Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 30, 1993 TAG: 9311010037
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN KASTNER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Although "Girl, Interrupted" reads as smoothly as a light modern novel, the material is from real life.
The book details writer Susanna Kaysen's experience as a psychiatric patient at Boston's McLean Hospital, where Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles have sought treatment.
Kaysen's youthful impressions of staff, patients, medications and hospital routines offer a unique and often humorous glimpse into an experience many have had, yet few openly discuss. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, one of the wide variety of labels from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," Kaysen was admitted after an aspirin overdose.
Her observations on the stigma of mental illness and the glaring differences in the diagnosis of women's and men's problems are interspersed with reflections on the delicate point where her psychiatric experiences caught her, disrupting her routine somewhere between childhood and adulthood at age 18.
Kaysen's hospitalization occurred in 1967. Her life was touched by the happenings of those dark, yet colorful days of the `60s, with the drug scene that she - and others - survived.
Kaysen's observations and interpretations still ring true today - her descriptions of hospital security, staffing, politics, personalities and even floor plans. "Girl, Interrupted" is no "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." But the humorous perspective Kaysen offers is refreshing as she fully opens the closet door, expertly removing and displaying - at least for the moment - that skeleton we call mental illness.
\ Joan Kastner is a Roanoke writer.
by CNB