The of Treatment of People with Mental Illnesses in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

The setting of a psychiatric ward may be intimidating to anybody. The feeling of being confined as if you were in a jail cell can terrify even the sanest of people alive. Doctors originally held people with mental health issues in the hospitals as a means to keep them off the street and away from normal people who were just trying to conduct their daily business. The treatment of those with mental illnesses has been a controversial subject for years due to the mistreatment of patients and not being able to fully understand what is wrong with them. The use of fear and forced labor are one way that patients of the mental ward are sometimes mistreated. The characters in our story are forced to do menial cleanly daily and were ordered around by the staff. Nurse Ratched kept certain patients around who were basically just zombies around as a way to place fear into them and keep control over them, sort of a reminder of what could happen if they get out of line.

The use of fear was prevalent throughout the story with the nurse and her black boys. If a patient got out of line, they were threatened with being sent to the Disturbed ward.They would also try and place fear into the patient as soon as he or she stepped foot on the ward. Whenever a new patient would arrive, one of the black boys would chase them around with a thermometer covered in Vaseline. They would take the person into the shower room and turn on the showers so that the only thing you could hear was the water hitting the sound of the tile. If parents felt that a childwas unruly during their teenage years, the often sought the opinion of a medical professional. This was the case of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Their daughter, Rose Mary, was often subject to mood changes and would not perform to her parent’s high standards. Joseph spoke with a doctor and they discussed a procedure that would also later be later performed on patients at mental health facilities. The procedure of a lobotomy was performed on Rose Mary Kennedy and ultimately made her incontinent. The surgery was muddledand it made her have the mental capacity of a two-year-old. The procedure, when performed on mental health patient was proven, when preformed successfully, to make the patient calmer, less aggressive, and more manageable. This procedure has long been controversial because the small amount of people that it helped with their condition couldn’t outweigh the far higher amount of people that it harmed, such as Rose Mary Kennedy.The procedure was performed on Randle PMcMurphy in our book after he almost strangled Nurse Ratched in an altercation after the suicide of Billy Babbitt.

A procedure that is used for the treatment of depression and agitation or aggression is the use of electricity. A small amount of electricity is passed through the brain which makes the body go into a seizure. The procedure of Electroconvulsive Therapy has been a thorn in the medical professionals’ side because it was often done by people who were not properly trained and administered too high of a voltage or because it was sometimes done without the use of anesthesia which leads to memory loss and sometimes leads to bones breaking. This sometimes does not seem to have much effect on patients and other times it works as a means of placing fear into them. The use ofECT was used for the patients in our book and although most seemed to be afraid of the procedure, McMurphy seemed to almost get a “charge” out of it even though he did show signs of being afraid of it. The abusive use of ECT was shown in the book with both the characters of Ruckly and Ellis. Both Ruckly and Ellis were sent for ECT, were given too strong of a dose and it turned them from Acutes into Chronics. They were kept on the ward as a reminder of what could happen if you buck the system and not obey the orders of the nurse and black boys.

Nurse Ratched stated that it is “A devicethat might be said to do the work of the sleeping pill, the electric chair and the torture rack. It's a clever little procedure, imple, quick, nearly painless it happensso fast, but no one ever wants another one. Ever." The usage of medication is also sometimes used for some medical disorders. Medication has been proven effective at the treatment of such disorders as ADHD, anxiety, and also PTSD. The medications have proven that they don’t necessarily cure the ailment but merely make it so that the patient has a better quality of life where the issues are more manageable. In our story, the “Big Nurse” would give the patients medication and not tell them what it was. The “Red Pills” were often give just before they went to bed and often made them very tired and put them in a fog. I believe these pills are some sort of barbiturate. Barbiturates are a type of sleeping pill that has a tranquilizer in it. The staff would use these pills to help keep control of the patients and make them almost like zombies. As stated in the online article by Jon Swaine, “The book's publication contributed to a backlash against the entire psychiatric treatment system in the US inthe 1960s. Huge, spirit-crushing state institutions – like the Oregon facility later depicted in the film – began reducing their excessive resident numbers and granting patients more rights.It also catalyzedthe development of more effective anti-psychotic drugs that allowed more patients to be treated at home and live more normal lives.”

The use of restraints and other means of confining a person to an area is also another type of abuse that is present in the mental health institutions. Although keeping a person locked up in a certain area is for their own good, there are times when a person can be limited to a certain area without access to the use of a bathroom. A patient may also be tied down onto his bed as a means of restraint. This is to keep the patient from getting out of bed or escaping. In cases of patient abuse, restraints can be tied too tight and could cut off circulation of blood or make it difficult for the patient to breath and move.

All of this is done for the safety of the patient and staff involved but has proved to be a controversial topic none the less. The issue with most of the patients is that they end up being like most people who go into the prison system. Whenever a patient is institutionalized, they are forced to keep to a daily schedule of meetings, chores, and therapy. As Rosie Claverton stated in her online article “Because any total institution equips people to survive in that environment and not to grow beyond it. This effect is also widely seen in prisons and the military. These patients have grown so used to the ward that they don’t know how to leave it.” This is proof that although a patient is sent into the mental ward to try and help them get better, they are subject to certain routines and treatments that are sometime more harmful in the end result than what they do good.