Girl, Interrupted: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

Susanna Kaysen reflects on the initial meeting with the therapist who recommended her for admission to McLean. The doctor reported that he interviewed Susanna for three hours. She insists the meeting lasted twenty minutes, though she concedes that she might have spent a little more than an hour in his office while he called the hospital, her parents, and finally a taxi company to take her away. She knows that they can’t both be right, but wonders if it even matters which one of them is.

Kaysen’s one piece of “hard evidence” in support of her claim is a document labeled “Nurse’s Report of Patient on Admission,” which she obtained from McLean. The time of admission is recorded as 1:30 PM. Susanna believes she was in the therapist’s office before 8 AM, but concedes that because her sleep cycle was off, she might have been wrong. She posits that if she left home at 8 and spent an hour travelling to a 9 AM. appointment, twenty minutes of time with the therapist would put her schedule at 9:20 AM. The trip from the doctor’s office to Belmont took about half an hour, and Susanna remembers waiting fifteen minutes to sign herself in, plus another fifteen minutes before reaching the nurse who admitted her. Susanna concludes that this means she would have arrived at the hospital at half past twelve, which seems to support the doctor’s recollection of a three-hour interview.

Kaysen, however, tells her readers not to be so quick to believe her therapist, since she has more evidence. There is an Admission Note from a doctor at McLean who took an “extensive history” from Susanna before she reached the nurse—the hour of admission on his report reads 11:30 AM. Susanna endeavors to reconstruct the morning of her admission with this in mind. If the doctor at McLean admitted her at 11:30, subtracting the “half an hour [of] bureaucracy” puts Susanna’s arrival at McLean at 11 AM. Subtracting the half-hour taxi ride puts her exiting the admitting therapist’s office at 10:30 a.m. Subtracting the hour the doctor spent making phone calls takes her back to a 9:30 AM end to her meeting, which lines up with her original view of a twenty-minute total conversation. “Now,” Kaysen writes, “you believe me.”

A scanned insert of Susanna’s official admission note clearly displays the time of her admission to the hospital as 11:30 AM.