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Re: Movies--girl, interrupted

Posted by JAV on January 28, 2000, at 21:17:07

In reply to Re: Movies--girl, interrupted, posted by Abby on January 28, 2000, at 19:57:48

> >
> > The movie propagates the "just snap out of it myth" in many ways. First, it should be pointed out that the patients in the movie were strikingly normal. If you have ever observed a psychiatric ward of a hospital, you would undoubtedly note that some the patients behave strangely. People who suffer from certain mental illnesses, like OCD or schizophrenia, to the extent that they must be hospitalized inevitably have strange or abnormal behaviors that inhibit their functioning in society. The patients in Girl Interrupted, with perhaps the exception of the girl who hid chicken under her bed, were quite normal. I would describe their behavior as possibly eccentric but not abnormal. The character Angelina Jolie played only once did one thing I would call strange- she called
> > Susan by the name of Jamie, a patient who had previously committed suicide. So where are the really ill people? Or are we to believe that
> > mental illnesses were simply figments of the collective imaginations of people living in the psychedelic sixties? I happen to know the mentally
> > ill do exist (have always existed), and they suffer terribly. Girl Interrupted does not depict their suffering, in fact, it minimizes it and, cruelly, it invalidates it. Susan was able to simply "get better" once her nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) told her she was "being selfish and self-absorbed". In effect she "snapped out of it".
> >
> > So was this a story of a someone misdiagnosed and institutionalized inappropriately? Seems like it. Susan certainly didn't seem to be genuinely suffering (at least not more than the average teen turning adult) and the atmosphere of the hospital was more like summer camp than of a place where people were mentally ill and struggling. Girl Interrupted certainly does not portray the real life struggles (and they exist) of someone with a mental illness. So my question is: Where are the
> > inspiring movies of those who have suffered from mental illnesses and survived? Why are we so supportive of Cancer patients and why do we so
> > disregard the difficulties of those suffering from Major Depression?
> >
> >A lot of upper middle-class people were hospitalized in the 60's for conditions we
> would now probably treat on an outpatient basis with
> Prozac or talking therapy.
>
> I'm pretty sure that Kaysen was depressed--she says she still gets that
> way---but that she was also struggling with adolescence in a crazy time.

New Comment

I haven't seen the movie or read through all the messages posted here. However, I have read the ook. I have also read "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and "Prozac Nation" by Elizabeth W..... (Ican't remember her surname right now!". My impression, having read all three of these books is that "Girl, Interrupted" is the book that has least depth. It read as a book as a light weight biography that had, as yet, no real grounding in the real life that is mental illness. I hope that that makes sense.


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URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000128/msgs/19939.html