Susanna Kaysen's account of her two-year hospitalization
at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, begins in the spring
of 1967. Kaysen, the
daughter of Ivy League academics, witnessed firsthand the widening
generation gap developing in America in the late 1960s.
Older generations viewed their children's world with alarm and confusion
and embraced few of the cultural changes occurring around the nation.
Nearly 70 million children born to the World
War II generation came of age as teenagers and young adults during
this period. These “baby boomers” would have a massive impact on
the American cultural identity.
The Vietnam War and the deep divide it created in American
culture defined 1967 and 1968,
the years of Susanna Kaysen's stay at McLean Hospital. Gritty, uncensored
battle footage, widely available for the first time, riveted the
nation. Draft protests became common in cities across the country.
Young people marched on Washington and burned their draft cards,
taking part in protests that often ended in violent clashes with
police. The emergent hippie movement preached a lifestyle of peace
and love through the celebration of music, sex, and psychedelic
drugs. In the summer of 1967,
several months after Kaysen entered McLean, San Francisco hosted
the Summer of Love. Thousands of young people and curious observers
converged on the city in the largest counterculture celebration
to date.
While an angrier movement of antiwar protests replaced
the “flower power” generation, efforts to achieve equality for women
in American society were in full force. Prominent activists and
writers like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Mary McCarthy worked
to expand the opportunities available to women in a society that favored
men. The introduction of the birth control pill, legal abortions,
and a general loosening of social restrictions on women embodied
a fundamental shift in American attitudes.
In the midst of this turmoil, hospitals like McLean were
caught in an awkward transitional period. McLean Hospital, founded
in the early 19th century, had long been
a refuge for the troubled members of wealthy and aristocratic families.
Through the 1950s,
privileged patients lived in well-appointed residence halls with
fireplaces, private bathrooms, and servants. Well-known residents
included poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; Central Park designer
Frederick Law Olmsted; Princeton mathematician and subject of A
Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash; and, just prior to Kaysen's
arrival, songwriter James Taylor. In the late 1960s,
however, McLean had fallen into a period of benign neglect, no longer
a luxurious refuge for the wealthy nor a cutting-edge mental health
facility. This was due in large part to the changing face of the
mental health care field.
Medical notions of mental illness had undergone a series
of radical changes since the turn of the century. In the early 1900s, patients
were often treated like incurable prisoners. “Talking cures,” developed
by psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, competed with
physical therapies, such as electroshock therapy and surgical lobotomy,
in which the frontal lobes of a patient’s brain are destroyed. Professionals
became fierce advocates of preferred therapies and opponents of
others. Controversy continued to roil the mental health field, as
it does today. In the early 1950s,
however, the synthesis and validation of the first clinically tested
drugs to alter brain chemistry, such as Thorazine, introduced drastic
changes in mental health practices. The widespread use of pharmaceutical treatments
drastically reduced the demand for institutional commitment, a phenomenon
that diminished the need for residential facilities like McLean.
In the late 1960s,
Susanna Kaysen resembled many other patients flooding mental health
care facilities: young, relatively well-to-do, and very likely misunderstood
by a mental health care establishment undergoing its own evolution.
Kaysen is deliberately ambiguous in addressing the issue
of whether her hospitalization was medically necessary. She describes with
scorn a physician’s twenty-minute diagnosis of her need for institutionalization
but later recounts a number of frightening incidents that would
seem to indicate that she genuinely needed help. Despite her difficulties
as a teenager, Kaysen went on to a life as a successful writer.
Besides Girl, Interrupted, for which she earned critical
acclaim, Kaysen published the novels Asa, as I Knew Him (1987)
and Far Afield (1990),
as well as the memoir The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001).
A film adaptation of Girl, Interrupted appeared
in 1999. Kaysen lives
in Cambridge, Masschusetts.
