| For centuries, “misfits” have been institutionalized as “insane.” In late medieval France, beggars were institutionalized as “insane” so that they would not clutter the open markets. In industrial democracies, a more scientific-sounding vocabulary was developed to accomplish the same objective — to isolate nonconformists lacking support from family and friends. In Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold adapts to the screen the 1993 autobiography of Susanna Kaysan (played by Winona Ryder), whose malady in 1967 at the age of eighteen was having sex with a married man, overdosing on aspirin, failing to apply to admission to college along with her prep school peers, having few friends her age, being an embarrassment to her parents, and preferring to pursue a career as a writer. Upon graduation, her parents leave her no choice but to commit herself to Claymoore, an upscale private mental institution, where she is diagnosed as having a “borderline personality disorder,” which she is brainwashed into believing is an accurate description of her own mental state. After a period of adjustment into the routine of pills, talk therapy, and official as well as unofficial activities, her boyfriend suddenly shows up to take her away, but she is not to be One Who Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Instead, her previous experiences with unstable men counsels her into preferring to remain a prisoner, since she is drawn to the companionship and drama of her new female friends. Similar to The Snake Pit (1948), she eventually comes to the conclusion that she is sane in an institution that creates insanity; according to the tagline, “Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.” Through the thoughtful counsel of nurse Valerie (played by Whoppi Goldberg), she discerns exactly what she needs to say to head psychotherapist Dr. Wick (played by Vanessa Redgrave) and to a panel of psychotherapists so that she can be released, as she is after eighteen months, when she embarks on the career of writing that she sought all along. However, the import of the film is less about Susanna’s unfortunate plight and more about the validity of the current theory of social constructionism, which in this case argues that labels are invented by persons in authority in order to disempower nonconformists. Each girl at Claymoore has one thing in common — running afoul of adult hypocrisy. Their affluent families on the outside do not want them to leave, preferring to institutionalize children whose presence in polite society would unmask serious adult indiscretions. And Claymoore, to survive financially, goes along with the charade by inventing maladies that have no cure, refusing to deal with the real issues that bring the girls for “treatment.” As a backdrop, television news covers the turmoil of the late 1960s, thereby implying that society was itself falling apart, as if the girls and their parents were both victims of societal forces. But the portrayal of the unhealthy state of the art of psychotherapy some thirty years ago is itself out of date. Nowadays, Freudian psychotherapy has been discredited, and medical researchers increasingly are finding that many behavior disorders are not mental in origin but instead can be treated pharmacologically with considerable success. Moreover, the civil rights movement now protects those who are committed to mental institutions by insisting on hearings in which psychiatrists are only expert witnesses in judicial proceedings where those who have been diagnosed with behavior disorders are represented by independent attorneys. Nevertheless, the same hocus pocus can operate at a more sophisticated level, since the fate of individuals who lack a measure of self-control acceptable to family and friends can be decided by judges deferring to psychiatrists, who in turn may have no alternative but to entrust care to social workers. When social workers are on a power trip, as illustrated by the shocking film Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), the results can be surreal. MH |