Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. This is episode 7 of the Swan Song Series.This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her searing performance of Rowe, a sociopath. Show NotesGirl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen RiberaMad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi | GoodreadsBrittany Murphy: Inside Her Sudden Death at 32 That Still Confounds HollywoodGirl, Interrupted at her Music. Vermeer. 1660.It’s the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair. The light is muted, winter light, but her face is bright. I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something—she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, “Don’t!” I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. “Wait,” she was saying, “wait! Don’t go!” — Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
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Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Hello dear Patreon subscribers, welcome to Swan Song Series 7.
It's a movie episode today, Girl Interrupted Part 1.
Hello Julian, how are you?
Hi there, I'm good.
I'm excited about this episode and I just want to note that I'm still recovering from laryngitis so every now and again, like we recorded an episode a few days ago and every now and again I'll hit a word where I go a little hoarse.
And I know that you're recovering from a little bit of a cold, so we're slightly compromised in the audio recording department.
A little bit, but I have my tea.
I have, also I have chocolate, which is really good for this episode, I think.
Great.
There's actually, I think this is good for your throat, actually I'm making that up, but I mean, in my tea I have condensed milk these days.
Did you grow up with that?
Did you grow up with that?
You did, eh?
Because you're from the Commonwealth yourself, right?
Yes.
Condensed milk is a decadent treat.
It's great.
Yeah.
You know, I started drinking it again after my mother died.
She passed away, and I think the next week I just remembered it.
I just remembered that this is something that she loved that it was a treat for her.
And now, yeah, it's like it's I think it's a year, year and a half later more something like that.
It's funny, I haven't I haven't had it in about 30 years.
But the association with the taste now that you bring it up, it's so rooted in my childhood and in a different place, you know, such a different culture.
I used to love having condensed milk on toast.
Yeah, that was a thing, right?
You were a heavy Commonwealth fan.
Yeah, and I also used to have Marmite and Freybentos, right?
Ah, okay.
I missed out on those.
It's more in Australia, I think.
But in England, too.
People in England love having Marmite on toast, and Americans who taste it think it's the most disgusting thing ever, but I love it.
Right.
We want to give another shout out to Christina Flinders for joining us last time on our inaugural Listener Stories series.
We did two parts with her and we found her to be incredibly lucid and generous with her story.
Absolutely.
And we hope that you all enjoyed it.
Also, thank you for commenting on it in the Patreon stream.
I think that was very meaningful for Christina, and I think it gives her a really strong sense of what she might do with this material going forward, which I think is a really happy thing.
So, today, a little bit of a different journey.
We're going out on a limb, and we're gonna jump in at the deep end here, so we recommend that you listen to the prior series episodes first, and also, you know, you might even, especially after this first clip, you might want to pause this episode and go and watch Girl Interrupted before going any farther.
I mean, you know what, all of that I think is good advice, and at the same time, hey, if you're just joining us, enjoy the ride.
There may be some references that you want to go back and figure out what we mean, but I think this is a pretty unique episode, and yeah, the movie material that we're getting into just has a lot of richness.
It does.
Trigger warning here, discussion of suicide.
I mean, everybody thinks about it at some point.
How would you do it?
I don't know.
I guess I haven't really thought about it.
See, once it's in your head, though, you become this strange new breed.
A life form that loves to fantasize about its own demise.
Make a stupid remark.
Kill yourself.
If you like the movie, you'll live.
If you miss the train, kill yourself.
Susanna.
What?
Let's not talk about this anymore, okay?
Why?
Because it's, uh...
stupid.
Oh, sweet music and suddenly you're...
Oh, sweet music and suddenly you're...
Ahhhh.
What?
What are you doing?
What?
Because I don't want to kill myself?
That's not cool to you?
I don't want to die.
I was just talking.
Look, Susanna, the world is fucked up, okay?
It's so fucked up that if some draft zombie pulls my birthday out of a barrel, I'm gonna die.
When's your birthday?
December 30th.
I'll pray for you.
Alright, so, Susanna...
Let's set the scene here, right?
We're looking at and commenting on what was reportedly one of Teal Swan's favorite movies when her and her friend Diana were teenagers.
It's Girl, Interrupted.
And in this scene, Susanna Kaysen, who's played by Winona Ryder, and her temporary boyfriend Toby, who's played, interestingly, by Jared Leto.
So interesting.
So interesting.
What a future he has gone on to have.
Absolutely.
They're bathing in the afterglow, naked in bed together.
And then after he asks her to stop talking about killing herself, she's upset.
She gets up to put on clothes and leave.
Then he points out that his own fear of being drafted, that's that reference to his name being pulled out of a barrel, right?
Because they did it by lottery.
Makes the topic of death very scary in a real way for him.
And I feel like here we're getting a glimpse into her trying to share what she feels in terms of being somewhat set aside, set apart from other people by this preoccupation with suicide and a certain kind of emotional inner turmoil.
Yeah.
Yeah, and she, you know, it sets the scene for us well because Kaysen is describing suicidal ideation as a kind of illumination.
She says that you become a strange new breed.
Uh, and against this, Toby kind of insults her with his legitimate worldly fears.
It's stupid.
Yeah, and what we have then is a real tragedy of these gendered ships passing in the night.
Uh, you know, this young woman with no idea of what she's going to do and no place in society as we will see, and this young man who feels that he is going to be thrown into the meat grinder.
Now, later in the film, Toby's draft number does come up and Susanna actually watches it drawn during the lottery.
She's watching the television in the psych ward at McLean, the hospital.
And this allows the story to have Toby show up and offer to take her away as he draft dodges to Canada.
He tells her that You know, his dad has given him $5,000 and he's got this car and they're gonna be able to go up and, you know, start a homestead or something like that.
We can build a cabin in the woods!
Right, and he, again though, he puts his foot in his mouth, proving himself to be dismissive of not only her particular journey, but also of the friends she has begun to cultivate at McLean.
I don't think that's the name, Matthew.
I think it's called Claiborne.
Maybe I'm mixing up the actual hospital with the fictional one.
We'll say the hospital.
At one point I think Toby says, those girls in there, they're eating the grapes off of the wallpaper.
And she's just disgusted at his callousness.
And that moment allows her to refuse his world.
To choose the hospital at least for the time being as the safer place and to find solidarity with other women who are finding their way out of this labyrinth of mid-century mental health care.
Yeah, I mean, there is another angle on this too, which to make him not completely irredeemable, which is that he also is saying to her, you know, I don't think you belong here.
I don't think that you're really quote-unquote crazy.
Right.
And there is a through line, I think, in this story of, you know, the pathologization of what she's experiencing.
Well, and it comes up over and over again, even down to the vagueness of her diagnosis with the sort of catch-all category of borderline personality disorder, which we'll talk about.
And, you know, what you're saying actually is echoed by the head nurse, actually, or I believe Valerie's actually a doctor in the film.
Not in the book, but played by Whoopi Goldberg, you know, there's a very powerful scene in which she says, you know, I think you're just wasting your time.
You haven't figured it out yet.
You need to get on with things and you have all kinds of advantages and so on.
So, yeah, a good place to start, I think.
This film is released in 1999.
So, Teal Swan is 15 years old.
It comes to VHS on January 1st of 2000.
So, I'm not sure whether they saw it in the theater or not.
But it's an adaptation of a memoir published in 1993 by a very good writer named Suzanne Kaysen about the 18 months that she spent undergoing treatment for borderline personality disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s.
Now, the memoir is praised to the rafters by all kinds of, you know, literary illuminati, and it stands as, and I think it's very beautifully It stands as a field guide to the mental health landscape for women at the time, and it also includes an amazing cast of characters who we'll get to.
But the title, we should note, refers to a Vermeer painting, which is called Girl Interrupted at Her Music from 1660.
And, you know, it's as haunting as any Vermeer.
Have you seen this picture before, Julian?
I had not before you included it in our research process, and it's absolutely beautiful.
It has that really typical kind of sense of like being sort of in the muted shadows, but having the incredibly sort of represented light playing on the face of the girl, On, you know, some of the warmer objects in the room.
It's really, really beautiful.
Yeah, and like with many of Vermeer's sort of tableaus, I think it captures a moment of very quiet shock, or mystery, or what is going to happen now?
There's an incredible, like, this I mean, the golden light is always pouring in at a slant and creating these deep shadows, but there's also this sense that something critical is going to happen at this point, and we're not exactly sure if it's safe or not.
And now, Kaysen, yeah, go ahead.
Well, hold on.
I wanted to say about that that there's another...
aspect to what you're saying, which is that yes, it's a moment of shock and what might happen next, but there's also a sense that he captures in these kinds of moments.
It's almost like he opens a little aperture for us into there's an inner life here.
There are unexpressed emotions.
There's something happening behind the face that you're seeing, which suggests something quite intimate and psychological.
Yeah, yeah, and I wish I knew a little bit more about the history of art to know whether or not this is his particular uniqueness for the time.
I mean, I know he's famous and his paintings have survived and so on, but that does seem to be, there does seem to be something very modern about this painting.
Do you know the time period?
1660.
Oh wow, okay.
Doesn't that feel like, doesn't it feel like it should Should be a 19th century painting?
Yes.
In the sense that it's disclosing a secret, right?
Yeah.
And the reason I ask is because I was thinking about perhaps the parallel development in literature around a kind of first person character whose inner life you get to be privy to, right?
Well, also, the character in this painting is breaking the fourth wall.
She's looking directly at the viewer and saying, what's going to happen now?
And am I okay?
Kaysen writes about it in her memoir, This Way.
It's the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair.
So that's the other figure.
We've kind of like blown over.
We ignored him totally.
But of course, you know, he's looming over her shoulder and he's courting her as well as teaching her.
The light is muted, winter light, but her face is bright.
I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled.
She was warning me of something.
She had looked up from her work to warn me.
Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, don't.
I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency, but her urgency filled the corridor.
Wait, she was saying.
Wait, don't go.
Yeah, I think this is really interesting, too, because another of his very famous paintings, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which has been the subject of several pieces of fiction, it was thought by many to be obscene at that time, precisely because of those same parted lips.
That are considered to convey some kind of unladylike sexuality or kind of a loss of emotional composure.
Oh, wow!
Okay, so what Kaysen is actually identifying as the attempt to convey like a secret or some sort of urgent meaning to the viewer, that was interpreted at the time in this other painting as being a sign of lasciviousness or a sign of Yeah, perhaps.
Or perhaps we could also read it from the empathic angle of saying that this represents the sexual vulnerability of the innocent who doesn't know yet that they have to pull their lips tightly together in this kind of pursed, Right.
performance of some kind of piousness or, you know, control.
Right.
So Kaysen goes back 16 years later to see the painting in the same museum, and she's
with a rich and self-centered boyfriend.
She writes, she had changed a lot in 16 years, the subject of the painting.
She was no longer urgent.
In fact, she was sad.
She was young and distracted and her teacher was bearing down on her, trying to get her to pay attention.
But she was looking out, looking for someone who would see her.
This time I read the title of the painting, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, interrupted at her music as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being 17 as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas, one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been, what life can recover from that?
I had something to tell her now.
I see you, I said.
Such great writing.
It really is, yeah.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about the transition from writing to film because I think that's really important for what actually happens in terms of its potential sort of cultural impact and how that works its way into our story and into the living room of the Bosworths.
So, Kaysen's memoir, you know, is this harrowing exploration of mental illness, whether it's correctly or incorrectly diagnosed, usually incorrectly, whether it's treated with compassion or not, often not, and how that all plays out against the backdrop of gender dynamics.
And the film adaptation is directed by James Mangold, who also did Copland, Walk the Line, Wolverine, and Logan, and it stars Winona Ryder as Susanna Kaysen.
She's also one of the executive producers, so I can only imagine that, you know, I would love to just ask Ryder, maybe I should find, I wonder if there's an interview out there that describes her picking up the book or something like that and that's a man gold.
That's extraordinary too because this is early in her career, she's very young.
She's very young.
She's become the executive producer on this project because she really wanted to get it made.
I'm sure, I'm sure it just really spoke to her.
Yeah, she drives an incredible ship here to get this done because it really comes together in a beautiful way.
And then we have Angelina Jolie who gives a searing performance as the jaundiced sociopath named Lisa.
A career-making performance, right?
Yeah, incredible.
The budget for the film was $40 million.
It grossed $48 million at the box office.
You know, I realized in doing this, I don't, you know, study a lot of film.
I don't know what it actually made in VHS rentals or sales, and I don't know where to find that.
That would be kind of interesting to find out, because that's how it gets to the Bosworths, actually.
It's important to note, yeah.
Yeah, no, I think absolutely.
I think that it probably made a whole lot more money than that on the other side of theatrical release, because that's actually a pretty small profit on $40 million.
Yeah.
So, the other two screenwriters here are Lisa Loomer and Anne Hamilton Phelan, and that's really important to note because the film deviates significantly from Kacen's journey.
Let me just give an example.
We open with that scene with Toby, but as it's played in the film, it just does not exist in the book.
There's a monologue that carries a lot of that internal poetry, but the interpersonal dynamism is not there.
Kaysen, in short, is not writing a driving narrative with this book.
It is really a memoir of vignettes.
So she writes, and this is where the material for the Toby scene comes, suicide is a form of murder.
Premeditated murder.
It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it.
It takes getting used to.
And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive.
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with a suicidal state of mind.
It's important to cultivate detachment.
One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead or in the process of dying.
If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out of the window.
Does this sound familiar, by the way?
If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin.
If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels.
These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
The motive is paramount.
Without a strong motive, you're sunk.
My motives were weak.
An American history paper I didn't want to write, and the question I'd asked months earlier, why not kill myself?
Dead?
I wouldn't have to write the paper, nor would I have to keep debating the question.
So what does this remind us of?
Well, it's uncanny how much it sort of resonates with Teal Swan's treatment of suicide in some of her really, really Some of her YouTube videos that have been viewed the most.
It's interesting because in this passage, what is being described is a way of becoming More sort of familiar and intimate with the impulse towards suicide so as to be able to go through with it.
And the way that Thiel frames it is that the way to be free emotionally is to imagine yourself And I don't get that from Kacen at all.
There's no heroism in her voice.
No.
It is quirky.
of like, you know, de-repressing yourself or like going, facing your shadow or something
as a way to sort of become this heroic spiritual figure.
Right, and I don't get that from Kacen at all.
There's no heroism in her voice.
No.
It is quirky, it is eccentric.
It, you know, feels a little bit scrambled and there's no sense as well that she's teasing you
towards the particular event.
Whereas, and I'll get into this a little bit later, because what happens as the medium changes from, you know, a literary reflection on, you know, mental health issues to the You know, immersive, dyadic, parasocial relationship with Teal Swan, who's looking into your eyes and talking about what it would be like for you to commit suicide.
The content seems to be similar, and yet the container, the feeling, the power of it is completely different and much more claustrophobic.
Yeah, and in that passage, it's very descriptive.
She's describing a kind of depersonalization in which the horror of killing yourself is starting to become something that you're able to contemplate in this abstract way, whereas Thiel's approach is much more prescriptive.
This is something that you should do in order to, you know, get whatever benefits I'm telling you you will get from it.
Right.
I just want to point out one other thing.
This is a little bit nerdy and might be reading a little bit too much into it.
She says, my motives were weak.
An American history paper I didn't want to write.
I mean, on one level, she's it's it's reasonable.
That is a weak motive.
You don't want to write your university paper.
But on another level, there's something else going on there, which is like, I don't want to think about American history.
I really can't stand.
I can't stand.
Because there's a lot of this movie that feels like it's standing on the edge of the end of history.
What's going to happen afterwards?
What's going to happen after we get out of this place?
Whether it's the war or it's the asylum.
So, here's the rub, though.
We are looking at this film because we heard one comment in an amazing interview given by Diana Hanson-Ribera, who describes the following memory.
There's these two neighbor girls.
They're both engaging in self-harm.
They're both engaging in eating disorders.
What happened to these girls?
Why are they doing this?
And really, everyone was trying to understand.
I think her mom, even, when we watched the movie, Girl Interrupted, with her, which is a very dark movie.
Even to this day, I can't watch it without feeling horribly triggered.
She wanted us to watch that with her to kind of see I kind of see mental illness and I think she thought we would really relate to it and I don't know if the idea was it would be inspiring or maybe make us feel not as alone in some of these struggles but
And Teal and I really had some parallels with that movie.
I was the Winona Ryder character, and she was the Angelina Jolie character.
The one that, she was a sociopath.
And Teal loved the parallels between her and Angelina Jolie's character.
It wasn't something, I would've, I struggled being the Winona Ryder character, because my borderline personality, that's horrible.
I don't want a borderline personality.
And, where she kinda, She didn't see some of those things as a negative, where I saw them as a negative.
She saw it as like a prideful thing, like sociopaths are one of the more hardcore illnesses.
She's like seeing herself in the character, it sounds.
And kind of taking pride in seeing herself as the character, which stands out to me now.
We are few.
What stands out there for you?
Well, right away makes me think of later on, which we'll get to, Angelina Jolie saying we are few and we are mostly male.
Right.
You know, that she does take pride in her diagnosis as a sociopath.
And, you know, you hear Diana here kind of grappling with the power imbalance is not only there in the relationship with Teal, it's there in how the movie gets Okay, you're going to be the one who has this super vulnerable, confusing, intensely emotional kind of quote-unquote disorder, and I'll be the one who totally flat on the surface of things appears to have more power.
Yeah, and who will dominate and who will, as we'll see, as we'll get into, I think we're going to take two episodes to do this, as we'll get into, takes pride in pushing people's buttons, as she says.
Yeah, yeah.
And provokes the most abject and horrible scene in the film.
And who also, however, is exposed at the end as being somebody who cannot actually exist outside of the confines of the hospital.
Yeah.
And so it flips.
There's something very tender about Teal Swan identifying with the person who, in the end, is not free because they can't or is not released because they can't actually gain a meta view.
Enough to be able to rejoin the world.
But then there's also this ambivalence about, well, do you want to rejoin the world anyway?
Don't things make more sense in here?
So, really, really interesting.
I just wanted to add that there's also a way in hearing this quote that it all feels like a bit of a mess.
I mean, you've got this sort of implication that Teal's mom Thought the film would somehow be helpful to these two girls who apparently are starting to you know have these symptoms right?
Self-harm and eating disordered behavior.
Who knows to what extent that was that was the case?
Maybe maybe Teal's mom thinks this is gonna be inspiring to them or maybe it's a cautionary tale.
We don't know.
But here's this film in which there actually is a young woman who kills herself.
There's some really awful cruelty in the film.
There's this roleplay game that we're then imagining of Teal and Diana.
Seeing themselves as these two main characters, one of whom almost certainly, I would say, doesn't belong in a psychiatric institution, the other who's a really nasty sociopath of the kind we should hope never to meet.
It also plays, to some extent, as I reflect on, because we've talked about this before, like how do we imagine Thiel's parents relating to all of this, and to me, It plays into a trope I've mentioned before in the spiritual subculture that often sees emotional instability as indicating some kind of really spiritual sensitivity and then it goes further and perhaps sees mental illness as perhaps being in touch with a spiritual reality that the normies can't see.
In this case, maybe being unbound by restrictive norms of society.
And we talked in a previous episode about the countertransference, perhaps we could frame it as, of the relationship that Teal's parents seem to be caught in with her, in which she's this powerful and gifted golden child who is only troubled to the extent that the world doesn't know how to understand and support her specialness.
Right.
So it seems to me like it could be part of that.
I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of sweet that her mom thought, wow, you girls might take some comfort in a film like this that starts to get into these difficult and highly charged issues that I don't know how else to communicate with you about.
But on the other hand, it's like, okay, it's a little twisted.
Well, I think, I understand the gesture and the impetus and I think that it would have been, it might have been possibly generative and educational and maybe even salutary for You know, girls in this situation to watch this film, but there would have had to be a lot of space and time and conversation and guardrails and also the ability to compare it to other pieces of literature.
Perhaps pointing them towards the actual book because reading the book is a completely different experience.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about that later.
But I just want to say that in terms of the intensity of their engagement with the film, by email, Diana kindly responded to a bunch of questions that I had, and she told me that she recalled watching this a few times at least with Thiel, and only once with her mom present, which was the first time that she saw it.
She says that she's pretty sure that they owned the VHS and that it wasn't rented a bunch of times.
So, she says, quote, I believe Mrs. Bosworth, a.k.a.
Bobby, had good intentions by watching the movie with us.
She discussed the beauty and depth of some of the characters despite their mental challenges.
There was some sort of discussion around the brutal treatments in the old psych wards and the ineffectiveness mixed with trauma from those treatments.
There were some discussions about shock treatment and lobotomy.
I also think the movie was upsetting for Teal's mother, I can imagine.
And the treatment options in our small town weren't great.
So, yeah, thanks Diana for the clarifications.
Yeah, I feel like just as a very quick aside, we should mention for anyone under 30, there used to be these buildings where there were all of what were called videotapes.
And you could go into these buildings, you would leave your house, and you would go into these buildings and then you would select videotapes of films that you wanted to watch and you'd pay at the counter and then you'd take them home, you'd put them into this thing called a VCR or a video cassette recorder that would then play them on your television.
It was a different time.
Yeah, and you had to rewind them too, or else there was a $2 or $3 rewind fee, right?
Yeah.
And yeah, the, gosh, it was incredible that that was,
those shops covered, blanketed cities.
Yes.
And in rural areas, because I lived in rural Vermont and there was one video store like in a 20 mile radius and that became a meeting place.
Yeah.
To the extent that they stuck a cafe into it.
Yeah.
And then it just totally disappeared.
Completely disappeared.
Almost overnight.
I don't know if it's still there.
I should go and check.
There used to be one in Santa Monica called Vidiots.
That was actually an incredible resource because all the movies were organized by director and by genre and it's a foreign film section and it was an extraordinary place to get lost in that world.
And then, yeah, seemingly overnight, Netflix killed the blockbuster star, right?
But to go back from this digression, this description of what may have been happening at that time, especially in that part of the world for these young girls and their families, it makes me think about what I often perceive as a kind of huge gap, a huge cultural gap, Around how perhaps many parents think about psychology in relation to everyday life.
You know, it's almost like there's normal people.
Like us.
And then there's people with psychological problems, like going to therapy is akin to having a serious psychiatric diagnosis.
You know, I think of my wife's parents and how her mom has gone to therapy and it's been really great for her, but how her ex-husband, whenever she's Being really emotional in a justifiable way will say, well, you need to go see your psychiatrist, right?
That there's this, there's this real, um, uh, insulting kind of stigma that's associated with, uh, with, you know, having emotions.
Yeah.
90% of the time it's a misogynistic accusation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it makes me think too of, you know, one of, one of the famous, uh, One of the famous lines from Pink Floyd's movie and album The Wall, you've been found guilty of having feelings, feelings of an almost human nature.
This will not do.
Call the schoolmaster.
He's going to say how you always were mentally unstable.
Yeah.
And it's like melancholy or even depression is automatically framed as this scary abnormal thing that we don't know what to do about.
As opposed to seeing emotions and even existential dread or normal identity crises that we go through at different stages of development or even trauma symptoms.
As actually being entirely commonplace and something that makes sense in the real world and can be addressed and worked through in ways that yes, actually can provide maturity and insight.
But perhaps not through some kind of radically intense hero's journey, right?
As we see in the film and as we'll see with Teal Swan's later formulations for her followers about what it means to deal with your psyche, right?
I don't in any way mean to minimize what these two girls may have been going through.
Well, what I am saying is that a good therapist probably really would have helped here, maybe after watching the film.
And I don't mean the Barbara Snow kind of therapist.
Yeah, when to be fair, the Bosworths do say that they went to many, many clinicians, but of course, there's always luck involved with that, right?
Yeah.
It's a roll of the dice.
Yeah.
So, okay, we have this report from Diana.
We both love this movie.
It's incredibly evocative.
We're going to be making a lot of connections here.
There's going to be a lot of digressions, all coming out of this one piece of evidence.
So how are we going to make sure we don't go all, what should we call it?
We don't start seeing a whole bunch of connections that are not really there because we're caught up in how it rhymes.
Because we like the sound of our voices.
I mean look, for me, I feel like this needed to be an attempt to fit the movie onto Teal Swan's life in some sort of direct correspondence.
We have some interesting information shared by her childhood best friend, who she now denies.
About what this film represented to them and how they identified with the main characters.
But there's plenty to talk about here.
And I think, you know, with regard to Teal and Diana, there's a kind of informed speculation that we're doing.
But beyond that, I think we're looking at a film from a particular time period that's also set in a different time period earlier, a couple of decades earlier, that has all sorts of rich cultural layers.
And hopefully, if a good chunk of our listeners have watched it recently, we can just see where this goes together, because I think there's a lot to reflect on.
Yeah, and just to reiterate for those who are wondering why we aren't just labeling Teal Swan a cult leader and calling it a day, a lot of that is just established and it's kind of boring at this point.
We know that she has a non-credible origin story of satanic ritual abuse.
We know that she's been giving out trashy psychological advice, mainly to vulnerable women, for years.
In unboundaried online forums, we know that a number of people have in her circle have died by suicide under conditions that are not fully explored.
We know there's an in real life inner circle of people who are all suspiciously carrying recovered memories now as well after having been with her for a number of years.
We also know that she's ambitious and that she makes a lot of money on a dodgy and paradoxical combination of sex appeal and moral panic.
And we know that she frames all of this in terms of spiritual awakening and insight.
We know that the juice behind this is really the lifeblood of conspirituality, that everything that she brings to the table is crucial for, you know, people's awakening, but also the awakening of the world.
But the point of this series is to explore why all of that is so appealing and what this culture is that made her possible.
Because, you know, I think that's where it's at.
Those are the questions that we're left with in the end.
And I just want to say that on a personal level, I think that these episodes are my act of rebellion against my own disciplinary blinders.
Years of coming to the end of a discussion about a group or a leader by quoting cult theory and just, you know.
having a beer. You know that kind of thing I'm just a little bit bored with, it's limiting,
it puts the subject matter in a kind of box. I don't think we can understand Teal Swan
if we believe that she's someone uniquely definable outside of the culture as a whole.
I don't think that we can put her into the cult box and really have a satisfying understanding.
So I would say that just Teal is a kind of kaleidoscope, a Rosetta Stone for the many
themes that spin out from the conspirituality wheel.
Yeah, that's well said.
I think that's a good summary of what this has been evolving into and a really good insight about what it represents to you.
I think that one thing we can say that came out of the deep end, this Hulu series on Teal, is that no matter how you interpret the deceptive, you know, allegedly deceptive editing and Teal's claims that Caspian Co.
manufactured a kind of Frankenstein narrative for their climax by patching together different
things.
Like even if she was right about all of that, it's really hard to not come away from watching
her interactions, her affect, her statements about herself and still see an unusually pronounced
narcissism and for sure.
So one of the reasons I think humans intuitively find that level of narcissism scary as I think
is also clearly visible just in the raw footage of how her inner circle deals with her when
she's upset or feels challenged.
Is that we can sense in someone like that a kind of ruthlessness, a self-serving quality in which empathy is potentially used in manipulative ways, that there's a palpably simmering rage when the power dynamic is challenged.
And that when amplified further, that narcissism has qualities that we might associate with sociopathy or what used to be called psychopathy.
These terms change over time.
And so the incongruity between outer circle idealization and then this inner circle experience that suggests abusive dynamics and an insistence on tightly controlled power, it's very familiar from other instances of cultish groups.
But I think that For me, one of the things that's happening with this series is we're following some hunches that perhaps I'll just wonder out loud about right now.
I think maybe because of her generation, so meaning her age, because she's a woman, Because her fame and fortune are discovered first through the wounded healer trauma pathway, and because her success is so driven by YouTube, so this is a digital phenomenon, because her version of a lineage is much more satanic panic and alien channeling than like Kashmiri Shaivism or Vajrayana Buddhism, right?
We see her as representing something really different culturally than this earlier generation of gurus who rode the east-west boomer gen-x counterculture spirituality wave like we did, right?
The backstory of psychological distress and then self-identifying with an Oscar-winning depiction of a sociopath in a film That it's very much about women in America during, as it turns out, the same period that the boomers who would maybe have gathered with Maharaji and the Houston Astronome would have been dropping acid and becoming convinced that Maharaji was God on Earth.
This is a different turn of that kaleidoscope.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
And also, you know, two things.
It feels like Teal encountering this movie when she's 15 allows her to be a little bit of an amateur historian.
And to find some very attractive themes that she is probably already chewing on, embedded in the past in a way that is probably natural for her to think about.
Okay, well, you know, how does this play out now?
How do these stresses, how does psychiatric coercion happen now?
How do I relate to this?
I think it's immediately, the film is immediately given to a kind of instant cultural updating for the really interested young viewer too.
And yeah, she would end up seeing it through her contemporary lens.
So, you know, let's just start with the opening because we're speaking about kind of nostalgia
and culture, aren't we?
♪ Time it was and what a time it was, it was ♪ ♪ A time of innocence, a time of confidences ♪
♪ Long ago we must be, I have a photograph preserved ♪ to grab
Or stolen something when you have the cash?
Have you ever confused a dream with life?
Or stolen something when you have the cash?
Have you ever been blue?
Or thought your train moving while sitting still?
♪♪♪ Maybe I was just crazy.
Maybe it was the 60s.
Or maybe I was just a girl.
Interrupted.
Yeah, so everything in the opening is pitch perfect.
Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel, maybe it was the 60s, maybe I was a girl interrupted.
The Simon & Garfunkel comes from 1968, that's the year setting of Kaysen's book.
So yeah, how does this hit in 1999?
They have to be watching this and knowing that they're watching their own parents, right?
They're watching their boomer forebears.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that, as I was listening to that, I was reminded of, because I was picturing the scene in my head, is, and it just comes to me now given your analysis of the Vermeer, or reporting on Suzanne's analysis of the Vermeer, is that when she says the name of the movie, Maybe I was crazy.
Maybe it was the 60s.
Maybe I was just a girl interrupted.
She looks, she breaks the fourth wall and looks right at us as she says it.
Oh, you're right!
With the wide eyes.
You're right.
It's the same wide eyes that are on the movie poster.
Right.
So they really dug into this idea of what the girl in the painting has to do with perhaps this whole story.
But I must say, I have such a soft spot for Simon & Garfunkel.
You know, my mother had the live in Central Park double album and we listened to it on quiet Sundays or rainy afternoons.
And if you're under 30, there used to be these things called records.
Hold on now, hold on now.
I think though, I think there's a lot of Zoomers who are getting into vinyl, aren't they?
It was a kind of artifact, something that you got to hold on to and look at and relate to while you were listening.
Hold on now, hold on now. I think there's a lot of Zoomers who are getting into vinyl, aren't they?
Don't they know more about that shit than we do now?
Well, I don't know, man.
I don't know.
The record collections that we had growing up that we got to dig into from our parents, it's a different experience.
I love digital music.
I'm not a Luddite.
But anyway, we would listen to this on quiet Sundays or rainy afternoons, and Bookends is such a beautiful, melancholic, poetic song.
To me, Paul Simon may be the greatest songwriter of all time, but we can debate that elsewhere.
That opening really sucks you right into the first-person sense of being young and just wondering, like, is what's going on inside me really just evidence that I'm crazy?
It's that somewhat banal observation, but I think it's insightful that we compare our insides to other people's outsides, that we have this uniquely first-person experience of our own in our world, and we often wonder, like, Is anyone else going through this?
I certainly had those kinds of troubled thoughts as a teenager.
And you know, when we think about this time period, you and I were discussing this earlier, you have people, and we think about the time in which the movie is released, you have Fiona Apple, who I think would have been right at home as a character in this film and has been very open about her troubled background, her trauma.
You have people like PJ Harvey and Courtney Love, who are expressing a really strong edge at this time as female icons.
You have Alanis Morissette, who is hugely popular, and if you think about her first huge hit single, It is such an amplification of what some people might describe as borderline rage, that really hurt rage that is searing and really preoccupied and wanting vengeance.
And I hope you think about me when she scratches her nails down your back, all that kind of stuff.
Oh my gosh, right.
Actually, no, that's inverted.
Anyway, there's a lot of vengeance going on in those lyrics.
There's scratching.
There's some scratching that happens that has some emotional significance.
There's growling.
There's a whole grunge era of women's music that just still makes my hair stand on end.
It's so incredibly powerful and beautiful.
Absolutely, and at the same time you have Sarah McLachlan, that's much more airy and emotional, and you have the Lilith Festival, which was at the time very heavily kind of praised for being this music festival that featured a lot of female artists.
Yeah.
I don't know, I mean, McLachlan could go pretty hard too.
Anyway, I actually followed up with Diane about their music landscape, and she said that they weren't actually music people, really, but they stuck to things like Enya.
Sail away, sail away.
That's right.
They listened to the Cranberry Singing Zombie, but they had a very low tolerance for loud music.
So I thought that was kind of interesting.
But that opening, it's a, what do you call it?
It's not a recapitulation, but it's a foreshadowing of the end.
It's actually the end of the film.
Which is a very novelistic thing to do, right?
You start at the end.
Right.
With Susanna cradling Lisa after the climax.
The whole thing cast in the glow of acoustic guitars.
And then it plunges right into Susanna's cause for being committed to the hospital, which is her suicide attempt.
And then it goes, there's all of this timeline bouncing actually in the first 20 minutes that's quite beautiful because it goes back and forth between her adjusting to her time at the hospital and the sort of precipitating incidents.
We have this very clear scene where she has her first meeting with a psychiatrist as she is being committed by her parents and the psychiatrist is coming out of retirement.
He says he doesn't really do this anymore.
He says he's a friend of the family's and she's just pressed in on all sides because
she has made the suicide attempt with aspirin and vodka.
And we get this immediate sense that the entire framework for the hospital is a kind of psychiatric
coercion.
She's not even told what's going to happen.
Her mother has already packed her bag and you can see her taking it out of the back of the car out the window of the psychiatrist's office and she transfers it to the cab without even saying goodbye.
Mm-hmm.
And when she sees her mother taking the suitcase out of the trunk, she says, what is my mother doing?
What is my mother doing?
And no reply, right?
We haven't sprung the surprise on you.
And then when the doctor, when the psychiatrist or whatever he is, walks her to the cab, It's like a perp walk.
I mean, he's got her by the upper, he's just holding that upper arm and he's guiding her to the cab.
Yeah, and mom is sitting in her sedan, kind of weeping at the steering wheel.
This is necessary, there's nothing to be done.
And then she gets into the cab and this scene is mirrored in the end as well because it's kind of like crossing the river Styx.
With this kind of, you know, drugged out hippie cabbie who's slightly older and who's playing Petula Clark's Downtown in the cab, which is a song that shows up a little bit later, or much later actually, after Susannah is playing it actually for Polly while she's in solitary, so we'll get to that.
But it almost feels as though the cabbie is the only real therapist in the film.
You know, he says, he says, oh, you know, everybody's everybody's sad.
Well, it's interesting because you talk about him as being sort of the guy who's going to take her across the river Styx.
And there is a sense that he knows where he's taking her and that he's taken other people there before, too, because he says, What did you do?
And she goes, what?
And he says, you look, I think he says, you seem normal or something.
You look normal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then she says, well, I'm sad.
And he goes, everybody's sad.
Right.
It calls back to what I was saying before.
And it's interesting because right before that, when she's, when she's with the doctor, he gets up and she, to do something maybe with the mother and She looks down at his book that's on the side table.
That he's left conspicuously out of patience, right?
Yeah, it's like his legitimacy.
And the title is something like The Inner Workings of the Mind.
And then she turns it over and his name is Dr. Crumble.
Which I think that's a very deliberate little easter egg in there that his name is Dr. Crumple.
And there's a moment also in their exchange before he starts to get heavy with her, right, where he's just sort of being the empathic, seemingly empathic listener, and he says, explain it to me.
No, go ahead, explain it to me.
And she looks at him and says, explain to a doctor that the laws of physics can be suspended.
Right.
That what goes up may not come down.
Explain that time can move backwards and forwards and you don't have any control over it.
And that's an interesting moment too, because I can see myself as a teenager, a troubled teenager watching a film like this and hearing her say that and reading it in terms of like the normie world.
With all of their rules, all of their social rules and all of their limited notions about how reality functions are never going to understand the places that I go inside.
And you're right!
The thing is that you're never not right.
Like, the teenager is actually a sage that way, right?
It's a kind of insight that never really gets old.
It's an insight that becomes probably a little bit more burnished.
more fuzzy over time, but that essential quality of my internal life is uncommunicable to you.
It's just an existential fact that never really goes away.
And so if we can be supported and related to as young people around that particular kind of,
almost archetypal perception, right, and felt sense, in terms of the metaphor that that represents,
because it's really about psychological complexity It's not actually about magical thinking.
It wears the clothing of magical thinking.
And so you see with someone like Teal that it remains a literal kind of construct.
Right.
And what Susanna actually needs is for the psychiatrist, or anybody in fact, to say, You're absolutely right.
Your internal world is completely mysterious to me and to you, and it's just going to be that way for a long time.
But she doesn't get any reflection from anybody, actually.
Yeah, except from the cabbie, except from the cabbie.
You know, it reminds me of travel.
I traveled through India for about three months with, with a very intense girlfriend when we were in our early twenties.
And I remember that.
Let me just pause there for a moment.
I mean, traveling through India is intense enough, but it was a, it was a, It was an intense relationship in your 20s?
Yeah.
That goes hard, man.
No, this was a young woman who was insulin dependent, but loved the feeling when her blood sugar got so low that she started to feel like she was tripping because she was convinced that it was evidence that her spiritual practice was paying off.
No!
It was a lot, it was a lot.
Oh no!
So were you, oh my God, so were you actually, Helping her health-wise, but also bringing her down to the material world and slowing her progress?
Trying to.
I mean, the climactic moment in that story is her actually going into a diabetic coma in a hotel room in a town where we were the only two Westerners.
Oh, man!
Yeah, and I mean, that's an intense story for another time, but the thing, the reason why I'm thinking of it right now is that as we were on our sort of spiritual quest for a few months, We would repeatedly say how the waiters in all of the restaurants we went to were the real spiritual teachers of our journey because they would just they would meet us with such empathy and such sort of
I don't know.
There was a grace about how they interacted with us.
And then, of course, with further hindsight, I'm able to look back at that and go, yeah, we were the spiritual tourists on whom they relied for some kind of good tip.
So they were like, I'm going to play the enlightened waiter to play on your expectations.
Yeah.
We get to, in this back-and-forth rhythm between her settling into the hospital and, you know, the precipitating events, there's all of these elisions between her, you know, talking to Susanna, talking to, for instance, the intake administrator at the hospital, and then that elides into her speaking to her high school counselor.
Ms.
Kaysen?
You have the distinction of being the only senior at Springbrook not going on to college.
May I ask what you plan to do?
I plan to write.
But what do you plan to do?
Look, I'm not going to burn my bra or drop acid or go march on Washington.
I just don't want to end up like my mother.
Oh, ouch.
No, they don't.
They have more choices than that.
No, they don't.
Oh, ouch.
No, they don't.
I love everything about that scene, even just like hearing it without the visual,
the voices of the kids playing outside, distant and unapproachable.
And here Susanna is, she's not a child anymore, but she's not going to go forward what you want to do.
I want to write, but that's not really something that you can do.
Also, what she's being told is that your internal life is not commodifiable, right?
You can't make money just by being you.
And that is also, I think, a kind of existential shock for any kind of sensitive person.
Oh yeah, I know this conversation well.
I'm sure you know it well, too, from being a young person.
I wanted to be a professional musician and I've had the conversation with so many adults as a teenager about, well, you know, you need something to fall back on.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think that I did have that conversation many times, and part of me actually wonders whether this life path digression that I took into six years of cult life that really kind of Made my educational path unpursuable after that because then I was broke and then, you know, I didn't have time, I didn't really, I had to get gig working.
I don't know, it's almost as if Those six years, if I'm really honest, those six years solved a kind of problem for me of not having, not building some kind of skill to fall back on because I think deep in my heart, I don't know if I actually want that.
I identify actually with Susanna sitting in that office and saying, I want to write and isn't that enough?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, we have all of these flashbacks.
The action, as I said, is bouncing back and forth between settling in and the precipitating events.
And then we meet her cohort, which functions, as I mentioned, as a kind of tableau of mid-century ungovernable archetypes.
Fantastic characters.
Before you get into describing these fantastic characters, I just want to say that I hadn't watched the film since it first came out.
And I watched it again over the course of the last week, almost twice altogether.
And as soon as I started watching it, I went, oh my God, I had no idea.
And I immediately thought of The Outsiders.
Do you know The Outsiders?
Not so well.
So The Outsiders is a film based on a book, a book by a female author who was very, very fascinated with young boys and young boys who did not have good parenting and lived in low-income neighborhoods and got involved in gangs and criminality and what the deeper sort of emotional needs were that they were trying to get met through.
Through those relationships and those activities.
Really good stuff.
I think three of her books were turned into films.
Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and maybe Tex.
Matt Dillon is in all of them.
The reason the Outsiders came to mind is because whoever was the casting director on that film hit a jackpot because it's this film from I believe the early 80s that has Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, like it has all of these unknown boys at that time who would go on to be the big stars of their generation.
And when I started watching this film, I went, wow, I had no idea that Elizabeth Moss was in this film.
I had no idea that Brittany Murphy was in this film.
I did not remember that Clea Duvall is in this film.
And then there's Angelina Jolie, and then there's Winona Ryder.
It's like, oh, this casting director also pulled together an amazing group of young women who would all go on to do, you know, extraordinary things.
Yeah, jackpot's the right word.
So okay, you've named Moss and she plays Polly Clark, who is disfigured from attempting to burn herself to death and has now regressed really into a kind of childlike state.
Which he maintains throughout the film but also provides this kind of like beneficent commentary on things as well.
Cynthia is schizophrenic.
Georgina is Susanna's roommate who has been diagnosed as a pathological liar and she's fixated on the L. Frank Baum novels, the Wizard of Oz novels, and this is really a great choice in terms of literary fandom because Baum is also writing on a symbolic or conspiratorial level.
He's writing about, you know, he's writing about American capitalism in the Oz series.
And so there's two things going on.
She's very, very attached to the childlike story, but then also I think there's a bit of a political Easter egg in there as well.
Then we have Daisy Randeau.
Now, who's the actor there?
Uh, that's Brittany Murphy.
Yeah.
So... That's Brittany Murphy who goes on to have a really lovely but short career and dies really tragically.
Oh.
In real life, yeah.
And actually dies tragically after getting involved with a much, much older man who many feel exploited and abused her, though we don't know the full story.
Okay, so there's ghosts here too, right?
I suppose if you watch any movie from more than 10 years ago, you're watching ghosts, right?
Yeah.
But yeah, Daisy's father pays for a private room at the hospital and discharges her on the weekends to abuse her.
She self-harms.
She has obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It's also implied that she's bulimic, that she's addicted to laxatives.
Eating disorders are the primary issue faced by Janet, who is also like super acerbic as a character, like incredibly funny.
Susanna, we know, has a kind of Catch-all diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and she's enthralled with the sociopath Lisa Rowe, who is rebellious but charismatic.
She's beautiful and alluring in a very sort of angular and, I don't know, volatile way.
She encourages Susanna to stop taking her medication and to resist therapy.
That's really important, of course, when we're thinking about Teal Swan.
And in their first dialogue, Lisa refers to the staff psychiatrist, Melvin, as their therapist.
You know, which is quite unfair, it seems.
There's no evidence that Dr. Melvin is anything but bored and depressed himself, either in the film or in the book, by the way.
Yeah, let me just interject here, too, to say that the cast then is rounded out with Jared Leto, who, you know, is sort of unknown at that time, too.
So another casting coup.
And in terms of my obsession with The Outsiders, And in a cast of old boys, you also have a young Diane Lane in The Outsiders.
Wow.
Amazing.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Lisa's framing and approach to the hospital is, I think, crucial when considering Teal's identification with Lisa, which is something that, of course, Diane has told us, but we're also going to, I think, massage and broaden a little bit because I think Teal can probably identify with many of these characters.
But her framing of the institution is important because, of course, Teal does a lot of work to discredit psychiatric care and medications.
And of course, to be fair, watching Girl Interrupted makes us realize that she has a really good point in a lot of cases.
Yeah, it's such a complex area.
I mean, if this film is set in the late 60s and that's Teal's knowledge base, well, absolutely right.
She has a really good point.
But I mean, probably even today, psychiatric hospitals are likely pretty grim and not a place anyone really wants to be.
I think though, you know, for Thiel, the contested area of alternative healing and being a guru, it's more the domain in this kind of inflection of therapy and trauma as opposed to like maybe more serious psychiatric diagnoses.
Although, you know, if Thiel really believed Sincerely, even one of her really outrageous claims about aliens or paranormal powers, it might indicate some sort of tendency towards psychosis or delusion.
But there's something else that I think you're gesturing toward here, Matthew, which maybe has to do with how women have been treated historically within psychiatry and how that still persists today.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, just to go back to your point on the greatness of contemporary institutions, you know, I have some experience with that.
I have a family member who I once had to help as they navigated institutions and it's really, it's burned into my memory in a bunch of ways.
First of all, like how strange and alienating and precarious and aseptic the ward felt as I had to go and deliver some personal effects.
The whole floor was cold, the person was shivering, they didn't have proper socks, they didn't The people that they were with, we're talking about often transient populations, they didn't know how they were going to be treated or whether the treatment was going to be helpful.
And of course, as the family member, you don't either.
There were also these very disorienting failures in basic dignity.
I remember bringing in the personal effects.
I was told I could bring them in, but they had to be checked, they had to be examined for prohibited items.
But there was no desk or table set up for that, and so the orderly actually asked me in front of everybody in the ward to empty, to just dump this bag of personal belongings onto the floor.
Holy shit.
So that he could poke through them to make sure there was nothing that was not allowed.
The whole feeling of the place was that this is some strange kind of limbo outside of the world and yet extremely rule-bound.
I couldn't imagine how, you know, perhaps you could feel safe for a number of hours at a time while you were asleep or something like that, but the overall feeling was something that I recognize captured in Kacen's book, which is, you know, what are we actually doing here?
Like, what is this and how long is this going to last?
Yeah, I mean, from that description and also from the book and the movie, I would say if you were not Feeling paranoid and disconnected from others before going in, you certainly would feel that way once you were there.
And if you were already feeling that way, it would probably be made worse by that kind of environment and experience and treatment and lack, as you said, lack of dignity, lack of interpersonal kind of congruency, lack of informed consent.
Yeah, which is why there's a number of rapport and relationship building sequences in this film that I think are really, really crucial because they show that Susanna comes to view her fellow patients as being allies in this netherworld.
Which is also something that I think, it's a sentiment that I think we can see in some of these online spaces as well.
Like, we are set apart, we found each other, we are the rejected, we have been disposed of by society, but we have each other.
And so there is a camaraderie that develops.
But to your point about the history of, I mean, the treatment of women in psychiatry, it's an enormous topic.
Just enormous topic.
I'm making my way at the moment through a really beautiful book by Lisa Apinionese.
It's called Mad, Bad and Sad Women and the Mind Doctors.
And she's done this enormous study about really the pathologization of gendered responses to hierarchies of power through history, and also how the treatment of psychiatric patients, but especially women, From way before Freud, is really a story of people being treated as vessels or bellwethers for various forms of cultural malaise.
And I just want to read this part from the intro.
So, Pignanese writes, in one of his pithy throwaway remarks, the philosopher Ian Hacking noted, quote, in every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.
Anthropologists have long charted the different expressions of madness and the forms cure may take in unfamiliar cultures.
Nor are modern cultures, however globalized, altogether homogeneous where disorder is in question.
A BBC program about Japan, where the population is aging, recently explored a prevalent and debilitating form of stress characterized by medics as Retired Husband Syndrome.
An illness that could turn a wife's repressed worry about a salaryman husband's imminent return to the home, where habits of obedience and servitude would have to be reinforced, into a round of skin rashes, ulcers, asthma, and high blood pressure.
As I was amassing material for this book, I realized that symptoms and diagnoses in any given period played into one another in the kind of collaborative work that all doctoring inevitably entails.
Often enough, extreme expressions of the culture's malaise, symptoms, and disorders mirrored the time's order, the worry's limits, border problems, and fears.
Anorexia, first named in the latter part of the 19th century, is usually an illness of plenty, not of famine, as depression is one of times of peace and prosperity, not of war.
It is perhaps no surprise that an age in which the sum of information available in any given minute is larger than it has ever been in history should find a condition in which attention is at a deficit.
This is not a simple matter of mind doctors spotting, shaping, naming, in a word diagnosing or even suggesting an illness, although all that happens too.
People, and it is people who become patients, are not utterly passive.
We are talking here of mental or psychic illness and mad or sane patients are as susceptible
to knowledge as doctors and often know how to hide from or use it.
So if we go to hacking statement that there are quite firm rules on how to behave.
When you are crazy in any given time.
And the suggestion is that those rules are dictated in part by the cultural zeitgeist.
I mean, what are we talking about?
What can the presentations of satanic ritual abuse and false memory syndrome tell us about how Teal Swan acts as a conduit for the culture of the 1980s and 1990s?
I mean, it's also fascinating and there's a lot of different angles on everything that
Ian Hacking was just saying as you were quoting, but in terms of the satanic panic and all
of this false memory syndrome stuff, I mean, I really, I perceive it through my own particular
preoccupations as actually a lack of valuing of the inner life, a cultural kind of illiteracy
around not only emotions, but also symbolism and metaphor, an inability to understand that
the most primordial kind of fears that we have that get outpictured as things like Satan
and demons, that they're part of a kind of very deep, It's a huge phenomenon that's present in all human beings that is profoundly symbolic.
It's about something, but it's not literally about Satan.
So to have this massive cultural moment in which there's this Kind of upwelling of all of this Christian panic is to me profoundly indicative of just a lack of psychological depth and mythopoetic depth.
And then you add to that, that the panic takes this additional turn, which is that even if you don't believe in Satan, you can come to believe that there are evil people out there who are doing real things to real children in the name of Satan.
And so that It becomes really terrifying.
To the extent that both SRA and false memory syndrome really depend upon the fragility of memory, it seems to me that they are also conditions of an ahistorical era.
In the sense that, you know, we go through the 70s and 80s and 90s and experience an explosion and proliferation of media, especially news media.
What is happening?
What has happened?
What terrible things are happening both in Vietnam or in our neighborhood?
Oh, and also, what happened during the Second World War?
What really happened at My Lai?
what really happened in Dresden, exactly.
And so in an age, I think Aponezi points at it with, it's not surprising that a condition
of the deficit of attention arises in an age in which there is too much to pay attention to.
It's not surprising to me that disorders involving the sort of angst of memory Yeah, and then there's also the piece of like, well, what has been hidden?
What are you not remembering?
things and forget things at the same time, like in very major ways.
Yeah, yeah, and then there's also the piece of like, well, what has been hidden?
What are you not remembering because you've been sort of hypnotized into forgetting?
So there are clues here that there's symbolic meaning going on in all of this as well.
And I want to just add, you know, from my perspective that I think all of this is very, very rich territory.
And at the same time, there are, you know, genetic, There are impacts that trauma have on how our brains develop at different stages and there are ways that we can track a lot of diagnoses to a more kind of material, at least reference point if not cause.
Well, you know, I think it's absolutely true that we're going to go to two episodes here with this because we're only a small part of the way through the movie, but let's actually get to the point where in one of these rapport building, team building scenes, The patients raid, in the middle of the night, the offices of the imperious Dr. Wick, who we're going to see in the next episode.
So they've gotten out of bed.
They didn't take their sleep medication.
They didn't go so far as to drug Nurse McWinnie this time, but they did get out and I think did they go bowling in this particular scene downstairs?
There's a fucking bowling alley in the basement of the... I don't even know how that happens or why that's there.
But they wind up breaking into the head psychiatrist's office and they grab their files so that they can read what's being written about them.
Lisa Roe.
Highs and lows increasingly severe.
Controlling relationships with patients.
No appreciable response to meds.
No remission observed.
That was before you ran away.
We are very rare and we are mostly men.
Lisa thinks she's hot shit because she's a sociopath.
I'm a sociopath.
No, you're a dyke.
Borderline personality disorder.
An instability of self-image, relationships, and mood.
Uncertainty about goals, impulses, and activities that are self-damaging, such as casual sex.
I like that.
Social contrariness and a generally pessimistic attitude are often observed.
Oh, that's me.
That's everybody.
I mean, what kind of sex isn't casual?
They mean promiscuous.
I'm not promiscuous.
It's so much going on there.
So there's that killer quote where where Lisa is.
Is quoting, it sounds like from memory, a definition for sociopaths, we are very rare and we are mostly men.
Which is a point of pride, and also just to underline what you were saying before here, right?
They're looking behind the curtain.
They're looking at what those who have power over them have categorized them as being.
Yeah, and sometimes it's resonant and sometimes it's not.
I mean, Kacen reads her description of borderline personality disorder and says, oh, that's me, because it sounds resonant, but it sounds resonant in the same way that a fucking cold reading sounds resonant, doesn't it?
It's your astrological sign.
Just like, just throwing shit at the wall, like just a, just a, just sort of a grab bag of stuff.
Here's Apognese on borderline personality disorder.
The category, neither quite mad nor altogether bad, is another diagnostic dump.
Until the precisions of recent DSMs, it designated an individual whom traditional therapies had found it all but impossible to treat, though they often asked for treatment or were assigned to it by social agencies.
According to the NIMH, 2% of American adults, most of them women, are borderlines, emotionally unstable, they may attempt to seduce, manipulate, attack the therapist, or simply leave the treatment.
They have a pattern of rapid emotional fluctuation as well as shifting aspirations, jobs, and relationships.
They account in America for some 20% of psychiatric hospitalizations, often because of suicide attempts or threats.
In the early days of the women's movement, the analytic characterization of borderlines was derided.
It was understood, in parallel with hysteria, as a controlling classification, a label to be applied to any woman who wouldn't conform, from Dora, to Marilyn Monroe, wildness, desire, extreme language,
excessive, impulsive, indeed rebellious behavior were simply not allowed into the feminine repertoire.
And so its expressions were categorized as mad, morally insane, historical,
hysterical and borderline.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's intense.
I think that's a good place to leave it.
And we will get to the rest of the movie, including we are finishing up in Dr. Wick's office.
I think the opening scene that we have to tackle next time is Dr. Wick's incredible dialogue with Susanna Kaysen, and so we'll open the next episode with that.
What do you say?
Alright, that's a really good place to transition.
