Essay Archive - Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted
In "Girl, Interrupted," the novelist Susanna Caisson, 43, uses a series of vignettes to describe her experiences as a teen-age mental patient in 1967-68. Using herself as a troubled - and troubling - example, Kaysen demonstrates with humor the severe problems with diagnosis, the sensation of psychiatric hospitalization and the callousness of even the most upper-class of families and hospitals. "Lunatics," says Kaysen, "are similar to designated Hitlers. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the ho....
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