Interruptions

(A book review of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted)

Girl, Interrupted

The first quarter of this book reminded me so much of the first episode in season 6 of House MD, the critically-acclaimed American television series, and a personal favorite.

The book basically tells the story of a teenage girl who spent two years in a psychiatric hospital, which was renowned for housing several personalities in their own special fields including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles. Her experiences in the psychiatric ward for teenage girls unfolded in detail and with overwhelming surges of both sanity and insanity, and the many underlying presumptions and truths about freedom and confinement.

She starts by describing each patient in the ward in a way that will make your imagination more real about how people in these kinds of situations suffer. If I had not been previously exposed to these kinds of illnesses and much more if I wasn’t interested in psychology, I would’ve probably cringed at every story she told of how these people stayed consistent with their diagnoses.

One thing I noticed from the book is how she tried to describe the other patients in the ward as somewhat being in a lower level as compared to her, sanity-wise. She talked of their attitudes, their looks and most importantly she defined their behavior, in a way that made them seem more erratic than she is; they misbehaved the way their disorders are defined while she stood witness to all of these, feeling both misdiagnosed and pathetic but sometimes pitiful and contemptuous towards them. 

But why? The reason she remembers of being brought to the hospital was the time she tried to kill herself. If the other patients tried suicide by burning themselves or putting themselves in utter danger, she, on the other hand, decided that her 18-year old self should die by swallowing 50 tablets of aspirin. Here’s one of my favorite parts in the book where she talked about suicide and her attempt at it.

Suicide is a form of murder – premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk.

My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you’ve posted that question, it won’t go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t…

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill, the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and maybe every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy. I didn’t figure this out, though, until after I’d swallowed the fifty aspirin.

               

                Honestly, this part made so much impact to me and stirred a lot of feelings. Our minds can be so treacherous and even gets the best of us. I really have so much to say about suicide and these few paragraphs by the author stirred a lot of emotions within and everything else connected to suicide.

                In the Philippines, most people don’t like to be identified as someone who received or is currently receiving some sort of special psychological attention or to be more specific, therapy. I know of some friends and a handful of people who have their shrinks and once in a while get admitted in psychiatric wards for their disorders. And they always have a difficult time telling their friends or relatives about it, afraid of judgment, rejection, or worse, isolation.

Anyway, the girl, after two years in the hospital, was finally released. After her occasional face scratching, too much wrist banging and few fights in the ward, she was out.

                “I can honestly say that my misery has been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud’s definition I have achieved mental health. And my discharge sheet, at line 41, Outcome with Regards to Mental Disorder, reads ‘Recovered’.”

               

                And as proven by the book, there was always something notable about her, not in behavior but in paper. She stayed in a psychiatric ward and her records had it. There was no way of escaping no matter how “psychologically fit” she was. And this is really one of the saddest and most unfair things in the world. She was rejected at job applications and was often tagged as somewhat different.

                The girl’s diagnosis revealed that she actually had Borderline Personality. She had difficulty admitting it to herself and wanted a more biological illness, so that she could blame it to chemistry or to something that can’t be cured, something she could not have done anything about.

“It appears to be way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: “it’s what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.”

                And this diagnosis always got to her and her life. At the end of the book, she describes her older self as more aware and somehow mature, with a rich boyfriend on the side. But her past would haunt her at the most trying times.

                        This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music.

Interrupted at her music as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

I had something to tell her now. “I see you,” I said.

My boyfriend found me crying in the hallway.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“Don’t you see, she’s trying to get out,” I sad, pointing at her.

He looked at the painting, he looked at me, and he said, “All you ever think about is yourself. You don’t understand anything about art.” He went off to look at a Rembrandt."

I am not an expert on psychological disorders, suicides and whatnot. But sometimes, the world forgets that we are all imprefect and that we cannot ignore the inevitable feelings within us, whether it be good or bad. And as one of my favorite lines from the movie “Bride Wars” goes, "You’re only human. You don’t have to have it together every minute of every day." Sometimes what some people need is not an advice or some sort of preaching; sometimes a little compassion and understanding could make a whole lot of a difference. 

                This book could be seen as sad or even disturbing but with the author's first hand experiences, it gives us a little light and pocketful of hope towards people who might’ve lost themselves in a place where sanity becomes a luxury and the mind becomes the playground.


P.S. The girl in the story is actually the author of the book, Susanna Kaysen. She was admitted at Mclean Hospital on April 27, 1967 and stayed there for two years. The book also included copies of her hospital records which made the book even more real but equally haunting.

*hoping the watch the movie soon ^______^