Girls, Interrupted, book and film thirty years later

“Have I ever been crazy? Maybe. Maybe life is crazy. Madness is not about breaking down or keeping a dark secret. Madness is you or me, amplified.” If, while reading this sentence, you saw a very young Winona Ryder with a pixie haircut and huge eyes in a taxi, you were probably also teenagers in the early 2000s.

Maybe you wrote this sentence in your diary, asking a classmate with beautiful handwriting to decipher it on the summer pages. Bottom left instead of the author’s heading: The girl who got interrupted. For those who don’t know interrupted girls 1999 cult film, tells the story of a young woman who spent 18 months in a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. This is taken fromeponymous memoir by Suzanne Caisen, released in 1993, thirty years ago..

Thirty years have passed, and we still watch the scene on YouTube where Suzanne (Ryder) and Lisa (Angelina Jolie) sing. “Downtown” to comfort Polly (Elisabeth Moss), who is high on sleeping pills and locked in a cell in a psychiatric hospital. the layering of new meanings that Susanna’s story continues to evoke

. Kaisen did not expect such a success.

When she published her memoirs, letters began to arrive from all over the world from women telling her about their experiences in mental hospitals. Mental health talk was not common, and in 1967, when the eighteen-year-old Kaisen was scheduled to be in the famous McLean Hospital in Boston (the same one that treated Sylvia Plath in the 1950s), swallowing dozens of aspirin tablets in a state of desperation.

interrupted girls This is primarily a book for women.: we are talking about hospitalizations, mental disorders, diagnoses and medications. And we are talking about women, girls, locked together in a non-place that should make them healthy again and fit to return to society. There is a long story behind the connection between women and mental health, a thread that links diagnoses. hysteria, a psychosis invented and used for centuries to pathologize the female conditionand the fact that even today, although mental health is less and less taboo, diagnoses of anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, and sexual dysfunctions are still much more common in women than in men.

Several studies show that between the 60s and 80s, American women were the main target of pharmaceutical companies for psychotropic drugs. Maybe it will come to your mind Mystery of femininity essay by Betty Friedan: her “nameless problem” that shattered the dreams of millions of housewives stuck in a life already written at birth. If women didn’t like sitting at home all day, looking after their children with no hope of any other role in society, if they became depressed as a result, prescriptions for antidepressants, anxiolytics, and sedatives were often the solution. Where is the line drawn between health and disease, between sanity and insanity, between comfort and stiffness in pain?

“For many of us,” writes the author interrupted girls“lThe hospital was not only a prison, but also a refuge.. Although we were cut off from the world and all the issues we enjoyed raising there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that drove us crazy. Equilibrium, despair, rebellion, pressure, expectations, frustration, desire to numb pain: virtue interrupted girls is to talk about mental health without drawing clear lines and giving unambiguous answers.

At the end of the book, it is revealed that Suzanne had a sexual relationship with her English teacher at school before the crisis. Maybe for this. in his medical records you can read the word “illegible”. Polly has a disfigured face and wants to remain a child forever. Georgina takes refuge in a world of lies, Daisy, a victim of childhood abuse, hurts herself; Lisa constantly defies the authorities and destroys everything around her.

Through them, thirty years later, interrupted girls still manages to get us thinking about the importance of mental health and what it means to be a woman, and is still too often described as crazy. But, among other things, he brings us back the choral story: Polly, Lisa, Susanna, Georgina – that’s us, reinforced

. This was the second part of Suzanne’s final monologue, which we had to record in our diaries: “They weren’t perfect, but they were my friends. By the 1970s, almost all of them had left and were living their own lives. Something I saw again, something not, never again. But there is not a day that my heart does not find them again.