Insanity; Illness or Judgment?
The Book, Girl Interrupted, by Susan Kaysen, is an autobiographical piece about her two years at Mclean Mental Institution. Kaysen tells the story of the people and experiences she encountered at Mclean. She struggles with why she is there, how she got there, and if she is truly sick. The line between sane and insane, normal and deviant is a blurry one. More importantly, it is a distinction that, except in the most severe instances of mental illness, scarcely captures the personality it seeks to classify. The ethical issue is that the need to classify people into categories of social norms can cause much harm. People are defined by a few characteristics and then decisions are made that change their lives forever. In some cases doctors seem to rush to these decisions causing more damage than good.
Kaysen begins the book by telling the story of her last day before she entered the hospital. "Perhaps it's still unclear how I ended up in their. It must have been something more than a pimple. I didn't mention that I'd never seen that doctor before, that he decided to put me away after only fifteen minutes" (Kaysen, 39). She goes on to explain that the doctor forced her to enter the hospital. She did have a background with a suicide attempt but she had already decided that she would never try again. The doctor took a look at her file and a pimple on her body that she was picking at and sent her away after fifteen minutes. Kaysen describes this as her "last fifteen minutes of freedom".
Entering the residential psychiatric facility was described as a total loss of privacy. Kaysen describes the patients' loss of freedom in the chapter "Applied Topography." Locked in the dehuma ...