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Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. Penguin Random House LLC., 1999.

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Kaysen went to the doctors, and they made her get into a taxi and go to McLean Hospital to get admitted into the psychiatric ward. "'I've got a bed for you' he said. 'It'll be a rest. Just for a couple of weeks, okay?'" (pg.8)

(picture is her admission paperwork)

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Kaysen didn't want to believe in actuality that she in fact was at the doctors for three hours long. She went on explaining the doctors case, and her own case. It took the doctor about 30 minutes to talk to Kaysen, an hour to call the hospital, her parents, and the taxi, it took 30 minutes to get there, took  an hour to get admitted, checked in, and settled in. After all that, that is a grand total of 3 hours. She subtracted all of the waiting time and the car ride time, and she ended saying she was only there for 30 minutes.

(Picture is on page 73.)

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Everybody got a diagnosis when they got admitted to the psych ward. Kaysen got diagnosed with a character disorder and she states, "I had a character disorder. Sometimes they called it a personality disorder" (pg.59).

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As you may or may not know Susanna Kaysen was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder(BPD). This chapter goes on about what her case was like personally.

(this image represents what it can feel like to have BPD)

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Kaysen made many friends in the psych ward, but one friend in particular was just a little bit more special than the others. Her name was Lisa, Lisa was so called "the life of the party" Lisa put a smile on everyone's face. One day she ran away for three days; she normally would run away for one day before she got caught. She came back and started to not act like herself, she was distant, the only thing she did was watch tv(she hated tv), and she just wasn't herself anymore. They all thought they put her on something, but in actuality they didn't. She was plotting to pull a big prank on all the staff by wrapping the entire tv room with toilet paper. (pg.21-24)

(picture is the actress that portrayed Lisa in the movie.)

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Daisy was something else. She was anorexic and she only got admitted on her birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. She had two favorite things chicken and laxatives. "'She peels all the meat off because she likes to keep the carcases whole'" (pg. 34). She eventually went home after the holidays. A few months later, in May, the girls at the mental hospital got some bad news about Daisy, she had killed herself the day before her birthday. Almost all the girls were devastated.

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In this chapter Kaysen explains the seclusion room. She says "The real purpose of the seclusion room, though, was to quarantine people who'd gone bananas" (pg.47). She says this because this room is for those who are not safe to be around because you never know what they are going to do.

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All the girls would sit in front of the tv and they would watch all sorts of tragedies. Like, the assassination of MLK, or the death of Robert Kennedy. No, they weren't upset about these things, they were calmed by it. They were calmed because these people had done what they have always wanted to do so it was almost like they were doing the dirty work for them.

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One of the girls Kaysen was friends with was named Torrey. She was put into the ward because she got caught doing amphetamines. Torrey's parents mentally and emotionally abused her. "They would 'confuse' her" (pg.96). They always put her down and called her a junkie. One day her parents were going to come and take her from the hospital and she didn't want to go home with them, so all the girls helped her escape.

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After Torrey left the girls found out she didn't go with the plan and they were devastated. They didn't know what to do. "After lunch Polly said, 'Lets just plan to spend one hour in the living room, then one hour in front of the nursing station and so on'" (pg. 101). They had to come up with a schedule so they can focus on something else.

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After Torrey left Kaysen went into an episode of depersonalization which pretty much means she didn't think she was a real human. She thought she was all skin, so she cut herself to see if she really was a real human. The nurse came in and gave her Thorazine which calmed her down.

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Kaysen went to the dentist because she had an abscess in her cheek. She didn't want surgery, so they gave her penicillin. She unfortunately had an allergic reaction to it so they had to perform surgery to get rid of the abscess. After surgery she freaked out because she lost time and they wouldn't tell her how long the surgery was.

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A new girl arrived at the hospital. She was super nice and kind of clueless about everything, she didn't know what honey was. She confused all the girls because they didn't know what was wrong with her. Until one day she went crazy, screaming, running, bouncing off the walls. "Down at the end of the hall, muffled booming and yelling and crashing came out of the seclusion room"(pg. 112). She was forced to go to maximum security.

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Kaysen had a therapist named Melvin. He was also her analyst. She never like analysis, she thought it was boring and when she was in therapy she felt peaceful, and she didn't get that peacefulness there. But one day she found tunnels under the hospital and they were her escape from reality. She fell in love with them. She told Melvin about then and he didn't know what they were exactly. Sadly, a few years later Kaysen found out that Melvin had passed away from a stroke and she was broken.

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After being in the ward for a year and a half Kaysen got a job being a typist. Her boss was very sexist and mean to Kaysen but she didn't give up because she wanted to be a writer one day. She told her social worker that one day and she told Kaysen she was being unrealistic and that made her mad.

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Near the end of her stay she had lots of privileges. She got to go on the town and go to the movies and meet all these cool people. One night she went to the movies with some friends and she met her future husband. They dated for about a year and then eventually he proposed. But things didn't always go as planned Susana thought that her marriage was going to be quiet and peaceful but in fact it was not. "It wasn't quiet either. And in the end I lost him" (pg.136).

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In this chapter they explain the difference between the mind and the Brain. Kaysen said “It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is ‘stale flat and unprofitable’, even further to writing a play about a man driven by thought” (pg.137).  This is an answer to the question “ So what's left of mind?”.  The mind and the Brain are two different things, the brain talks to itself and when it talks to itself it tells you what is going on in your body. The mind is the thing that's telling you to do all these impulsive things like, if you eat 25 cookies it's a perfect dinner. But in actuality it's just the lack of Serotonin in your brain that is making you have these thoughts.

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In this chapter she's explaining what borderline personality disorder is. Borderline personality disorder or BPD, is an identity crisis where you don't know certain things about yourself at  an older age. Your brain is just wired differently from everybody's which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I wouldn't call it a good thing either.

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The last and final chapter was explaining this painting she had came across and it was names "Girl, Interrupted at Her Music" so Kaysen said, "As my life had been, interrupted in the music of being 17, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on a canvas: one moment made to stand still and stand for all the moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What can life recover from?" (pg. 167).
(painting is "Girl Interrupted at Her Music")

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A few years after her discharge, she ran into a bunch of people. First was Georgina, Georgina would come and visit her once in a while until she got married and moved to Colorado. She also ran into Lisa and surprisingly she had a kid. Lisa lived in the Suburbans with her kid and went to Temple. They had an apartment, they had furniture, and Lisa said, “ I want us to be a real family, with furniture, and all that. I want him to have a real life” (pg.163). Kaysen was surprised by how far she had come from the hospital.

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Girl, Interrupted (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

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This website is the trailer, the cast, and the bibliography.

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Videos6

In 1967, Susanna Kaysen had a headache and chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. This landed her in the mental institution, Claymoore. Here she is diagnosed, by Dr. Melvin Potts, with borderline personality disorder. When she arrives at Claymoore, she is greeted by Nurse Valerie Owens 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 childlike schizophrenic; Janet Webber, a sardonic anorexic patient; Daisy Randone, a girl who won't let anyone in her room, and only eats her father's chicken; and Lisa Rowe, a sociopath who controls the other patients, and makes lives hard for the nurses at Claymoore. Through the movie, Lisa gains and loses control over Susanna and we see how bad she really can be. The movie's ending 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.

What is the streaming release date of Girl, Interrupted (1999) in Japan?

Answer

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Videos6 In 1967, Susanna Kaysen had a headache and chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. This landed her in the mental institution, Claymoore. Here she is diagnosed, by Dr. Melvin Potts, with borderline personality disorder. When she arrives at Claymoore, she is greeted by Nurse Valerie Owens and shown round the woman's ward.

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This article is about the different perspectives of students and faculty.

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Girl Interrupted is a film that portrays not only the struggle to understand her own mental illness in an adolescent girl, but also offers insight into the impact of others on our view of ourselves, as well as the impact of others on our behaviors and view of the world.

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This article is about the memoir Kaysen wrote 25 years later.

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Girl, Interrupted, Twenty-Five Years Later

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When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like “an anthropologist in the loony bin.” She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands—“a standard anthropological thing, a study of a villag…

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This article is about everything one may have missed in the book and why the information in the book is so important.

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Columbia Pictures

As all the 20-year retrospectives that poured forth this year have reminded us, 1999 was a hell of a year for movies.

From 10 Things I Hate About You and American Pie to The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project, then Fight Club, The Virgin Suicides, Rushmore... all were movies that left a mark on pop culture, even the ones that weren't fully appreciated in their time.

So, there had already been an embarrassment of riches, but as 1999 drew to a close, just in time for the winter holiday, memorable in its intensity for every teenager who bought a ticket, came Girl, Interrupted.

Five years after starring in Little Women, also a Christmas time release, Winona Ryder was back with another tale of young women making the best of things in close quarters-in this case a mental institution rather than a cozy little house in Massachusetts-but interestingly still a story about girls finding solace in each other when their lives are spiraling out of control, again starring Ryder as a smart, rebellious heroine who wants more out of life than the opportunities traditionally afforded to women in her time.

1860s, 1960s...

Which, in hindsight, isn't at all surprising.

"They're just normal people who follow their impulses and instincts completely," Jolie said on HBO at the time about the ensemble of patients in the film. Her Lisa, in particular, is endlessly charismatic, obviously intelligent and, as seen through Susanna's observant eyes, unfazed by the psychobabble they're being fed by assorted doctors. Yet Susanna eventually realizes that Lisa, for all her world-weary wisdom, is nonetheless unstable.

"She lived too big, was too honest, was too hungry, was too full of life," Jolie described the character to Rolling Stone in 2001, by then rather misunderstood herself as one-half of "America's most dangerous marriage" and a behavioral wild card with too many tattoos, too many quirks and a seemingly unhealthy fixation on husband Billy Bob Thornton.

The actress, who acknowledged identifying with Lisa, continued, "At the end of the film there's a certain sense of them saying to Lisa, 'Nobody wants you to live, nobody likes the way you are-you'd be better off if you were sedated and tied down and shut up...If you feel that you're the kind of person she is, then it's really hard, because you're struggling with, 'F--k, am I just damaging to people everywhere?

"Am I just too loud and too wild and do I just need to let everybody live their lives and shut up and calm down?'"

The conversation had evidently touched a nerve.

Ultimately Girl, Interrupted's main ensemble consisted of Ryder, Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Clea DuVall, Elisabeth Moss and Jillian Armenante, with Whoopi Goldberg playing nurse Valerie, Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor as resident psychiatrists, and Jared Leto as Susanna's boyfriend from the outside who knows she isn't crazy and can't understand why, after awhile, she doesn't mind being there so much.

Ryder told E! News at the time that she wanted to surround herself with the very best group of actors possible, the better to elevate her own performance. Along with Jolie, Goldberg was the other must-get for Ryder.

"If Winona Ryder calls me and says, 'would you mind doing me a favor and walk on some broken glass?' I would do it for her," Goldberg told E! News about agreeing to be in the film, which she described as "a nice, short gig." "I think she's one of the most underrated actresses that's out there."

"All of the girls in this movie," she continued, "there's not a [weak link] in the bunch. They all are conceivably the next real crop of actors. Not to say anything disparaging about the crop that's here now," Goldberg added, "but there is a difference in these girls than you'll find in almost any of the other group...You look at them, you think, 'oh, you have it.'"

While this was ostensibly Ryder's movie going in, however, it was all Jolie going out, and the buzz surrounding her performance didn't stop until she was accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2000 (and informing the crowd that she was "so in love" with her brother in that moment).

Mirek Towski/DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

In addition to Girl, Interrupted, which just about made back its money, Jolie had also starred in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington, a film that made $152 million in 1999, so a lot of people who didn't see her in the former watched her in the latter, her first big-budget starring role opposite a mega movie star.

She married Thornton just a few months after she won her Oscar and life-though she'd only share it with Thornton for a few years-would never be the same. After the slew of headlines they made for their bloody excesses, she revamped her lifestyle to get super-fit to play Lara Croft in 2001's Tomb Raider, became a mom to son Maddox in 2002 and, just two years later, met Brad Pitt.

And with that, her life transformed relatively quickly, though the enigmatic quality that made her an object of such rapt fascination would remain firmly intact.

At the fictional Claymore psychiatric hospital (they shot the institution scenes in the empty wing of a state hospital in Harrisburg, Pa.), the patients displayed a heartening, hilarious and sometimes destructive camaraderie, and the actresses seemed to really coalesce on set.

"They felt like a group and that made me happy," Kaysen said in the HBO featurette, "because that was an important part of why I liked being in the loony bin to the extent that I did."

But a few invisible walls were up when the cameras weren't rolling.

"I remember thinking, 'Oh we're going to turn out to be great friends,'" Ryder recalled to Total Film about Jolie in 2010. "But I think she needed to be able to look at me just as the character Susanna, not as Winona, so in a very respectful way she just kind of kept her distance." (Which makes sense when you consider the singular focus and connection Jolie had with her character even in hindsight.)

Moviestore Collection/Shutterstock

Ryder continued, "What she's accomplished after the film in terms of humanitarian stuff, I'm just really happy she did that. I remember in the press junket for Girl, Interrupted she would just be so open about her problems and then I would come in and everyone would think I was so boring. So it's really great to see she's found her calling in her personal life."

Ryder did become close friends with Murphy, whose agoraphobic character Daisy refuses to eat anything other than her deli owner father's chicken and hoards the carcasses under her bed. Alone in her own apartment after being released from the hospital, Daisy ends up killing herself.

Almost 10 years to the day after the Girl, Interrupted came out, Murphy died suddenly of what later was determined to be complications of pneumonia, anemia and multiple drug intoxication.

Ryder admitted to that she couldn't watch the movie anymore because of Murphy's own tragic end.

But in the flush of the moment, in 1999, Murphy was having the time of her life.

Playing that character wasn't "a matter of difficult, hard or easy..." the Clueless star said at the film's premiere. "It's just challenging or not challenging, or creatively rewarding or not-and it was creatively rewarding, and I really enjoyed doing this film very much."

The rapport on set "was sort of wonderful," Murphy said. "I liked working with everybody. Forget the fact that it was all actresses and all women-which is inspiring just in the fact that there was a script that had so many amazing roles for young women. They were extraordinary artists and extraordinary humans, and so I learned a lot about them in a humane manner and I learned a lot about them on camera in an artistic manner. And on all accounts that can't possibly be wrong, it was fantastic."

Meanwhile, Ryder and Jolie had opposite trajectories in the '00s, as the former's cachet began to dip after being the go-to face of the '90s and the latter's star-personally and professionally-rose ever higher. They're only four years apart in age, but Ryder had already enjoyed a decade at the top of the heap when Girl, Interrupted came out and Hollywood still hadn't figured out that actresses in their thirties were great at playing women in their thirties.

"It was hard to find that transition to adult roles," Ryder told London's Telegraph in 2014. "But I'm actually really enjoying getting older because I went through a period of time where I was technically old enough for roles but always associated with younger ones. The whole of my thirties was spent that way. Now that I'm in my forties it's getting a little bit easier."

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

She also looked back on her arrest for shoplifting in 2001 as "the place where I just wanted to stop," and that manifested itself in a dumb mistake. The ensuing break from the public eye was the silver lining, Ryder told Porter in 2016. "It allowed me time that I really needed, where I went back to San Francisco and got back into things that...I just had other interests, frankly."

Incidentally, in addition to the movie stardom Ryder had also proceeded Jolie in headline-making romance, having already been engaged to heartthrob Johnny Depp. Then she was in a long-term relationship with Soul Asylum singer Dave Pirner, and was dating Matt Damon in late 1999 while out promoting Girl, Interrupted.

When she read the book in 1992, "I was just coming out of my very serious depression," Ryder told the New York Times, "and I didn't know what to label it, just as Susanna doesn't know what to label hers."

Suzanne Tenner/Columbia Tristar/Kobal/Shutterstock

Ryder told Diane Sawyer she remained drawn in by the very first paragraph of Kaysen's book, which she read for the journalist:

"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy."

She admitted being concerned that working in the close confines of an actual psychiatric hospital might prove traumatic, but she ended up being the rock that held the cast together.

"She never got lost in the material,'' Mangold told the Times about Ryder. ''Because she was operating from experiences she had had, instead of from intellectual parallels, she spent a lot of time just remembering what it was like to be very deep inside herself. She gives a wonderful performance because she understood that the point of the book is that crazy isn't all that different than normal, just a slightly amplified or skewed way of viewing things.''

As for Jolie, Mangold told Philadelphia City Paper in January 2000, "Even in the history of movie actors, Angie is very rare. She's got balls the size of Volkswagens. She has this incredible majestic power, and yet incredible sensitivity as well. She speaks musically, and she's almost a dancer on screen. She's dangerous, charismatic, hilarious, frightening, fearsome. Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, maybe a couple more are in her class, but that kind of energy is very unusual on film. [Ryder] is an orchid, but Angie's a volcano."

They knew it might be a tough watch, but everyone involved just hoped that people would find this movie that they were so proud of, which they felt really encapsulated what it felt like to be emotionally adrift and wondering if you'll ever feel happy again, let alone normal. And what the hell does normal mean, anyway?

While a lot about this movie has become unintentionally startling-the powerhouse-in-waiting that is Jolie; still-figuring-it-out Jared Leto 15 years before his own Oscar win; Murphy's chilling performance in light of her own premature death; future Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss as Polly, disfigured from setting herself on fire-the film itself still resonates in a perfectly relatable way.

"This movie will be an example," Ryder told the Times. "If it does well, the studios may be inclined to make more personal movies and take more chances. Those are the movies that always end up being classics."

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Everything You Forgot About Girl, Interrupted and Why the Story Remains So Vital - E! Online

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Columbia Pictures As all the 20-year retrospectives that poured forth this year have reminded us, 1999 was a hell of a year for movies. From 10 Things I Hate About You and American Pie to The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project, then Fight Club, The Virgin Suicides, Rushmore...