Susanna Kaysen offers a personal memoir about her diagnosis with Borderline Personality Disorder and subsequent confinement at McLean Hospital. After attempting suicide, Kaysen voluntarily commits herself and is assigned to a medium-security psychiatric ward. Over the next approximately eighteen months, she receives treatment consisting of drugs, therapy and analysis. During her period of confinement, she meets several other young women, who are also receiving various forms of treatment for disparate mental illnesses.
Toward the end of her stay Kaysen receives a marriage proposal, which she accepts. The memoir concludes with a retrospective reevaluation of the time period and topics presented.The presentation of events within the memoir is not chronological, although most events are placed in a more-or-less chronological order. References to future events are occasional while references to prior events are fairly frequent. Specific dates are often omitted and the narrative construction makes the ordering of events and the dates of some events difficult or impossible to ascertain with precision. The memoir presents several reproductions of documents, which offer the most authoritative event dating available.
Given its brevity, the memoir covers a remarkable range of time and topics; most of the thirty-four chapters are about four pages long and, for the most part, fail to fully develop the theme or topic presented.Kaysen grows up in a wealthy and prestigious family, which appears to be typical in most respects. Her mid-to-late teenage years are marked with developing mental illness, which is diagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder. In 1965, at the age of seventeen Kaysen attempts suicide using a massive dose of aspirin. After this suicide attempt Kaysen engages in an illicit sexual relationship with her high school English teacher, while simultaneously terminating her relationship with her boyfriend. During this period she also engages in subdued, but routine, self-mutilation and experiences short-term catatonic fugues (i.e. Short-term memory losses).
In 1967, Kaysen voluntarily commits herself to McLean Hospital after hospitalization is recommended to her by a psychiatrist.During the next eighteen months, Kaysen receives treatment with drugs, therapy, and eventually analysis. During her stay in the medium-security ward Kaysen meets and befriends several other young women who are also patients. The memoir contains some biographical information about several of these patients, as well as a few notes about a handful of healthcare providers at the hospital. In general, the information presented is too sketchy to develop a comprehensive understanding of the individuals discussed.
Toward the end of her stay Kaysen unsuccessfully applies for several jobs before being hired as a typist. Her employment lasts less than a week.
Kaysen then worries briefly about her future before receiving a marriage proposal, which she accepts. She is then discharged from the hospital and deemed to be fully functional by the staff.The remainder of the memoir is dedicated to an examination of mental illness in broad terms, with a focus on Borderline Personality Disorder. Kaysen examines her own experiences with commitment and mental illness and argues—somewhat unconvincingly—that her mental illness was not serious enough to warrant confinement, given the socio-medical norms of the day.This section contains 518 words(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page).
—.Susanna Kaysen, an 18 year old girl who had a headache and chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. In the 1960's, this landed her in the mental institution, Claymoore.
Here she is diagnosed, by Dr Melvin, with a Borderline Personality Disorder. When she arrives at Claymoore, she is greeted by Nurse Valerie and shown round the woman's ward. Here she meets Georgina Tuskin, a pathological liar who is fixated with The Wizard of Oz; Polly Clark, a fire survivor; Janet Webber, an anorexic patient; Daisy Randone, a girl who won't let anyone in her room, and only eats her fathers chicken; and Lisa Rowe, a psychopath who controls the other patients, and makes lives hard for the nurses at Claymoore.
Throughout the movie, Lisa gains and loses control over Susanna and we see how bad she really can be. The end of the movie shows Susanna being released from Claymoore after an 18 month stay. How does Susanna take back her control? This movie battles subjects such as mental heath, abuse, self-harm and suicide.Susanna is rushed to the hospital.
Afterwards she discusses this with a psychiatrist. She had been having some delusions. She had also been having an affair with the husband of her parents' friend. The doctor suggests that combining a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of vodka was a suicide attempt. This she denies.
He recommends a short period of rest at Claymoore. Claymoore is a private mental hospital full of noisy, crazy people. Georgina is a pathological liar. Polly has been badly scarred by fire. Daisy won't eat in the presence of other people. Lisa is a sociopath, the biggest exasperation for the staff - like Nurse Valerie - and the biggest influence on the other girls in the hospital. Lisa has a history of escapes, so gaining access to personal medical files is not a problem.
Susanna's boyfriend Toby is concerned that she seems too comfortable living with her institutionalized friends. —.Susanna is depressed and directionless after finishing high school in the late 1960's. A suicide attempt lands her in Claymore, a mental institution.
She befriends the band of troubled women in her ward (Georgina the pathological liar, the sexually abused Daisy, the burn victim Polly) but falls under the hypnotic sway of Lisa, the wildest and most hardened of the bunch. Will Susanna 'drop anchor' at Claymore and perpetually act out like Lisa, or will she finally pull her mind together and leave institutional life behind? The synopsis below may give away important plot points.Synopsis. 'Maybe I really was crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl. Susanna is a young woman of eighteen, and her life isn't exactly what a 'normal' eighteen-year-old's is suppose to be like.
To her, any kind of sex is casual, and it doesn't matterwho she does it with or when, as long as she gets it. At graduation she falls asleep, proving she has little interest for the norms of prize-givings or anything to do with what's accepted bysociety. At her father's birthdayparty she is under dressed and is of course moaned at by her hypocritical mother. Herewe learn that her parent's friends are just as false as what is accepted by everyone.
Andthen it becomes clear that Susanna has been sleeping with her mother's friend's husband. This drives her to try to commit suicide with aspirin and a bottle of vodka to get it all down.At the E.R. She claims that she doesn't have bones in her wrists anymore, and tells thepsychiatrist at home that the bones grew back by the time she got to the hospital. So she is shipped off to a local mental institution and put in the ward for women only. Here she meets a multitude of people who really do have problems: an anorexic, a girlwho burned herself as a child, a lesbian (at the time was thought of as a mental disorder), a bulimic, and her roommate, a compulsive liar, to top it alloff. The ward is run by Nurse Valerie Owens, who is very clever, but is unable to become adoctor due to her race. All the nursing staff and the patients are kept marginally saneby Valerie, and she and Susanna have a complex relationship.
Susanna isquestionably diagnosed with having a Borderline Personality Disorder. Things really get started when the sociopath run away patient, Lisa, returns to the ward and turns Susanna's world upside down and inside out. She is a force to bereckoned with-she is magnetic, rebellious, doesn't take her meds and is unhealthyfor the other patients as she breaks down their self-esteem regularly. Due to the factthat her last best friend, Jamie, couldn't hack it when she ran away, Lisa befriendsSusanna and together they start a world of trouble. Susanna keeps a diary of all her thoughts and feelings, illustrating in it too, and tellingthe tale of her stay through her daily entries.
Her ex fling, Toby, comes to visit her and she very nearly tries to have sex withhim in her room. He tells her he wants them to run away to Canada together so thathe doesn't have to go to Vietnam. He tells her she isn't crazy and that the girls in theasylum aren't really her friends.
But she refuses to go with him, subconsciously beginningto rely on Lisa. Then she meets the head psychiatrist, Dr. Sonia Wick, and claims she is ambivalent, saying it means she doesn't care. Wick sees through this mask and decides tohave Susanna see her from now on. Afterwards Lisa is taken in to see the doc, butdoesn't return and Susanna falls into a depression. Nurse Valerie has had enough andthrows her into an ice cold bath to wake her. She tells Susanna, after Susanna attacksher verbally and says that she doesn't know what she doing, that she is a spoiled, lazylittle girl who is driving herself crazy!
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And that if Susanna isn't careful she'll throw herlife away on some stupid rebellion. That night Lisa breaks into the ward, wild eyed and crazy, and Susanna runs away withher so they can get to Disney Land. There they hook up with hippies and eventuallycrash at the bulimic, Daisy's, house after bribing her with promises of meds. But all turnsbad when Lisa tells Daisy that she is a freak herself and that this apartment is all amask to hide what's really happening. She breaks Daisy down, finally saying thatDaisy probably likes her father molesting her and that it's probably all she's ever known. The next morning Susanna wakes up and goes for a walk, to escape the sound ofLisa's voice and returns to find Daisy playing a record over and over again and Lisain the kitchen.
She goes up the stairs and finds Daisy's wrists slit and she hangs herself in the bathroom.Susanna goes back to the asylum without Lisa, (who runs away again) and starts anewwith Dr. Wick and her diary.
When she is due to leave, Lisa breaks out of her padded cell and steals Susanna'sdiary. Beneath the ward in the maze of corridors, Lisa reads the diary aloud andtells the other girls what Susanna thinks of them. Susanna runs away from Lisawhen she begins to chase her with a needle filled with a toxic-looking chemical.
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Susanna breaks her hand while trying to close a sliding metal door on Lisa andthen they finally confront each other. Susanna tells Lisa finally that no one caresif she dies because she already is dead and her heart is cold, and that she will start herlife again out of this hospital without Lisa and the others. In the morning she is about to leave, but first visits Lisa and talks to her again. Lisa says that she isn't really cold and that she didn't mean to hurt Susanna. When she leaves she saysgoodbye to all her friends, and gets into the cab saying that being crazy isn't aboutkeeping a secret, it's just about everyone being personified. And by the seventiesmost of her friends were out of the clinic and leading lives. The girl who was justinterrupted by herself and everyone else, is finally recovered from being a supposed 'borderline'.