what was deanie's mental illness?

To me, this is a VERY interesting movie for a number of reasons:

#1 I'm a PhD clinical psychologist who worked in the Kansas MH system (Topeka) for a little over 20 years beginning in 1962 -- my first 10 on a team serving a couple wards @ Topeka State Hospital. (TSH @ that time was rated one of the best MH state hospitals in the country). The last 2 of those years, when we were short of psychiatrists, I was the "treatment director" of/on a 60 bed TSH ward. And during those years, because it was so highly valued, I went through 5 1/2 years of psychoanalysis at nearby and VERY influential TMF (The Menninger Foundation) also in Topeka. I got excellent supervision of my psychotherapy &, after gaining much experience, I was also employed by TMF as therapy supervisor to some of their psychiatric residents.

For years 12 thru 16 of those 20 years I was the "chief psychologist" of our Kansas MH system (4 MH hospitals, 3 DD institutions, 3 adolescent residential facilities, 32 Community MH centers), overseeing and evaluating their clinical practices/adequacy and implementing changes. Then I spent 20 more years in private practice. And my last 4 yrs. as Clinical Director of a Community MHC.

#2 - Regarding diagnoses -- doctors differ in their biases toward this or that. When you're the doctor deciding on most effective treatment, you rely on those biases. For some, that would be meds -- for some others, Activity Therapy and psychotherapy. If you're inclined to see schizophrenic or Bi-polar symptoms, meds are certainly warranted. IMO, neither of those were warranted by Deanie's symptoms here. I'd give her the diagnosis of "depressive reaction" plus "adjustment reaction of adolescense." But those are much more modern diagnoses.

Remember, this movie is NOT a documentary but a fictionalized version of how life was supposedly lived in 1928-30. I suspect that at Mennigers' (the Menninger Sanitarium was founded in 1925 and took in-patients), it would be seen as a depression caused by conflict between societal & family standards on the one hand and biological urges on the other. BUT there was NO clear, universal standard for diagnoses until the advent of the "Diagnostic & Statistical Manual" of American psychiatry which was first published in 1952. So Deanie could have been diagnosed whatever her doctors decided. But 2 1/2 years of hospitalization for her symptoms is very L---O---N---G (IMO). In the 1960s, at TSH and TMF, I think 5-6 months might have been typical with possibly 11-14 months in exceptional cases with other contributing causes.

#3 In 1928 (@ the time of this action), MH hospital treatment in the USA was abominable. There was NOTHING in Wichita, KS, even REMOTELY resembling the treatment Deanie got. Instead, it was extremely similar to the good treatment, BUT VERY RARE FOR THAT TIME, that TMF (The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, KS) provided. But Inge, apparently thinking a Topeka location wouldn't make sense for residents of Independence, KS? (150 miles from Topeka), switched "TMF's later type of treatment" to a fictional facility in much closer Wichita. (TSH, the state MH hospital to which Deanie could've alternatively gone) was TERRIBLE at that time, more like prisons from which one is rarely released, until its reformation in the 1950s.) [TMF was largely responsible for that reformation; it was following that and with further huge help from TMF that TSH became--for a time--such an outstanding model of a state mental hospital.]

The type of relationship shown between Deanie and her doctor would have been similar to that between 1960s TMF Drs. and patients AND the occupational therapy Deanie had (art therapy, etc.) also would have been similar to mid-century TMF (as well as at TSH where we had many TMF supervisors of our treatment choices & probabilities). E.g., the type of "art therapy" featured in this film "...as a profession began in the mid-20th century" -- Wikipedia
(So Inge took many liberties with reality.)

#4 This film certainly captures the general moral code of the 1920s-->1940s, i.e., that "nice girls don't do 'IT'." According to a compendium of changing behaviors covering the 1900s ("The First Measured Century") slightly less than 19% of 19 year old unmarried white girls were sexually experienced at the time of marriage in 1928 while, by 1991, it was 74%. This curve accelerated so greatly from 1970 on that it well could have been in the 90% range for sexually experienced unmarried 19 yr. old white girls by 1990 or 1999. I grew up in rural Vermont, graduating from HS in 1945 in a class of 91. One girl in our class, "J---", was known as a "slut" because she didn't hide sufficiently that she'd had sexual relationships with 2 or 3 boys.

While the moral principles in this movie were true for that time, most of us found ways around them. I suspect more than a few girls who married their HS boy-friends had intercourse with them before their marriage ceremony. In Vermont, there was a saying that the gestation time for one's first child is 6 months but that for all later children it's 9 months. With several girls that I seriously "went with" (successively over 4 years) we found ways "around" the prevailing code -- in the back seats of cars, bras undone + easy access to below-both-waists, occasionally in bed near nude, using fingers and hands to accomplish with each other that which we'd prefer & dreamed of doing otherwise. And I think that this kind of "work-around" was typically true for most adolescents for many years previously (including this film's 1928 setting) as well as later. It was certainly true for a 19 yr. old girl I went with (1947) in Wash., D.C., plus the Stephens College girls I went with in '49-'51 when I went to U of MO in Columbia, MO. (The same statistical source book shows that, in those years, slightly less than 30% of 19 yr. old unmarried white women had sexual experience in contrast to the maybe 90+% by the year 2000.)

But, by about 1952 (in my experience), ways of avoiding pregnancies had advanced enough and were broadly enough accessible that most serious (or intense) relationships easily advanced beyond those "DON'T do IT!" restrictions of those preceding decades

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I enjoyed this film, thinking it captured many elements of a previous era although it certainly (IMO) over-exaggerated certain aspects. I've heard that Inge was gay and, if so, possibly that limited his reality perception of adolescent sexual experiences? Nevertheless, a very enjoyable film.

Deanie didn't went crazy because of Bud, her mother is reason why she went crazy.