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The movie Girl Interrupted, directed by James Mangold, is based upon the book of the same title by Susanna Kaysen. Girl Interrupted is about mental illness and the fight for self realization. The role society has defined for the main character, Susanna Kaysen, is a portrayal of a woman searching for the true meaning of life in a mental hospital. She is a woman who wants to be a writer, rather than fall in the footsteps of her homemaker mother. She is institutionalized not for being clinically insane but because she doesn’t fit into the role that society has defined for her in the 1960’s and thus she has turned in on herself by attempting to commit suicide. The central focus of the story is the actual institutionalization of the writer and her first hand accounts of life in a mental institution. Mangold handles the movie with extreme sensitivity as he chose to highlight several details to emphasize how the patients cope with the use and abuse of drug treatment in the