Girl, Interrupted is a best-selling 1993 memoir by American author Susanna Kaysen, relating her experiences as a young woman in an American psychiatric hospital in the 1960s after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Borderline Personality Disorder as portrayed in Girl, Interrupted. Prior to the events of her memoir, it appears Susanna was primarily being treated for depression. While in the hospital, however, Susanna was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Girl Interrupted, released in 1999, is a film portraying a young female in the 1960s struggling with the uncertainty of her own mental illness. With the persuasion of her parents, Susanna Kayson admits herself into a psychiatric institution and is later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Angelina Jolie as Lisa Rowe, diagnosed as a sociopath. Charismatic, manipulative, rebellious and abusive, she has been in the institution since she was twelve, and has escaped several times over her eight years there, but is always caught and brought back eventually.
Daisy is a beautiful, well-groomed young woman whose only real outward sign of her illness is being reclusive and unwilling to socialize. However, she suffers from severe obsessive compulsive disorder and a laxative addiction, and is also deeply traumatized from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her father.
Polly is a disfigured patient who was hospitalized for schizophrenia and depression. Polly has severe scarring on her body, the result of setting herself on fire.
Cynthia. A severe depressive on Kaysen's ward. Cynthia undergoes months of electroshock therapy. The effects of the shock treatments change Cynthia's personality, leaving her totally unable to assert herself.
Daisy Randone is an 18-year-old who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), has been sexually abused by a trusted adult, and has learned to rely on maladaptive coping strategies, such as bulimia and self-harm. She is introduced early in the film as a pretentious, but kind patient on the ward.
It is surmised by the other girls that Daisy used laxatives due to all the roast chicken she was eating. Daisy's father visited twice a week and brought her an entire roasted chicken from her mother.
Daisy keeps the chicken carcasses under her bed to mark her time at McLean Hospital. A deeper psychological assessment is not provided other than the suspicion that Daisy's father was in love with his daughter. Daisy would receive two roasted chickens a week from her father.
One day, Alice suffers some sort of mental collapse and is taken to the maximum-security ward by a pair of nurses. Curious, several of the girls decide to visit Alice on her new ward, which is markedly different from their own.
But Lisa's hatefulness soon surfaces in short order and she verbally attacks Daisy, exposing the fact that Daisy's has had an incestuous relationship with her father for years and this leaves Daisy desperate and in tears. Though Susanna tries to sooth things over, Daisy withdraws to her room.
As a child it is believed that she was raped by her father. This event leads to The Electra Complex: the complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a wish to exclude the parent of the same sex.
The film shows that Daisy visits the clinic annually from Thanksgiving to Christmas. However, the scene at her new home presents that she still suffers from Bulimia Nervosa and Persistent Depressive Disorder.
Answer and Explanation: Yes, Lisa Rowe gets released as Susanna runs into her at Harvard Square with a son years later. Her life has become that of a suburban single mother. During her institutionalization, Lisa was known for her escapes, which lasted a couple of days, and her scheming nature.
Daisy Randone is an ISFP personality type and is artistically gifted. As an ISFP, she has a strong moral compass and filters everything through her value system.
Before Susanna leaves, she visits Lisa in seclusion, who is strapped to the bed, and paints her nails. It's the small acts of intimacy in this film that display how great female friendship can be.
Lisa reports back to the other girls that Daisy has stashed rows of whole chicken carcasses beneath her bed, and uses the laxatives to help her pass the enormous amounts of poultry she consumes.
Lisa Rowe is one of the characters in Girl, Interrupted, who is diagnosed with a particular type of mental condition. Lisa was diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder. According to DSM-IV, this condition is a pattern of the violation of the rights of other people and disregarding them.
Lisa Cody eventually is diagnosed as a sociopath as well, and this enrages Lisa. The two of them engage in an escalating battle of wits, exchanging insults and pranks until Lisa effectively drives Lisa Cody off the ward. Lisa Cody escapes, and Lisa later finds her living on the streets of Cambridge, addicted to drugs.
She killed herself nine days after the assault. At the age of 14, Daisy Coleman was raped by Matthew Barnett, who was 17 at the time.
It also came fully stocked with sapphic undertones—so much so that, 20 years after its premiere, Girl, Interrupted is considered by many to be a queer film, or, for more cynical viewers, an example of queer-baiting that may or may not conflate queerness with mental illness.
Last weekend I enjoyed watching Girl, Interrupted (1999) for the first time, a movie that is based on a true story and Susanna Kaysen's memoir of the same name.
Janet Webber – anorexia. Cynthia – lesbian (a “diagnosis” that would not be made now). Unnamed character – Tourette's syndrome. The movie takes place in 1967 and 1968.
She is capable of affection (she seems genuinely fond of Nick and occasionally seems to love Gatsby sincerely), but not of sustained loyalty or care. She is indifferent even to her own infant daughter, never discussing her and treating her as an afterthought when she is introduced in Chapter 7.