Borderline Personality In Girl Interrupted By Susanna Kaysen

From the beginning of Susanna Kaysen’s, Girl Interrupted, the reader is immersed into a world where a normal adult woman’s life is interrupted.This is due to the error of the professional observers sending her to a mental correction facility where people who are deemed experts in their field such as psychotherapists, psychologists, and even therapists admit her based on their unanimous diagnosis of Borderline Personality. A normal woman is grouped together with people who actually do have major mental issues that affect her psyche. Despite Kaysen being heavily scrutinized by her observers she is not crazy it is due to the fact that she was diagnosed improperly which is not an accurate reflection of her character. One could see why the professional …show more content…
She elaborates how people seem to glance over the normal parts of a person and focus on the parts that make them abnormal. “ But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?” ( Kaysen 5). Kaysen is pointing out how many normal people are quick to judge without walking in that person’s shoes often times mislabeling people. Similarly, this is how the professional observers act as well nothing could be considered normal they were damaged beacuse they were in a mental institutions. Kaysen talks about how the doctors would speak in code about their patient’s behaviors when they would respond back to their patients regarding their behaviors. “ They had a special language: regression, acting out, hostility, withdrawal, and indulging in behavior. This last phrase could be attached to any activity and make it sound suspicious: indulging in eating behavior.. In the outside world people ate and talked and wrote, but nothing we did was simple” ( Kaysen 85). The professional observers think that just because a patient is in a mental institution that there they cannot have normal tendencies. Many individuals who are adults have everything regression to little kids when they do not act their age. The obeservers would twist normal …show more content…
Yet in the sixties, all women were expected to have identical behaviors. It was thing one was strong willed and independent in the sixties and then she was promiscuous on top of that. Kaysen says she only slept with a few boys but Kaysen argues, “If it were a boy how many girls would he have to sleep with to classify him as promiscuous ? Sixteen, seventeen girls?”( Kaysen 146). There are not absolute laws for diagnosing patients. As previously stated before there are a myriad of symptoms common in thousands of sicknesses and diseases. Doctors are not omniscient as to knowing all the diseases and sicknesses. Yet Kaysen’s psychotherapist just disgnosed her immediately as if he did know all the symptoms related to her disorder. Gawande says, “ Ignorance is one of the reasons why doctors fail. Ignorance is a limited understanding of all the physical realms of the laws that apply to the the given circumstance” (Why Doctors Fail). Ignorance is one reason doctors fail because they would have to admit that they were wrong and find out how they detected the wrong symptoms for the patient. Another problem that Gawande talks about is the hurricane versus the ice cube. The ice cube is the same outcome all the time just as when an ice cube will melt in the fire ( Why Doctors Fail). Psychotherapists, doctors and psychoanalysts. Most patients and doctors treat illnesses as