Illness in women has always been a great mystery. When illness is studied, it is studied in men. With male symptoms, male bodies, and male drugs to fix the problem. The medical field has done very little to explore the ways that various illnesses both mental and physical effect women. They often do not know how to treat these illnesses when they do show up in women. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Susanna is told that she is mentally ill. They treat her for borderline personality disorder when she does not feel that she has any mental illness at all. When she arrives at the institution she feels as though she does not fit in as she does not see herself as crazy. In Kaysen’s memoir, she is being hyper-treated by the doctors and nurses …show more content…
That it is one that looks to supress women and their symptoms not cure them. She holds nothing back in explaining that she was given various relaxation and sleeping pills to keep her docile and compliant. If she did not conform they would up the treatment and even punish her. This is no way for a hospital to be supposedly helping people. Kaysen wants her readers to understand the stigmatization that occurs not only within these institutions but in the world. She explains that by going into this hospital and being deemed mentally ill that she was hurting people or she is some type of burden to her family. She knows that having a mental illness is not something that is viewed as normal or right. People expect her to just get better and to snap out of it. Moreover, they see her as some type of monster or a pathetic excuse for a person. When in actuality she is just someone who may be struggling with a mental illness, or one that was created for her. Kaysen has to deal with the stigma that exists within the outside world for the rest of her life because of her premature institutionalization by her doctor. This was a way for her family to use the medical system against Susanna and throw her into a hospital to try to turn her into a woman that they approve
Her mother’s mental illness was the breaking point for her. She heard voices and tried to attempt suicide. She was an alcoholic and was addicted to laudanum. She gave them an opiate drug to keep them sedated and let them starve to death.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The book Girl interrupted is a humorous nonfiction Autobiographical book about the author Susanna Kaysen experience in side a mental intuition with others in which she encountered. The story takes place in 1967 Massachusetts inside McLean Hospital. Kaysen, who voluntarily enters a mental institution after visiting her psychiatrist and discovers she is having a problem and offers her a place to “rest”. She plans on staying just a few weeks but ends up stay a total of 18 months were she meets many of other mental ill patients and is later diagnosis with Borderline Personality Disorder.
After she has gone crazy, her husband is no longer able to control and repress her. It is tragic how the narrator tries to listen to her husband but finds that she is sicker, how she feels more hopeless towards John as time passes, how she decides and manages to fight back by using secret resistance, and eventually how she goes crazy under a patriarchal
Ken Kesey’s book titled “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” encapsulates the theme of insanity. The book questions not only the reader, but humanity on “What is insanity?” and therefore “What makes a person insane?”. An example of these moral questions is best displayed in the quote “Tell me why. You gripe, you bitch for weeks on end about how you can’t stand this place, can’t stand the nurse or anything about her, and all the time you ain’t committed.
He went on to explain that the people in those institutions are very limited to the things they are able to do and the choices that they can make. Simple choices such as what to eat, what to wear, and what to do in your freetime are made for the mentally ill by the workers. The patients are forced to take medication against their will and are also limited to everyday things such as being outside. There is so much dehumanization that occurs that the mental hospital doesn't feel like a place where the patients are receiving help. Instead, the patients themselves refer to being at the mental hospital as “doing time” as they would in
Conflict of Interest in Psychiatry In her book, Psychiatry and the Business of Madness: An Ethical and Epistemological Accounting, Bonnie Burstow attempts to provide a methodical and systematic deconstruction of the field of psychiatry and the base it lays itself on. She heavily questions the psychiatric principles and critiques what a mental disease is. Burstow also questions and critiques the biomedical model to reveal how many psychiatric treatments are merely a form of social control. Subsequently, Burstow appeals for the elimination of psychiatry, emphasizing that the, "regime as a whole is epistemologically flawed and ethically unacceptable" (Burstow, 2015, pp. 227).
The unsatisfying setting that appears around the ill woman unravels an understanding
They all would say that they were hearing a voice in their head that would say thud. On just that sentence alone they were sent to asylums and being diagnosed as schizophrenic or manic depressive. Rosenhan’s experience in the asylum, entailed that patients were not helped with their psychological disorders, let alone acknowledged at all. They were considered invisible. The nurses would turn their heads when patients would spit out their given medications.
In the book Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, one of the biggest focal points is mental illness. Mental illness can be tough to talk about, simply because the phrase “mental illness” encompasses such a wide range of conditions and conjures up images of deranged people, but it is very important, especially in this book. There is a certain stigma that people who are put into mental hospitals because they have medical problems or are insane and a possible danger to society. While this is sometimes true, it is far more common for patients to need help for a disorder, but just don’t know where to go or what to do, and can end up putting themselves or someone else in danger.
The insane are known to have been cursed with unclean spirits ever since the beginning of America who takes its views from the Old World. It was only during the Second Great Awakening that people, Christian activists and often women, sought to reform the prisons and asylums. For Americans, asylums are now remnants of the past; the mentally ill are now bestowed the right to live normal lives and they are now even given the choice to decide if they wish to seek help and take medication. Even so, it is undeniable that people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are unwillingly trapped inside a mind often not their own. Some of them, if left alone and uncared for, face dangers in society.
How they are perceived, and their of lack ability to meet the expectations of society was interpreted as mental illness. Although they are all institutionalized for different reasons, the one they all have in common is society. McMurphy, for example, was admitted for being a “psychopath”, while others felt that they were not able to function and signed themselves up voluntarily. Consequently, society sets up expectations for what is viewed as normal. If these expectations are not met or if someone is different they walk the fine line of sanity vs.
The story focuses on the main character who is a woman suffering from mental illness. It is very clear that the woman is ill when she states, “You see, he does not believe I am sick!” (677) speaking of her husband who is a doctor. So first she admits she is sick then later she states, “I am glad my case is not serious!”
What exactly defines one as “insane” versus “sane”, and where is the boundary between the two? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores exactly that: the short story initially seems to be a tale of a 19th century woman forced into the notorious rest cure popularized at the time by male doctors--however, as the plot progresses, it becomes a much deeper commentary not only on societal limitations imposed on women, but also on the blurred line separating sanity from insanity. Gilman explores the boundary between sanity and insanity with the usage of different literary elements; she expresses how the boundary is “paper-thin” through the usage of symbolism, shows the subtle conversion to insanity by utilizing a stream of consciousness
In the book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest” Ken Kesey shows that the “insanity” of the patients is really just normal insecurities and their label as insane by society is immoral. This appears in the book concerning Billy Bibbits problem with his mom, Harding's problems with his wife, and that the patients are in the ward
Psychoanalysts’ understand human personality through behaviors by looking into experiences, including the origin of emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Through the analysis of the movie Girl, Interrupted, many of the characters behave in all sorts of manners, ranging from being unreasonable, frightened, happy, sad, or disturbed due to their varieties of behaviors. All the characters include different ailments that affect the way they act, respond, and interpret situations. In accordance with personality theories, the movie Girl, Interrupted explores the memoir of a young woman through personality disorders, traits, and humanism during her stay in a McLean psychiatric institution during the 1960’s. Susanna Kaysen, the protagonist, is diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, due to her attempt at suicide by consuming an entire bottle of alcohol with aspirin.