Songfacts®:

• This song is about a girl who is put into a mental institution, likely against her will. It outlines corrupt medical professionals encouraging sickness so they can nurse them back to health and turn them into something fake, "Another Clone." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Sarah - Tavistock, Canada
• In a 1991 interview with radio station KLOL in Houston, Eddie Vedder said: "The song 'Why Go' was written about a specific girl in Chicago... I think her mom caught her smoking pot or something. She was about 13 years old and she was just fine. I think her mom thought she had some troubles when I think it was really maybe the parents that were having troubles and the next thing you know, this young girl was in a hospital. They kept her there for quite a long time. She was so strong that she refused to accept many of the accusations of her doing terrible things when she wasn't really doing anything and the next thing you know, she'd been hospitalized for like two years. The fact is that this is going on all over the place and this insurance thing that goes on with hospitals and insurance and these kind of counseling... prisons that they set up and it's really something that I think is really addressed subliminally in the song, but it has to be addressed on a bigger level. It happens everywhere and I just hope that someday we're able to change the fact that it is happening."
• In the liner notes to Ten, Vedder dedicated the song to a girl named Heather. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Martin - Rostock, Germany, for above 2
• In 1991, Eddie Vedder told the Canadian journalist Karen Bliss: "When you're inside and you have no control and when you're the 14-year-old version of Frances Farmer, you have reasons to be angry. You have reasons to be angry when your parents, who are very sheltered themselves, make decisions as to what you should experience in your life and what's normal and what's not. And then you've got institutions on the other side, who are taking large money amounts of money through insurance companies by diagnosing their children unfit."
  
  "It's happening a lot in American suburbs," he added. "People who don't really pay a lot of attention to their kids and don't really know how to deal with them, they just put their kids in hospitals."