The painful truths of Girl, Interrupted

“Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60s. Or maybe I was just a girl, inter­rupt­ed,” says Susan­na Kay­sen (Winona Ryder) in the open­ing of James Mangold’s Girl, Inter­rupt­ed. It is Susanna’s final state­ment in this thread of hypo­thet­i­cals that becomes the main focus of the film. The open­ing song, Simon & Garfunkel’s ​‘Book­ends’, rem­i­nisces about an era of inno­cence, while three girls sit in shock with tear stained faces – theirs has just been shattered.

Girl­hood is cer­tain­ly the focal point of Girl, Inter­rupt­ed, as the drama­ti­za­tion of the real life Susan­na Kaysen’s 1993 mem­oir becomes as much a com­ing-of-age tale as it is a per­son­al jour­ney through men­tal health. When Susan­na checks into Clay­moore Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal at a trans­for­ma­tive point in her life, she explains that instead of apply­ing to col­leges like her peers, she has been com­mit­ted to inpa­tient care for chas­ing ​“a bot­tle of aspirin with a bot­tle of vod­ka” – an action she claims was only to cure a headache. Although Susan­na is diag­nosed with Bor­der­line Per­son­al­i­ty Dis­or­der, the film’s depic­tion of this men­tal health con­di­tion has often been ques­tioned. What is cer­tain is that Susan­na suf­fers from depres­sion and – like many of her fel­low inpa­tients – denial.

Mangold’s film had a luke­warm recep­tion on release, and is bet­ter known for its sec­ond life online, where its depic­tions of men­tal health have been heav­i­ly roman­ti­cised by young view­ers. Online Angeli­na Jolie’s volatile Lisa (diag­nosed as a sociopath) has been inspi­ra­tional to pro-ana accounts – ignor­ing the trag­ic irony that Lisa was not insti­tu­tion­alised for an eat­ing dis­or­der but Jolie strug­gled with anorex­ia – and the waifish por­tray­al of women’s men­tal health is upheld through Susan­na, whose jour­nalling and chainsmok­ing is a chic form of what Tik­Tok has dubbed bedrot­ting. Dur­ing Tumblr’s peak, Girl, Inter­rupt­ed, became insep­a­ra­ble from the coquette aes­thet­ics where images of lace night­ies and pointelle vests fol­lowed with hash­tags of the film along­side that of trag­i­cal­ly-brand­ed singer Lana Del Rey.

Girl, Inter­rupt­ed is not the first to mar­ry the aes­thet­ics of soft fem­i­nine cloth­ing with emo­tion­al tur­moil and tragedy. Both Peter Weir’s Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock and Sofia Coppola’s The Vir­gin Sui­cides achieved sim­i­lar visu­al and the­mat­ic con­trasts with more grace. How­ev­er, per­haps the rea­son this overt erring on a fetishis­tic, aes­theti­cised look at women’s men­tal health is so still so reg­u­lar­ly ref­er­enced, from Gilmore Girls to Char­li XCX’s ​‘Girl, So Con­fus­ing’, is that it is one of very few films that attempts to nor­malise women’s expe­ri­ence of insti­tu­tion­al treat­ment for men­tal health conditions.

Psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tals are more com­mon­ly known in cin­e­ma as asy­lums – places where hor­rors are inflict­ed on unwit­ting patients by sadis­tic staff and the sane are trapped in Vic­to­ri­an tiled labyrinths unable to escape, such as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shut­ter Island, A Cure for Well­ness, Unsane and Jok­er: Folie a Deux. For Hol­ly­wood, the men­tal­ly ill and the insti­tu­tions that treat them are so often a nar­ra­tive crutch to incite fear and dri­ve the plot for­ward. For­get­ting in its car­toon­ish depic­tions, that real peo­ple suf­fer from para­noid delu­sions, man­ic episodes and hal­lu­ci­na­tions, and how harm­ful con­tin­u­ing these stereo­types can be.

Along­side these extreme depic­tions of men­tal health insti­tu­tions, there are those that address their com­plex his­to­ry. David Cronenberg’s A Dan­ger­ous Method, is a bio­graph­i­cal dra­ma detail­ing the ear­ly days of the insti­tu­tion through the aca­d­e­m­ic life of Karl Jung (Michael Fass­ben­der), Sig­mund Freud (Vig­go Mortensen) and patient turned stu­dent Sabi­na Spiel­rein (Kiera Knight­ley). While Alice Winocour’s Augus­tine, played by Soko, fol­lows the diag­no­sis of hys­te­ria. Both explore how misog­y­nis­tic beliefs held by the psy­cho­an­a­lysts in charge have long affect­ed the devel­op­ment of women’s men­tal health treatment.

Despite the real­i­ties of the psych ward in which Susan­na gets her stom­ach pumped, Lisa reg­u­lar­ly under­goes elec­tric shock treat­ment, and both are pre­scribed Prozac as per the grow­ing phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal cul­ture of the time, the roman­ti­ci­sa­tion of Girl, Inter­rupt­ed makes sense. Today access to con­sis­tent ther­a­py and atten­tive care is unlike­ly when admit­tance relies on insur­ance (in the US) or sim­ply avail­able places and beds (in the UK). Talk­ing ther­a­py is no longer a giv­en on wards, because, as the NIHR (Nation­al Insti­tute for Men­tal Health­care Research) states, of a ​“lack of avail­able psy­chol­o­gists”. Girl, Inter­rupt­ed feels like a psy­chi­atric ide­al today when all the NHS can offer is group CBT.

As I write this, British Health Sec­re­tary Wes Street­ing claims that there is a prob­lem with over­diag­no­sis of men­tal health con­di­tions and that ​“too many peo­ple are being writ­ten off” from work. For those of us who have wait­ed years for a diag­no­sis of depres­sion, ADHD or autism, after jump­ing through the bureau­crat­ic hoops of the health­care sys­tem just to be con­sid­ered for assess­ment (let alone treat­ment), this argu­ment is offen­sive­ly wrong. And for those that have con­tin­ued with the many extra assess­ments to receive aston­ish­ing low dis­abil­i­ty ben­e­fits that the Labour Gov­ern­ment is about to cut, it is even more galling. While Girl, Inter­rupt­ed is a depic­tion of the Amer­i­can men­tal health­care sys­tem, many liv­ing else­where can relate to fail­ing health­care, and even in the Unit­ed States right now, Trump’s fed­er­al fir­ings are large­ly affect­ing America’s acces­si­bil­i­ty to men­tal health­care. Both UK and US politi­cians blame indi­vid­u­als for their con­di­tions and accuse them of refus­ing to work or con­tribute to soci­ety at large.

Return­ing once more to the film’s intro­duc­tion, the frac­tion that most fas­ci­nates me is its mid­dle: ​“Maybe it was the 60s.” While Susan­na is com­mit­ted, her boyfriend Tobias (Jared Leto) is draft­ed to serve in the Viet­nam War. Today no one is being draft­ed, but our feeds are flood­ed with images of vio­lent atroc­i­ties as Pales­tini­ans doc­u­ment the con­tin­u­ing geno­cide in Gaza. We share in the shock of those who wit­nessed Viet­nam, the first tele­vised war, from the safe dis­tance of their homes. There is a con­stant aware­ness of real world vio­lence that awaits Susan­na once she leaves insti­tu­tion­al life – it’s this nag­ging truth that encour­ages her denial and refusal to address her indi­vid­ual real­i­ty. There’s an unspo­ken under­stand­ing that her progress and san­i­ty means con­tend­ing with an insane world.

It is this minute sen­tence that reminds me of sen­ti­ments shared by rad­i­cal polit­i­cal voic­es of today. Mark Fish­er argued in ​‘Cap­i­tal­ist Real­ism’, that the indi­vid­u­al­i­sa­tion of men­tal health ignores society’s effect on its cit­i­zens. “… instead… of accept­ing the vast pri­va­ti­za­tion of stress… we need to ask: how has it become accept­able that so many peo­ple, and espe­cial­ly so many young peo­ple, are ill?” Maybe it’s not the 1960s or the 2020s that are to blame. Maybe it is soci­ety that should be treat­ed for its insis­tence on insan­i­ty, not the indi­vid­ual. In that sense, maybe many of us are – in Susanna’s words – interrupted.