Analysis Of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962, during this time mental institutions did not have very strict regulations or rules. In fact, many of the people who were in charge dictated the kind of treatment the patients received, even if the treatment was unnecessarily harsh, or it could hard the patient. Kesey wrote this story based on his experiences working in the psychiatric ward of a Veterans' Administration hospital. He does a masterful job exemplifying this unfairness for mentally ill patients in his novel. Randle McMurphy, the main character, believes that a mental hospital would be a much easier sentence, but soon discovers the severe mistreatment of those patients. It is impossible to reverse the diagnosis of a mental …show more content…
Things are different now than they were when Kesey wrote the book, but that could be seen as both a good and a bad thing. “The novel is in a sense a product of its time, the anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic sixties, celebrating the rebellion of an individual against the system. In particular, it reflects contemporary dissatisfaction with established psychiatric practices and institutions--lobotomy and electroconvulsive therapy, institutionalization and overreliance on drugs--and it points the finger at society” (Semino). While today we don’t have the abusive hospitals it does seem as though we are diagnosing more and more people with some form of mental illness. Now it isn’t as severe an issue as it was then however, if you were diagnosed then, it was life crippling; now it is treatable. “To presume that a person is “mentally ill” they say, attributes the condition to a “sickness” that must be identified and cured. But difficulty in the person’s environment, the person’s current interpretations of events, or the person’s bad habits and poor social skills may also be factors.”(Myers 653). When evaluating a person for a suspected mental illness you have to take into consideration the biopsychosocial effects on their life. Which was something often ignored in the 20th century when treating and diagnosing patients. Sometimes all …show more content…
They were used to rid the public of the black sheep that no one wanted to deal with, the only difference between a mental hospital and a prison is that the people in the hospital didn’t commit any crimes. “They are in the hospital because they are unable to accept their roles as rabbits. Nurse Ratched is one of the wolves, and she is there to train them to accept their rabbit roles. She can make a patient shrink with shame and fear while acting like a concerned angel of mercy”(Kesey 101) Once a patient was in the hospital, they lost all control of their life. They were told what to do when to do it and how it should be done, if you didn’t do it the way they wanted you would be punished, sometimes severely. They weren’t allowed to question anything, that would be cause for punishment, they weren’t allowed to ask for information; everything that surrounded them was done without their consent or

Show More