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Summary Of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted

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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

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The younger woman in the book offers a new perspective into the life of someone under the roof of a mental institution in 1967. The bestseller is from Susanna’s point of view and often Susanna is talking to herself. Susanna suffers from borderline personality disorder and in both the book and her real life, there are pieces missing that readers are encouraged to fill in. Readers have to infer that she is suffering from this disorder when reading this book because she could be switching personalities at times. There was one chapter in the novel that stuck out, it was called “Do you believe him or me?”.

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