Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. Screen Time. Ryder worked as an executive producer on the film, and spent nearly seven years translating the story from the page to the screen. Girl, Interrupted. Plot Summary.

In the spring of , while everyone else in her senior class seems to be making plans for college, Susanna consumes a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of vodka. Soon, with a push from her family, she has committed herself to Claymoore, an upscale psychiatric institution. The diagnosis? A supervising nurse played by Whoopi Goldberg offers her own diagnosis: "You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving yourself crazy. Although mental illness is real and terrifying, the movie argues that perfectly sane people like Susanna can become institutionalized simply because once they're inside the system there is the assumption that something must be wrong with them. Goldberg's nurse has seen this process at work and warns Susanna: "Do not drop anchor here.

Girl, Interrupted. Plot Summary. All Themes Isolation and Seclusion Perception vs. Reality Women and Medicine Sanity vs. Insanity Manipulation, Restriction, and Control.

Susanna Kaysen, an eighteen-year-old in April of , agrees to enter McLean Hospital, a residential psychiatric facility in Massachusetts. Although she plans to stay only a few weeks, Kaysen remains at McLean for nearly two years. The doctor who forcefully advocates her committal to a mental hospital interviewed Kaysen for only twenty minutes. Kaysen tells the story of the people and experiences she encounters at McLean in a series of nonchronological vignettes.