Girl, interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen · first published 1993
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In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel
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…to these ideas, more people got diagnosed than before, and more young people identified with these struggles and felt more comfortable talking about them. Susanna Kaysen's 1993 mental health memoir "Girl, Interrupted", which recounts her experience as a young female adolescent struggling with mental health in the late 1960s, for example, received an enormous amount of renewed attention and interest when it was adapted…
on “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012” ↗In print: Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. (Much more disjointed than the film, but a quick read.) Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy On audiobook (I know, not technically reading): Garth Marenghi's horror trilogy (Matthew…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗If you want a good read about how the *****y the US healthcare system is, this is a very worthwhile read. Ironically the author is the writer of “Girl, Interrupted” and the story she writes is about how her son got screwed by the US healthcare system and is titled “Boy, Interrupted”. It also shows you how desperate people get for specialized care, and will shell…
on “The Secret Society of Lightning Strike Survivors” ↗