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Girls Interrupted By Susanna Kaysen Summary

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Girls, Interrupted is a book by Susanna Kaysen. This book is about an eighteen year old girl who after seeing her therapist, gets put in a taxi and taken to McLean. Here she finds herself checking into a mental institution. The book talks about incidents that occur there for the next two years of her life. Throughout the book we learn about not only her mental illnesses but also the illnesses of the other patients. This book opened my eyes to many new things. Before reading this book all I knew about mental institutions was that that’s where the crazy people are sent. After reading this book I have concluded that there is so much more to it. This book showed me that a mental institution hospital is not a joke, but a place where people can go to get serious help. This was my first real exposure to mental institutions and mental illnesses. Both are way more complex than I could have ever imagined. The book only addressed one mental institution, but I learned so much about mental health hospitalization as a whole. For example, I learned a lot about the different types of privileges that the patients had. When they first started at McLean they have no privileges what so ever, they are completely restricted to …show more content…

I also liked it because this wasn’t your typical happy story line. This really shows you the realness of life, not everyone is perfect, not everyone ends their lives with the dreamy boy, and life is a lot more than; getting an education, going to work every day, and having a family. This book taught me that not everyone can handle what life has to throw at them. After reading this book I saw that not everyone should be able to handle everything. The life experiences some of these girls had before they were institutionalized were so damaging, that few people would be able to handle these things without professional

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