Girl, Interrupted

Kaysen describes McLean as a “parallel world” and claims that events that happened there foreshadowed events in real life. Georgina met her boyfriend Wade in the cafeteria at McLean and believed that he was a spy for the US. While Wade was good looking, Kaysen believes it was rage that made him “irresistible” (32). Wade claimed that his father was also a spy, and that he made trips to Cuba where he killed dozens of people. Kaysen notes that she did not believe Wade, who was a 17-year-old resident at McLean and prone to having violent fits. Kaysen and Georgina heard that Wade’s behavior became violent for weeks on end, and he could not visit Georgina during this time. To cheer her up, Kaysen suggested they cook together. When they make caramel, Kaysen accidentally poured hot sugar onto Georgina’s hand, burning her. Although Kaysen screamed repeatedly, Georgina did not react, which in Kaysen’s eyes proved her toughness. She revisits her idea of the parallel world, explaining that events such as the Bay of Pigs seemed like something she already knew about due to the things she saw and heard at McLean.

A resident named Daisy returns to McLean; Kaysen explains that she came for seasonal stays at the hospital where she had her own single room. Kaysen feels that Daisy’s father was in love with her, and Daisy ignored this and focused on the roast chicken he brought her two times a week. Kaysen shares that Daisy was also obsessed with using laxatives, which Lisa noticed. Lisa wanted to see Daisy’s room and got laxatives from the nurses to bargain with Daisy, who relented and allowed Lisa to come in her room.

When Lisa left Daisy’s room, she immediately tells the other girls what it was like, claiming that Daisy stripped the chicken carcasses of meat and lined them up on the floor, waiting to get to 14 in total before leaving the hospital. Word spread that Daisy’s father bought her an apartment, which she enjoyed talking about with the other girls. She shared that she loved the sign outside which says, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now” (38). Daisy left the hospital before Christmas and in the spring, a nurse informs the residents that Daisy died by suicide on her birthday. Kaysen and the rest of the patients and staff had a moment of silence to commemorate her.

Kaysen labels suicide a form of premeditated murder and elaborates that she thinks people who die by suicide do so after thinking about it extensively and “getting used” to the idea (40). She notes the irony that to die by suicide you would need to plan and remain calm, which she claims is not easy for a suicidal person. Kaysen writes that suicidal people must “cultivate detachment” by ideating their deaths, and they must justify these ideations to themselves with a “strong motive” (40). Kaysen feels that her personal motives are “weak” and too trivial, such as not wanting to do her homework (40). She explains that thinking about the subject is becoming another reason to attempt suicide, as the debate is “wearing her out” (40). She admits that she does not really want to kill herself, she only wants to kill the part that is suicidal.

She describes her experience of attempting suicide in which she swallowed 50 aspirin, told her boyfriend about her plan, and left to get milk from the store. As she walked to the store, she experienced physical pain such as ringing ears and narrowing vision, and the emotional pain of regretting her suicide attempt. She fainted in the store and was taken to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. Kaysen felt “lighter” after this treatment and ponders whether she had “managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide” (42). After leaving the hospital Kaysen caught up with her schoolwork, broke up with her boyfriend, and began dating her English teacher. She concludes her chapter by hinting that her happier times were ending, and she was descending into a depression again.

Kaysen revisits how she was admitted to McLean Hospital. She recalls how her visit to the doctor lasted only 15 to 20 minutes before he decided to send her to McLean Hospital. Kaysen paints the doctor as deceiving, since he told her she would stay for only a couple weeks, while in reality, she was there for almost two years. Kaysen explains that while she did sign consent forms to enter the hospital, she was not informed about her legal rights. She remembers, “...They could never have gotten a court order against me. I didn’t know that, so I signed myself in” (43). In her view, her suicidal actions did not mean that she was a danger to herself, but rather were “a kind of self-abortion” in which she purged only part of herself (43).

Kaysen explores her situation from her doctor’s perspective. She acknowledges that in the late 1960s, many adults were concerned about youth culture and found some of their trends and habits disconcerting. She imagines that her doctor, feeling threatened and confused by the youth culture of that time, made a paternalistic decision to hospitalize her to protect her from the world’s more dangerous elements. Kaysen attributes her own decision to enter McLean Hospital to two reasons: questioning her mental state and feeling contrary towards the world. She admits that she was aware that her mental state was shifting since she was developing a “problem with patterns” (44). This issue caused her to see other things in patterned objects such as carpets or curtains, though she knew they were not really there. These same visual confusions happened when she perceived people’s faces, which became abstract and meaningless to her as a mere collection of body parts. Although she was worried about these issues, she also knew that she was still sane. She adds that her “state of contrariety” also contributed to her decision, since signing herself into McLean felt like a “very big No” to the world, which she perceived as her enemy (46).