Girl, Interrupted: List 2

What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me off to the nuthouse?

It was 1967. Even in lives like his, professional lives lived out in the suburbs behind shrubbery, there was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world—the drifting, drugged-out, no-last-name youth universe—that knocked people off balance.

What are these kids doing? And then one of them walks into his office wearing a skirt the size of a napkin, with a mottled chin and speaking in monosyllables.

It's a mean world out there, as Lisa would say. He can't in good conscience send her back into it, to become flotsam on the subsocietal tide that washes up now and then in his office, depositing others like her.

Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.

My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn't matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings.

Perverse reasoning. But back of that perversity, I knew I wasn't mad and that they wouldn't keep me there, locked up in a loony bin.

Lunatics to the left, staff to the right. The toilets and shower rooms were also to the right, as though the staff claimed oversight of our most private acts.

The seclusion-room etiquette was, If you weren't locked in, anybody could join you.

As a group we maintained a certain level of noisiness and misery. Anyone who sustained a higher level for more than a few hours was put in seclusion.

As a group we maintained a certain level of noisiness and misery. Anyone who sustained a higher level for more than a few hours was put in seclusion.

There were no objective criteria for deciding to put someone into seclusion. It was relative, like the grading curve in high school.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

The grounds were large and beautifully planted. They were pristine as well, since we were almost never allowed to walk around.

The gradations were Byzantine. One-to-twos (one nurse, two patients) led to group (three or four patients and one nurse).

So when we went to Bailey's in Waverley Square with our retinue of nurses, the arrangement of atoms in our molecule was more complex than it appeared to the engineers' wives sipping coffee at the counter and graciously pretending not to look at us.

It was a ten- or fifteen-minute walk down the hill, past the rosebushes and stately trees of our beautiful hospital.

The farther we got from our ward, the jumpier the nurses became. By the time we hit the street they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

A new boy was dishing out cones. We approached him in a phalanx.

Sometimes they had the audacity to ask where someone was.

Click, swish, "Checks," swish, click.
It never stopped, even at night; it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons.

Cutting old tough beef with a plastic knife, then scooping it onto a plastic fork (the tines wouldn't stick into the meat, so you had to use the fork like a spoon): Food tastes different eaten with plastic utensils.

One day a second Lisa arrived. We called her by her full name, Lisa Cody, to distinguish her from the real Lisa, who remained simply Lisa, like a queen.

Cynthia was depressive; Polly and Georgina were schizophrenic; I had a character disorder. Sometimes they called it a personality disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn't sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people's. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.

That afternoon Lisa Cody burned a tiny welt on her wrist and spent the next twenty minutes running cold water on it.

"Greenwich, Connecticut!" She sneered: No sociopath could emerge from there. "Were you a debutante too?"

Lisa pushed her sleeve up to her elbow and shoved her arm under Lisa Cody's nose. Her arm was studded with pale brown lumps, gnarled and authentic.

I won't quibble over ten minutes.

The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity.
Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception.

The immune system is half-asleep. The organism is torpid and brackish.

The organism is torpid and brackish.

Even the reflexes are diminished, as if the lower leg couldn't be bothered to jerk itself out of its stupor when the knee is tapped.

Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.
In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior.

There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions.

There are roots to the tongue. You've seen them, and if you put your finger in your mouth you can feel them, but you can't feel them with the tongue. It's a paradox.

Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination.

Experiences seem prerecorded, stylized.

A lethargic avalanche of synthetic thought can take days to fall.

Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture—it's the great mystery of mental illness.

Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture—it's the great mystery of mental illness.