Danielle Jago - The Portrayal of Mental Institutions in Go Ask Alice

Go Ask Alice is basically a diary version of a DARE ad, but I still like it all the same. Essentially, the book is a “true” diary about a young girl’s drug addiction in the late 60’s-early 70’s. I have read the book a couple of times now, and each time I still tend to see it as a little unrealistic and contrived (but that is probably due to the fact that it is not actually a real diary and was written by an adult woman). I think the diary being marketed as a true anonymously-written diary is interesting, because it really played on the audience for quite some time and created controversy. I actually bought this book and read it for the first time about three or four years ago for that reason. This book is on the banned book list in many places still, so I just had to read it.

            The specific aspect of the text I am going to focus on is the portrayal of mental illness and mental institutions. Near the end of the diary when Alice is admitted to a mental facility, she discusses the conditions as being poor, and she does not enjoy being in the company of the other patients of which she calls “idiots and lunatics” (147). She has this stigma attached to mental patients that degrades them and dehumanizes them and because of this stigma, she feels the need to distance herself from them. After she arrives there and begins to acquaint herself with the other patients, her prejudices reveal themselves when she describes the others as “pretty normal” as if people in mental facilities have a specific appearance (150).

            Additionally, there is what I can only think of as this subtle critique of mental institutions thrown into one of the diary entries. In her July 24^th entry, she writes a short sentence about how the hospital is run saying “Anything in the world could happen in here and no one would ever know” (150). The way I interpret this is that she is saying the mental hospital and the patients in it are largely ignored and pushed away from society, that no one seems to care about negligence or abuse or anything that goes on behind those walls, because the people outside of the facility have the same attitude toward the patients that Alice had.

            Later in her stay at the hospital, Alice describes this encounter with an older patient who “made some gestures” at her and Babbie (154). Babbie tells Alice they “could report her to the attendant but that it was better to just ignore her”. The reaction Babbie has to this woman could be because she has resigned herself to it and just does not want to fight it, or perhaps because the attendants would not do much of anything about it. Based upon Alice’s previous entries, I interpret this to mean that the attendant being told would not make any difference. They would still be harassed either way. Although this issue occupies a fairly small amount of time in the book in comparison to the other sections, it seems important to note especially considering how mental hospital patients have been so poorly treated historically.