When I was in S6, I read ‘Girl, Interrupted’ by Susanna Kaysen and loved it. It was a compelling memoir with honest representations of how Kaysen saw the women in the mental ward with her. It represented them for who they were to her, people, not characters to make a profit. Then I watched the movie. To me, it felt like an entirely separate piece of media, with mere concoctions of the people, rather than a meaningful interpretation of female mental illness. The mental illnesses of the women were not investigated to any great extent, being largely ignored except for purposes of the setting. In the book, Kaysen goes into much deeper detail of her diagnosis, BPD, discussing gender politics, being a female dominated illness, as well as her feelings about it. The women were made to be stereotypes instead of complex, making a mockery, to me, of the original media. I also found that my opinion was not shared on TikTok, with it actually being seen as an aesthetic to acquire, which I thought was interesting.
First of all, I found the ‘plot’ and ‘characters’ to have been heavily altered to make them more sellable to Hollywood. I saw this particularly through Daisy’s suicide and the villianisation of Lisa. I only put those words in inverted commas, as it’s a memoir, not fiction, so therefore about very real people.
In the memoir, Daisy is a seasonal resident who is heavily sexualised by everyone around her, including people who are meant to be safety nets, such as her father. They find out that once out of the ward again, she dies by suicide, and so they observe “a moment of silence” for her. In the movie, they have Kaysen and Lisa sneak out to visit Daisy, with the latter being very cruel to Daisy, and then finding her body the next morning. Not only is this incredibly disrespectful to Daisy, but I also find it sickening. This woman went through her life without a safe space or a safe person, and then Hollywood uses the idea of her hanging body as a plot device for the sake of television.
This mangling of her death highlights the ongoing issue of female mental health/suicides not being taken seriously. Using her as a plot point demeans her feelings and experiences. It becomes a very real example of women not being taken seriously. A study in 2023 showed that women asking for mental help are called dramatic, with 20% of those surveyed being asked if they were on their period. This then makes the misrepresentation of Daisy’s death dangerous, as it makes suicide a spectacle rather than a grave issue. It influences negative perceptions of female health, thus snowballing into a woman under 25 committing suicide once every two days.
This leads me neatly onto the exploitation of Lisa. In order to move the movie along to its climax and resolution, they needed an antagonist, with Lisa being the obvious choice. They take her characteristics, such as her loud opinions and interest in the other patients, as ways to make her rude and cruel to Daisy, Kaysen, and many others. This seems dehumanising; it makes people forget that she too was there for a reason and moulds the viewer’s sense of empathy against her and more towards characters like Kaysen. This is cruel, especially when Kaysen herself wrote: “Lisa! I can’t think of her without smiling, even now.” Making these changes to a person and their relationships seems a bizarre choice, especially when Kaysen spoke of Lisa a lot in her original memoir and never in a villainous light.
The peak of the film sees Lisa reading the memoir and screaming repeatedly at Kaysen, which is not only a largely inaccurate showing of sociopathology, but also blatantly Hollywood-ises the memoir into a thriller rather than an informative and absorbing set of memories. Sensationalising Lisa’s character is not only offensive to Lisa, the real person, but also incredibly harmful once again to discussions of female mental health. It feeds into the idea that women are dramatic and catty with each other, and not to be taken seriously. This is significant to know especially with the increase of women dying, that could have been otherwise prevented if their doctor had listened to them.
Online, I saw people feeding into the stereotypes given to the ‘characters’, without the realisation that these people weren’t experienced in this way by those who actually knew them. Which I do get a little bit – I would have liked the film if I hadn’t read the book. I think if the film had not previously been a memoir I would have enjoyed the plot points and seen it as a better representation than I do now. The acting was phenomenal for the script given, but pales to the character representations in the memoir. In my opinion, the movie belittles the conversation surrounding women’s mental health, as if it is something to be romanticised over, rather than being seen as an undeveloped topic in the world of medicine. Maybe, it’s just my For You Page, but I have seen one too many ‘Girl, Interrupted’ aesthetics videos, with outfits and colour schemes to match the film. This takes away the reality of people’s situations with actual deaths being toyed with. It negatively impacts people’s perceptions of empathy, while also highlighting why the art of reading should not become a lost one.
