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.