The use of hospital records in a narrative, although not a new technique, adds information and variety. Patients had scheduled leisure-time activities but also enormous amounts of downtime. She describes patients whose main treatment was individual psychotherapy five times a week, group therapy about once a week, and little else that was directly tied to treatment objectives. She mentions, but does not describe in any detail, treatments including medications, cold packs, and electroconvulsive therapy. She was on a ward whose population included young women with such psychiatric diagnoses or histories as acute psychosis, self-immolation, anorexia, depression, schizophrenia, character disorders, and substance abuse. Kaysen's depiction of her life as a patient in that era rings true. The author presents her text in very brief chapters-really vignettes, or verbal snapshots. Kaysen was living in her own apartment and was deemed recovered.Ä«etween the first and last pages the reader is exposed to the retrospective presentation of an 18-year-old's life as an inpatient on an adolescent women's unit, with further information presented through reproduction of other hospital records. The book's title, reflecting this interval, comes from the Vermeer painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music in the Frick Museum in New York City. Kaysen's case record folder, we see that she was discharged in January 1969, after 496 days in residence at the hospital and 121 days on authorized leave. On the last page of the book, also from Ms. She was characterized as a white, Jewish, single female with admitting diagnoses of "psychoneurotic depressive reaction" and "personality pattern disturbance, mixed type." There was also a rule-out diagnosis of "undifferentiated schizophrenia." Finally, we see that the diagnosis eventually established for her was "borderline personality." Kaysen's case record folder that she was voluntarily admitted to McLean, was a high school graduate, and was the daughter of parents living in Princeton, New Jersey, where her father was on the Princeton University faculty. On page 1 we learn from the reproduction of Ms. The first two components work well and construct an interesting historical record the third can be problematic and sometimes confuses the account and detracts from its value. Girl, Interrupted is a short book structured from three building blocks: a reconstruction of the author's hospitalization at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, beginning in April 1967 when she was 18 years old sections reproduced from hospital medical records and the perspective of a woman in her forties examining an earlier phase of her life about 25 years later. The renewed interest in Girl, Interrupted prompts a second review of this book, first discussed in this journal in 1993 ( 3), and a commentary on the book's translation into film. The book was published in paperback in June 1994 ( 2) and then reissued in 1999 to coincide with the release of the Hollywood movie version. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen was first published in book form in 1993 ( 1), parts of it having appeared before that in three different magazines.
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