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Taylor and some of his relatives were patients at Mclean before Kaysen. Taylor was in Carolina in his mind but was actually in Mclean.

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Kaysen was staying at Mclean during 1968, a time of great social and political change. She writes a chapter about the things that happened in the outside world during 1968, compared to inside Mclean.

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It was a year of seismic social and political change across the globe. From the burgeoning anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements in the United States, protests and revolutions in Europe and the first comprehensive coverage of war and resultant famine in Africa. The world would never be the same again

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It was a year of seismic social and political change across the globe. From the burgeoning anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements in the United States, to protests and revolutions in Europe and the first comprehensive coverage of war and resultant famine in Africa.

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Rorschach Tests were often used to reveal something about a patient at Mclean. Here you can take your own.

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Harrower-Erickson Multiple Choice Rorschach Test

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List of Mental Disorders According to the DSM

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List of Mental Disorders According to the DSM

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All of the girls that Kaysen knew in her ward had one or more of these mental disorders.

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Mental disorders are characterized by problems that people experience with their mind (thoughts) and their mood (feelings). They are not well understood in terms of their causes, but the symptoms of mental illness are scientifically valid and well known. Treatment - usually involving both psychotherapy and medication - for most types of mental illness and mental health concerns is readily available and, eventually, effective for most people.

The diagnostic criteria for mental disorders (also known as "mental illness") are composed of symptom checklists that primarily are focused on a person's behaviors and thoughts. These lists of symptoms have been summarized from current diagnostic criteria commonly used in the United States by mental health professionals (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition). We've divided the disorders into three broad categories below: adult, childhood, and personality disorders; some disorders may fall under more than one category.

These disorder lists are in the process of being updated to reflect the changes from the latest edition of the diagnosis manual, the DSM-5.
Please keep in mind that only an experienced mental health professional can make an actual diagnosis. Learn more: About the DSM-5 or Looking for a DSM Code?

Adult Mental Disorders

Common Disorders

Dissociative Disorders

Sexual & Paraphilic Disorders

Sleep & Wake Disorders

Childhood Mental Disorders

Childhood disorders, often labeled as developmental disorders or learning disorders, most often occur and are diagnosed when the child is of school-age. Although some adults may also relate to some of the symptoms of these disorders, typically the disorder's symptoms need to have first appeared at some point in the person's childhood.

Personality Disorders

These disorders typically aren't diagnosed until an individual is a young adult, often not until their 20's or even 30's. Most individuals with personality disorders lead pretty normal lives and often only seek psychotherapeutic treatment during times of increased stress or social demands. Most people can relate to some or all of the personality traits listed; the difference is that it does not affect most people's daily functioning to the same degree it might someone diagnosed with one of these disorders. Personality disorders tend to be an intergral part of a person, and therefore, are difficult to treat or "cure." Learn more about personality disorders and personality traits ...

Other Mental Disorders & Concerns
Disclaimers & Use Restrictions:
This listing is for personal use in education or research only. This listing is not meant to replace professional advice, diagnosis, or care from a licensed mental health practioner; its sole intent is for patient education. If you believe you may be suffering from one of these disorders, please consult a mental health professional. The diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are summarized from the American Psychiatric Association's 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5).

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Mental disorders are characterized by problems that people experience with their mind (thoughts) and their mood (feelings). They are not well understood in terms of their causes, but the symptoms of mental illness are scientifically valid and well known.

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This includes her diagnosis and condition when she was released from the hospital

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This painting was very influential in Kaysen's life. It was one of her favorite paintings, and is where the book gets it's name.

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2014

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Susanna Kaysen: The Chronicler of Cambridge

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Susanna Kaysen: The Chronicler of Cambridge

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An interview with Susanna Kaysen about Girl, Interrupted, her life, and her new book, Cambridge

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You might expect author Susanna Kaysen to sit down in front of a reporter's recorder and pour out her dark soul.

As the author of the 1993 bestseller "Girl, Interrupted," she revealed the dramatic story of her 18 months in McLean psychiatric hospital to the world. Her disarmingly honest book, made into the 1999 film that won Angelina Jolie an Oscar, was a prime mover in the still vital memoir craze. She ought to be the queen of confession.

But, over coffee and a scone at Hi-Rise Bread Company in her beloved Cambridge, which is the subject of her new novel, "Cambridge," Kaysen is demure. She is funny and mildly ironic as she recalls "the looney bin." She is opinionated and she is not particularly given to the self-mythologizing done by people who are famous for sharing.

More than once as Kaysen talks, she places a hand over the microphone, holding onto the privacy that she lost after "Girl, Interrupted" made her the go-to icon for those longing to talk about mental illness. At readings, in letters - all of which she answered - fans felt they knew her intimately.

"That's what I found confusing about the success of 'Girl, Interrupted,' " she says, her gray bangs reaching just above her eyebrows in a bowl cut. She was paralyzed as a writer for eight years after the book's release, even though it brought her enough money to give up copy-editing work.

"Everybody felt that they knew me and that I owed them more intimacy, that I had given them so much that they could demand everything," she says. "I didn't feel that I had given them so much. I remember saying over and over, 'This book is an artifact, I made it, I'm a writer. It's not a transcription from reality.' I felt people didn't see that, and they felt that I'd cut my breastbone open and that they were looking into my heart. But my heart is cold. You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer. So I felt there had been some kind of a misunderstanding.

"It took me a lot of time to reconstitute myself as a private being."

For Kaysen, privacy means her pleasant, quiet life "in the backwoods of Cambridge" with her boyfriend, whom she calls "my sweetheart."

"I never go anywhere," she says with a throaty laugh. "I don't have a whole bunch of literary connections. I don't write reviews or attend writer's conferences. I'm kind of shy and don't want to go to a party. I just want to stay home and read my murder mysteries and try to write and cook dinner."

Kaysen's editor at Knopf, Robin Desser, has worked with Kaysen for over 20 years, including on her second novel, "Far Afield," in 1990, and on her 2001 memoir, "The Camera My Mother Gave Me," about her disabling vaginal pain.

"'Girl, Interrupted' was a book that was punctuated by silences," Desser says, "as opposed to the way a lot of memoirs have been written since. Everybody's vomiting everything onto the page. And so some people were filling in Susanna's silences with their own stories. That's tough. The way people react to memoir can be particularly toxic for a sensitive person."

With "Cambridge," Kaysen is still writing about a personal theme, her hometown, where she has lived for most of her 65 years, excepting two years in Washington, D.C., as a teen and a year in the Faroe Islands in her 20s, with her anthropologist ex-husband. The novel is a portrait - almost a still life - of the city in the 1950s, revolving around a dreamy girl and her intellectual, worldly parents. Not coincidentally, Kaysen grew up among the academics and artists of Cambridge, too, the eccentric characters who socialized with her mother and her economist father, Carl Kaysen, a highly respected professor first at Harvard, then at MIT.

But even though "Cambridge" is heavily autobiographical (the young heroine's name is Susanna), it is fiction, a decision Kaysen made to help her in the writing process - a kind of "water torture," she says, that took her eight years: "I didn't want to be hampered by the fact that my memory was not reliable, especially the early memories. I felt a great obligation to be scrupulous about my memories with 'Girl, Interrupted.' I really didn't want to fudge that. And although I changed a few things to muddle identification, as far as I can tell I was very much being truthful about what happened. I didn't want that constraint here."

Calling "Cambridge" fiction, she says, enabled her to invent an Indian music teacher named Vishwa, for example, and build a romantic story line around him. Vishwa, she writes in the book, wore the "full Cambridge uniform" - khakis and a white shirt - and he lived at the juncture of Concord Avenue and Garden Street.

"My parents, though, they're pretty accurate in the book," she says, a laugh breaking - "but they're not here to protest." Her mother died in 1990, her father in 2010. She says her father was "surprised" by "Girl, Interrupted," in which she calls her family "crazy," "but I think he warmed up to it." He is featured prominently in "Cambridge," as a busy, moody, and intensely smart man.

Desser says Kaysen and her formidable father - who also worked with President Kennedy on national security from 1961-63 - were extremely close. "I think she always wanted to do good in his eyes," she says, "but on her own terms." Desser says both Kaysens shared a fierce quality: "I see commonalities in them, in their intellectual purity. Susanna hates bad grammar. She shouts and gets riled. There's a kind of straight arrowness and no bull about both of them."

Kaysen's version of that observation: "My father was judgmental and kind of mean and I'm like that. And he was very perfectionistic, and I'm like that. And he was very hard on himself, and I'm like that."

Novelist Claire Messud, one of Kaysen's close friends, and one of her only literary friends, says Kaysen is a perfect person to write about Cambridge. "In some way, Susanna is like Alice Munro," she says, "in that she knows this place to bedrock. She knows this place through her own experience, and she has come to know the history of it before she was alive."

And, indeed, sitting in Hi-Rise, Kaysen notes that it was once the liquor store where her father would buy wine every week when she was a kid. She says she constantly observes how much the city has changed, and how little it is like the "cozy" Cambridge she portrays in "Cambridge."

"When I look around, I see all this stuff that used to be here, the first landscape overlaid with these new landscapes. In Harvard Square, those new landscapes change every year because nobody seems to understand how to manage Harvard Square anymore. The stores that go there don't seem to work. A few do, but there's a lot of turnover."

Why is she still in Cambridge, where, she jokes, she will die? "It's home," she says, again laughing. " I may hate it, but I love it."

"Cambridge" is the first of a few planned books about her hometown, she says: "The later volumes will widen the scope to a less child-o-centric and a less me-o-centric universe. But I'll be writing from the grave - because I'm so slow!"

Which brings us to an important bit of information about Kaysen. She writes her books on a typewriter, which is one of those push-button thingies from the pre-computer era. She got a computer recently at Desser's request - "She still hates me for that," Desser says - but she rarely uses it. In fact, Desser has to call her to tell her to read an e-mail she sent.

Desser believes the typewriter plays a role in Kaysen's concise prose style. "Sometimes people who write on computers, you feel like they are just typing. When you have to type and retype as she does, there's a kind of precision there."

Kaysen says she works "word by word," and that she doesn't concentrate on plotline. And indeed, "Cambridge" doesn't have a book-length arc so much as a coming-of-age undercurrent. "The demand for an end, the demand for shape, is not always to be met," she says. "That is one satisfaction to get from a story or from a book, but it's not the only satisfaction, and it's not the only kind of story or book. Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly."

And then, of course, the laugh: "I tell myself these things!"

Another important tidbit: Kaysen did not go to college. Yes, the author of "Cambridge," whose father was an academic luminary in a city known for higher education, is self-educated.

"When I lived in the Faroe Islands, I went to college, essentially, because there wasn't anything to do and it was dark all the time," she says. "So I read all of Eliot, all of Dickens, all of Austen. I gave myself a great literature course, sitting there in the tundra."

Messud says she imagines Kaysen's youth was something like that of Virginia Woolf: "There was erudition around her in the home, and she was a voracious reader from an early age. There was a way in which education was happening regardless. School was an unnecessary inconvenience. When you could ditch it, you ditched it."

Getting ready to leave the bakery, which was once a liquor store, Kaysen says that in her house growing up, "It was kind of a horror that I didn't go to college."

And then, once again, the laugh: "It was great!"

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.

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Susanna Kaysen: The chronicler of 'Cambridge' - The Boston Globe

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You might expect author Susanna Kaysen to sit down in front of a reporter's recorder and pour out her dark soul. As the author of the 1993 bestseller "Girl, Interrupted," she revealed the dramatic story of her 18 months in McLean psychiatric hospital to the world.

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Kaysen analyzed the Ego, Id, and Superego of others in the book, and an analyst studied hers as well.

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Kaysen talks about the mind vs. the brain in the book and the functions of the brain.

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Ryder played Kaysen in the movie of Girl, Interrupted.

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Girl, Interrupted: Winona Ryder Exclusive Interview

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SUBSCRIBE: http://goo.gl/mHkEX9 FOLLOW US: http://goo.gl/7SoFjW LIKE US: http://goo.gl/6srxoU Check out Movie Behind the Scenes, Interviews, Movie Red Carpet Premieres, Broll and more from ScreenSlam.com Part of the Maker Studios

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This gives some background about Kaysen and discusses her other works.

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Hardcover, 257 pages |

Twenty years after the publication of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's excoriating memoir about the nearly two years she spent in a psychiatric institution at the end of her teens, she's written a sort of prequel. Cambridge, her unflinching, elegiac, quasi-autobiographical new novel, takes us back to the mid-to-late 1950s with a portrait of Susanna as a difficult, contrary 7-to-11-year-old miserably at odds with her family, her teachers and herself. The result is both fascinating and heartbreaking, because we know where her abiding unhappiness is going to land her.

Verbally gifted, mathematically challenged young Susanna is precocious right down to her moodiness and resentment of her mother's "aesthetic perfect pitch" and heralded listening skills, which she considers manipulative and phony. Kaysen totally nails the dynamic between the sultry pre-adolescent daughter and the sometimes curt mother who, irritatingly, is nearly always right - whether in knowing what Susanna is thinking or how much she will like a recording of Stravinsky's "Petrushka," or predicting the unsuitability of their Swedish nanny's suitor.

Kaysen ruthlessly autopsies Susanna's "balkiness," which, along with her self-pity, doesn't make her particularly likable - part of an intractable cycle of problems. "I knew that inside me was an indigestible nastiness, which was bound to poke through and kill anything nice that had managed to grow between me and somebody else," she writes. Craving even negative attention, Susanna is at once thrilled and terrified by her power to cause her parents worry. When her mother gives up trying to teach her piano, "part of me would curl up into a furious, rejected, desperate ball that wanted only to please her and was tight with regret and worry, while another part puffed itself into an equally furious, gleeful, flailing, shapeless enormousness, amazed at its ability to inflict the pain I saw in her face."

Cambridge spans roughly five years, from 1955-1960, bracketed by what Susanna depicts as two miserable exiles from her beloved, familiar comfort zone in Cambridge, Mass. The first is in dank, dark England on one of her father's sabbaticals from Harvard's Economics department, when Susanna is in second grade. She comes to appreciate the super-sweet candy but loathes the rote learning at her new school, the "porcelain malevolence" of their sole toilet in the basement and her mother's preoccupation with the baby sister whose arrival Susanna wasn't prepared for.

A year in Greece, which coincides uncomfortably with her puberty, is broadening but no happier. Floored by the Acropolis and a visit to what she calls - with typical biting wit - "my second family," the House of Atreus in Mycenae, she observes, "Greece was a long lesson in my insignificance," and wonders, "why did my parents keep dragging me around to see things that were too big for me to contain?"

Young Susanna isn't completely negative. She adores her Swedish nanny, whose gentle boyfriend, an Indian conductor named Vishwa, teaches her to really listen to music. She loves sour cream, a legacy from her Russian-born grandmother, and the "unpredicatable, quicksilver quality" of "elastic and springy" language. She finds solace in her nerdy friend Roger's easygoing household, where his psychoanalyst parents give her air. And most of all, she relishes eavesdropping on adults, taking "mental notes" as love stories "unfolded and then folded up again," although she "learned nothing, naturally, because the heart is unteachable."

Cambridge is a return to form after Kaysen's last book, The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001), an autopathography about her genital woes. By labeling her clearly personal new book a novel, she frees herself to shape her material for maximum effect. Her prose is chiseled and powerful, much like her description of the impact of the Parthenon on Susanna at 11: "A moment when the world unfolds: few of those, in life. Everything peeled back. I could hear it rolling away. This was the skeleton of humanity I was seeing, this colonnaded marble spine."

Cambridge is steeped in nostalgia - a melancholic ache not just for times Susanna has known, but for times she wishes she'd known. She realizes, "Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood."

But Kaysen doesn't fabricate a happy childhood in Cambridge. Instead, she peels back memories to expose the colossal, obdurate "colonnaded marble spine" of a lost youth.

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Before She Was 'Girl, Interrupted' She Was A Girl From Cambridge

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Hardcover, 257 pages | Twenty years after the publication of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's excoriating memoir about the nearly two years she spent in a psychiatric institution at the end of her teens, she's written a sort of prequel.

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Kaysen stayed at Mclean Hospital and wrote Girl, Interrupted about her experiences there.

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McLean Hospital | Psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School

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Top-rated psychiatric hospital helping those living with conditions such as addiction and borderline personality disorder.

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Summaries and reviews of Girl, Interrupted, and quotes from the book.

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I think they may be only in the film but i'm so confusedI think they may be only in the film but i'm so confused Samar Barakat

"Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever."
"Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60s. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted."(less)
"Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever t ...more

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Karlyflower *The Vampire Ninja, Luminescent Monster & Wendigo Nerd Goddess of Canada (according to The Hulk)*

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I think they may be only in the film but i'm so confusedI think they may be only in the film but i'm so confused Samar Barakat "Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it.

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Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder during her stay as Mclean Mental Hospital.

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Overview

Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior. These symptoms often result in impulsive actions and problems in relationships. People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last from a few hours to days.

Signs and Symptoms

Risk Factors

Treatments and Therapies

Join a Study

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Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior. These symptoms often result in impulsive actions and problems in relationships. People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last from a few hours to days.

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Title:
Girl, Interrupted Trailer

Description:
Based on writer Susanna Kaysen's account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s.

Related Titles: Girl, Interrupted

Related Names:
Whoopi Goldberg, Winona Ryder, Vanessa Redgrave, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, James Mangold, Joanna Kerns, Elisabeth Moss, Brittany Murphy, Jillian Armenante, Angela Bettis, Alison Claire, Clea DuVall, Drucie McDaniel, Christina Myers

Content Rating:
Not Rated

Video URL: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1286209817/

Courtesy of:
Screenplay, Inc.

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Title: Girl, Interrupted Trailer Description: Based on writer Susanna Kaysen's account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s. Related Titles: Girl, Interrupted Related Names: Whoopi Goldberg, Winona Ryder, Vanessa Redgrave, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, James Mangold, Joanna Kerns, Elisabeth Moss, Brittany Murphy, Jillian Armenante, Angela Bettis, Alison Claire, Clea DuVall, Drucie McDaniel, Christina Myers Content Rating: Not Rated Video URL: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1286209817/ Courtesy of: Screenplay, Inc.