Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
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Wolran Kim
Mar. 2012


17-year-old Susanna Kaysen has a consultation with a psychiatrist after she went to the emergency room because she swallowed aspirin for a headache. She was judged as having attempted suicide. She denies attempting suicide to the end, but she is ordered to stay in a mental nursing home and is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. In the nursing home, McLean, she meets many patients: Valerie, the only person who treats her unlike a patient, Daisy, who is called daddy’s girl, Polly, who has an unsightly appearance from face burns, and Lisa, who repeats leaving and returning, yet never actually leaves the nursing home. They all live together with their mental disabilities. Susanna and Lisa become closer because of their strange, similar personalities, and they make special secret stories while they experience the suicide of a friend.

Susanna, who wonders about that human that can control time, and why apples fall to the ground, has been diagnosed as a crazy person. Her madness is defined by a rational social centrism, just as French sociologist, Michel Foucault, states: a society regulates the madness through a history of madness. What would make her go crazy? What interrupted her? All girls in this hospital live fully-controlled lives. They all have serious mental disorders. Some have attempted suicide; others are drug addicts or psychopaths. Meanwhile, Susanna feels something different from them that she has never felt before from ordinary people who treated her as a crazy person. In the hospital, their behavior is monitored and controlled, and even little abnormal actions are regarded as negative after being analyzed by the rules of patients’ conduct. These girls become more aggressive and skeptical toward common sense and normalcy in this place where there is no freedom at all. They think that all social orders and systems are slavery that constrains their freedom, and they look for ways of expression in their own way.

Susanna and the girls in the Clay Moore Asylum, who were isolated dichotomously—normal and abnormal—are crazy people in too many various ways. However, this kind of segregation and isolation looks like tyranny to normal people. Their pains—suffering from a father’s sexual abuse, suffering from severe burns to the face—made them crazy, but this mental hospital makes them even more mad, because this place diagnoses them and prescribes medication to them unilaterally rather than considering their unique personalities and environments.

Susanna told the doctor that she was never happy. Her misery was bound by others and was accumulated by her. She was always afraid of something, and was never free from anything, the past, the eyes of others, receiving wounds, wounds that she gave, inferiority, weakness, anger, prejudice, and poverty. Her pain is relative to anyone who has experienced isolation and helplessness. Her nurse says to her that she should empty her heart by writing her feelings on a notepad, because Susanna was suffering from her friend’s suicide. Taking this opportunity, she starts to spit out everything in her mind. She finds her own way to freedom and her own world exiting from silence. She finally has learned how to coexist with people with firm confidence.

Susanna’s word to Lisa, “You are already dead,” is shocking. A closed mind toward others is the same as disappearing (dying) to others and also trapping them. Human society, moreover, modern society, consisting of material civilization, is cold. Many people who live with closed minds are disabled and no less crippled than those with physical disabilities. Sometimes, opening our hearts is the most difficult thing, but true freedom is realized in this courage. There are too many things that could explode whenever someone touches this world, and they may wait just to be touched. The confusion of dream and reality can easily be seen in wandering, sensitive teenagers.

This book would just be a conservative lesson with such an ordinary, happy ending to the story if the author tells us only about the process of Susanna’s rehabilitation after being let out of the hospital. But the last words which Susanna told Lisa pass into a deep resonance about the inevitable conflict of fate and human suffering in the world. Lisa laughs at Susanna who is going to return to the normal world, but Susanna finally has the courage to be bumped against society in a free world. She thinks that she is better off fighting the world by removing the bars inside her mind. Either way, it is the same because both the hospital and the outside world are not normal. Mental counseling cannot set her on her legs, but only she herself can. No one can fix another’s injured mind, but only she can heal her mind.

To heal the wounded hearts of people is not easy. People with mental disabilities require more professional and meticulous care with patience and love, than do those with physical disabilities. This story can be accused of cynicism or escapism, but I saw the depth of an unknown soul along with the critique of society. An invisible mental disability is more complicated and difficult to heal than a physical disability. Rebellion of our mind digs into our daily lives in some way. Susanna finally broke down the walls around her heart when she left the hospital and came out into the streets. No one can demolish the wall in my mind, but me.