Girl Inturrupted

            In the book Girl Interrupted, the main character, Susanna Kaysen, in eighteen, and suffering many problems. After a short meeting with her psychiatrist she is shipped off to a mental hospital for her borderline personality disorder. There she is put in the teenage girls ward. There she meets many interesting people, such as Lisa, the sociopath who is always trying to escape. Dais, who is in constant need of laxatives, and many others. Psychiatrists have the antagonistic role in her commentaries on life on the ward, and while reading the book you learn a lot about Susanna, and how smart she really is despite her "illness". Susanna entered the mental hospital still having no idea why she was there, but what she soon came to realize was that she was the most normal one out of all that were staying there. The hospital was a very strict facility with locked everything. There was no leaving the hospital except for when the nurse would take 6 lucky patients to get ice cream, but that was hardly ever. Nurses checked on you every 10, 20, or 30 minutes, depending on your behavior and diagnosis. Susanna also had a therapist, with whom she met weekly and told him about her problems and thoughts about everything. Susanna's diagnosis was something having to do with depression, and even though she was in an environment full of friends like Georgina, Lisa, and Cynthia, she felt out of place because they all had serious problems and she didn't.
             Girl Interrupted was an amazing book. I was able to relate to it in many ways. Susanna Kaysen writes in a very detailed but precise way. I felt like I had some sort of connection with every character in that book. I have felt like Lisa, Susanna, Polly, Cynthia, Janet, Daisy, and M.G. have all been in my life at some point. People I know have dealt with depression, eating disorders, and the fear of terrible reality. From this book come startling observations- that insanity comes in two varieties-fast and slow; that the hospital was a refuge, as well as a prison That psychiatry is split into two camps, those who study the mind, and those who study the brain.