Girl, Interrupted: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

Valerie, Kaysen writes, was about thirty years old. Valerie was tall, with tapered legs and arms, and looked a lot like Lisa. Valerie was good at curling herself into corners, and often was the one to help calm down and retrieve patients who had tucked themselves between a radiator and a wall or into another difficult-to-reach spot. Susanna describes Valerie as strict and inflexible, but nevertheless says that Valerie was the only staff person any of the girls trusted—they trusted her because she was not afraid of them. She was a woman of few words, and the girls on the ward appreciated that as well, as they had to hear “a lot of talk” every day. Each girl sees three doctors a day: the ward doctor, the resident, and her own therapist.

The doctors have a special language, and use terms like “acting out,” “hostility,” “regression,” “withdrawal,” and “indulging in behavior” to make anything the girls do sound somehow “suspicious.” Nothing the girls do is ever simple, and is always seen as motivated by something else. Valerie, however, is a relief from all of this jargon, and only ever says what she means.

The doctors are men, and the nurses and aides are women. The one exception is Dr. Wick, a female therapist who is the head of the girls’ ward, South Belknap Two. Dr. Wick “look[s] like the ghost of a horse,” and sounds like one as well. She is from Rhodesia, and is both naïve to the intricacies of American culture and easily shocked by any talk about sex—two things which Kaysen notes made her an “odd choice” to head a ward full of young women.  When Susanna attempts to describe her visit to the Frick to see the Vermeer in one of her sessions with Dr. Wick, Dr. Wick is shocked by Susanna’s description of her sexual relationship with her English teacher. Their sessions, Susanna notes, are in no way therapeutic, and Susanna feels lucky that she only has to talk to Dr. Wick for five minutes each day.

After each session with Dr. Wick, a resident arrives for another session—information from which the residents use to regulate privileges and medication. Residents change every six months, and the girls on the ward are never able to figure out how to handle one resident before another one is swapped in in their place. Sessions with the residents are similarly unhelpful, and residents are, across the board, stingy with doling out any medicines or privileges at all. 

Therapists have nothing to do with the girls’ day-to-day lives on the ward. Susanna’s therapist urges her not to talk about the hospital all, and insists that their sessions are for talking about the deeper-rooted problems in Susanna’s life. Therapists cannot affect anything at all about the girls’ lives on the ward, and their only power is to “dope [their patients] up” with sedatives that “knock the heart out” of anyone who takes them.

Half a dozen nurses including Valerie and one or two aides are on duty during the daytime. Where the day staff are cold and removed, most of the night staff are warm and comforting—except for Mrs. McWeeney, the head night nurse, who does not get along with Valerie. The girls like Mrs. McWeeney far less than Valerie, and feel a sadness each night when Mrs. McWeeney takes over, as they know they are about to be locked up for eight hours with a “crazy woman” who hates them. The unpredictable Mrs. McWeeney makes mean faces at the girls without warning, and often withholds medications from the girls for no reason. The girls complain every morning about Mrs. McWeeney, but Valerie tells the girls there is nothing she can do about Mrs. McWeeney, and urges them to respect her.

Now and then there is an influx of student nurses on the ward. The nurses are about the same age as the girls: nineteen or twenty. They are eager, innocent, and also incompetent, and the girls on the ward both pity and scorn them. More than anything, the girls on the ward are darkly fascinated by student nurses because they see “alternate versions” of their own lives reflected back at them—the lives they could be living if they weren’t locked up on a psychiatric ward.

The students and patients love talking to one another, and patients ask nurses about current movies, school, and their personal lives. In exchange for these tidbits of life on the outside, the girls on the ward do their best to control their tics and mood swings while the students are around. “Consequently,” Susanna writes, “the [students] learn nothing about psychiatric nursing [during] their rotations.” The student nurses leave the ward having seen only shades of the girls’ real selves and real problems, and Susanna notes that for many of the patients, being remembered as almost-well is the closest they will ever come to being cured.