MHA's Blog: Chiming In

I’d been on a roll with this blog, watching movies that present good depictions of mental health conditions, or at least, weren’t as awful as I thought they were going to be. That streak is over now, having watched Girl, Interrupted. This movie is not just bad; it’s just about as bad as it can get.

Girl, Interrupted is a 1999 movie based on a book by Susanna Kaysen. Susanna is the main character, a young woman put in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. She spends a year there, learning about herself and getting into adventures with the other consumers, including Angelina Jolie’s Lisa and Brittany Murphy’s Daisy. After becoming close with Lisa, the two break out of the hospital and this leads to disaster and Lisa’s disappearance. Susanna begins to get better and finally is scheduled for release, but Lisa’s reappearance threatens to derail her progress. This leads to a bitter confrontation before Susanna leaves.

This movie has every awful stereotype in it about mental health conditions, mental hospitals and people with mental health conditions. Susanna’s borderline personality disorder, severe enough for her to attempt suicide, is played like she’s just a rebellious teenager. She’s self-indulgent, rude and generally horribly to people, and the movie acts like she should be that way. It reinforces the idea that she’s not really sick, just misunderstood, which Susanna believes is true. The head nurse on the ward, who has taken a special interest in her because she’s got something more going on than the rest of the girls, tells her that she’s a “lazy, self-indulgent little girl who’s making herself crazy.” The movie is very clear that borderline personality disorder isn’t actually an illness; it’s just a phase that Susanna’s going through. At the end of the movie, she herself says “I wasted a year of my life,” despite the fact that she’s in recovery. It’s a terrible message to send about mental health conditions. To top it off, Susanna’s an insufferable character. The voiceovers are so bad, and she has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

To add to the terrible main character, the movie adds a few supporting characters of various shades to stereotype. The head nurse, played by Whoopi Goldberg, is dangerously close to the magical minority trope, when a minority character exists entirely to help the white main character learn about themself. She has no other personality traits than wanting to help the main character be better. Besides Daisy and Lisa, the rest of the women in the hospital are character traits rather than people. They give Susanna a chance to see “real crazy” even as she befriends them. Their stories are barely told, and they do exactly what we expect them to. They are in the plot to show Susanna and the viewer what real crazy is, so we know Susanna’s not like them. Her behavior is because she’s misunderstood.

Then there’s Lisa.  Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lisa, a young woman diagnosed as a sociopath who’s been in the hospital for 8 years. It’s a big showy portrayal and Jolie hits all the emotions, but they don’t quite add up to anything. Lisa’s manipulative, overly sexual, charismatic and verbally abusive. She takes pleasure in destroying the psyches of the other girls, especially Daisy, for no discernible reason. The character plays like someone mistook sociopath (which is actually a slang term for a few different illnesses) for jerk. She befriends Susanna until Susanna is affected by Daisy’s suicide, which Lisa caused, and then she turns on her. It takes Susanna being abusive back to Lisa to get her to take her condition seriously.

This leads to another problem all together. Every single mental health professional in this movie is completely incompetent and unhelpful until they aren’t. The only people who can help someone with a mental health condition in this world is Susanna and her self-righteous truth-telling. She helps Lisa realize that she needs to take her condition seriously, and she gives a few other girls the push they need to begin recovery. In fact, no one begins recovery in this movie until Susanna tells them how.

This movie mad me angry, which I’m sure you noticed. It’s got all of the stereotypes of bad mental health movies, and yet the anger directed towards it is much less than A Beautiful Mind. The characters are barely characters, the professionals are in no way professional and there’s only one minority in the entire movie! The main character is such an awful character overall that it’s almost insulting how many potentially interesting characters are used to support her. Skip this movie entirely, unless you want to get angry.

In two weeks, we’ll take a look at a classic in mental health movies, Sybil. Have you seen Girl, Interrupted? What did you think?