NORMALITY ESSAY ON SUSANNA KAYSEN
Susanna Kaysen is an eighteen-year-old girl who has been sent to McLean Hospital to be treated for depression, and spends two years on the ward for teenage girls in the psychiatric hospital. Susanna’s behaviour in the ward varies drastically from considerably normal to severely abnormal when she associates and befriends Lisa Rowe.
The ‘medical’ criterion of normality suggests that normality is the absence of any medical or mental disorder while Abnormality is the presence of an illness that has a clear cause, obvious symptoms and a label. I chose this criterion to define Susanna’s behaviour, because I think it is necessary to look at the medical side of her behaviour. Therefore according to this criterion of normality, Susanna is most certainly abnormal. She has a labeled mental illness and has obvious symptoms which accompany this label. These symptoms include her behaviour, which is dramatic and selfish and her mental incapability to function and cope with the demands of daily life. She falls asleep at her Graduation ceremony, uses casual sex as a distraction from her problems, carries out self-mutilating behaviour such as wrist banging, thinks and talks about death and suicide often and has visions of the past, tuning out when people try to talk to her. However the problem with using this criterion to define normality is the fact that some individuals may seem like they don’t have an illness but when examined more carefully it is seen that they have a minor illness which does not affect them as much. This would challenge the way the medical criterion defines normality as even though the individual has an illness it is not a dramatic one. Another criterion that I chose was the situational criterion as it gives a different approach to what normality is. The ‘situational’ criterion of normality suggests that what is normal is dependent on the specific environment or situation the individual is in. Therefore according to this approach, Susanna is considerably normal when in the psychiatric hospital but abnormal when in the outside world. In the psychiatric hospital she is surrounded by individuals with mental illnesses and therefore it becomes appropriate for her to act the way she does. It is normal behaviour to have casual sex, treat others with no respect and have feelings of emptiness and depression and act in a way you would not usually act in. When the nurse throws Susanna into the bathtub with her clothes on Susanna loses her temper and starts screaming and demanding the nurse to take her out of the tub. This behaviour is considered normal by the situational approach as she is in an environment that allows this kind of behaviour. But although this may be normal in the psychiatric hospital it is most definitely abnormal in the outside world. If Susanna were to do this at her house and treat her mother in this way she would be sent to her room or maybe even sent to see a councilor to discuss her problems. A problem with this approach though, is that it does not take into consideration how normal the actual environment is in the first place. For example a psychiatric hospital is considered an abnormal environment but yet people in this hospital are considered normal by the situational criterion because they are acting in accordance with the environment they have been placed in.
