Review on Girl, Interrupted

As an addition to our lectures on Personality Disorders, we were required to watch the movie Girl, Interrupted. Below are some of my views on the movie, as well as the trailor.

 

The movie "Girl, Interrupted" takes place in the late 60's, starring Wynonna Ryder as Susanna Kaysen, who gets put into  Claymore, a psychiatric hospital.  After staying in the hospital ward for a few months, she gets diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The film is  not so much about the recovery process  as it is about what makes a person choose to recover (or not), and all the factors leading to one's choice to recover. In my opinion the film provides a worthwhile exploration of mental illness and the effectiveness of the mental health care system.

The most interesting plot of the film for me, was how it frequently looks at the fine line between mental illness and normality .  Repeatedly, Susanna questions the validity of her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, and at the end of the movie, she reiterates that she still does not know what her diagnosis or even mental illness means. One possible interpretations of these points,  is that Susanna, like the rest of the world, is simply different from the others at Claymore. At first glance, the film does seem to create a clear difference between Susanna (‘sane’) and these others (‘crazy’). This is true not only at the start of the film, when she first enters  a psychiatric unit of women behaving bizarrely, but is continuously reaffirmed. The head nurse (Whoopi Goldberg), for instance, explicitly differentiates Susanna from those who are actually “crazy.” In contrast to them, Susanna is “driving herself crazy.” Similarly, Susanna’s psychiatrist tells her that, for her, “sane” and crazy” are “courses of action” that she must choose between. Together, these scenes seem to imply that some people are just fundamentally mentally unstable, while others are not (but can choose to be).

 

 

Ultimately, rather than a black-and-white crazy-or-sane world, what Girl, Interrupted portrays is a spectrum of mental health, with mental illness on one end and mental health on the other. Girl, Interrupted is a film about mental illness and its treatment, created over a decade ago, set in the late 1960s. While both of these facts date it to some extent—particularly in the treatments portrayed—the movie remains relevant in its exploration of mental illness, mental health, and psychiatric care. Are “crazy” people really all that abnormal or different from the rest of the population? Is psychiatry legitimate? Can treatment work? The questions are still pertinent, and the film’s answers—that those with mentally illnesses aren’t that much different from anyone else, that the system can help but has fundamental problems—continue to resonate.

 

 

“Crazy,” Susanna says in her final voiceover, “isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified.” In the world of Girl, Interrupted, those who are mentally ill and those who are perfectly sane are fundamentally the same.