Mental Health Issues through One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

For this essay, I will examine the novel “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” which is written by Ken Kesey. This novel really intrigued my interest; I love reading fictional novels based on historical events that actually have happened; it teaches me new things while still allowing my imagination to fill in some blanks. Writing “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Kesey explored mental health issues through a fictional novel, allowing people to become educated on how mental illness was not always accepted within society. Mental illness includes “our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices.” As a society, we have just started to become more aware of mental health. We are reducing stigma and understanding that mental health can be treated, and there are different severities of mental health, and being institutionalized isn’t the option for most cases of mental illness. Kesey’s novel was set in the 1950s when American policy on management and education of the mentally ill was inhumane and being institutionalized and tortured was normal for any severity of any mental illness. Kesey focuses on themes such as conformity, individualism, and rebellion. Kesey wants us to focus on what we call normal and how that normal is forced on us by society, just like the hospital staff did to these patients.

Kesey chooses an interesting narration choice to give the readers a unique inside look at how the mentally ill were treated in institutions such as, where the novel takes place. Chief Bromden’s unique inside point of view depicts the patients, staff, and the mental institution in an insightful, logical, and detailed way. Kesey decided to tell the story this way to engage the readers and get the readers to think logically about Chief, his experiences, and those experiences resulting in how he thinks and perceives what is “the truth even if it didn’t happen.” Even though Chief has hallucinations, he makes sure to describe his experiences in such detail it paints a picture in the reader’s mind, leaving the reader always wanting to know what will happen next.

Throughout the novel Kesey the themes of conformity, individualism, and rebellion. He really tries to give the readers the inside scoop of the inhumane ways of mental institutions in the 1950s. Many patients in mental institutions were left traumatized, something that our society today has to seem to have forgotten about. This novel shines a light on what was really going on and how different we look at mental illness today. This novel is based on a mental institution and is about the mentally ill patients that inhabit it. Chief Bromden the narrator, a supposedly mute and deaf patient, tells the story from his perceptive. This whole story is based solely on the stories of a mentally ill patient, that is drugged daily, and is known to have crazy thoughts, which makes the novel more ironic. As a reader, you are left questioning whether Kesey chooses a reliable or unreliable narrator. Chief Bromden is a schizophrenic, who is certainly biased when it comes to telling the story. As a schizophrenic Bromden has obvious breaks from reality such as, believing that nurses can change the flow of time, machines that pump fog into the ward and describing Nurse Ratched as a monster hiding behind a mask. Chief Bromden is always drugged up observing the hospital staff in their “blinding white” uniform and shoes. Watching and learning about all the wrongdoings of the staff but never speaking up. McMurphy shows up with “flaming red hair and fleshy, bruised knuckles” which “stand in contrast to the ordered, sterile colorlessness of the hospital.” McMurphy walking into the hospital and undermining the authority of Nurse Ratched and the established system that was already created is what Kesey revolves the novel around. The idea that freedom and representation is something that is every humans’ rights and this idea intrigued the patients drawing them to the closer to rebellion.

The idea of freedom has become prevalent in the hospital, shortly after McMurphy’s arrival. But that didn’t stop Nurse Ratched and her staff from using inhumane methods to keep that idea of freedom under wraps. McMurphy notices how electroshock therapy and lobotomization is used within the hospital walls. These methods completely change a person emotionally and physiologically. Physical abuse causes physical damage such as Billy Bibbit, who had scars on his wrists and cigarette burns on his hands, but physiological torture will not heal like physical wounds. The violence of this institution is physiologically and physically damaging. These patients fear for their lives, they are petrified that if they do not do everything, they are told that they will be forced to go through some type of physical torture. These methods of “reform” will forever be a physiological scar for these patients.

The ending was the most surprising part of the whole novel for me. Chief Bromden killed McMurphy smothering him with a pillow. McMurphy “fought a long time against having” his life taken away. He continued “flailing and thrashing around” until Bromden was forced to “lie full length on top” of him to get the job done. This was something that was not foreshadowed at all, this particular part of the novel made me lose hope for the future of the rest of the hospital. The reason that this small rebellion began was now dead. Chief Bromden believed that he was doing what McMurphy would have wanted. He knew that McMurphy would not want to have a life obeying every hospital staff, without having to be able to control anything. He knew how passionate McMurphy was about individualism from the moment he walked through the door, and since that had been taken from him, he felt this was the best option. The body next to him no was no longer McMurphy, but a vegetable that looked like the man that once was full of passion and life. Looking from Chief’s point of view he could not stand to let his friend, the man that inspired him to speak and the man that provided him with gum, to live as a thoughtless vegetable forced to obey every single command given to him by the hospital staff. He was no longer considered human; he was no longer capable of human interaction.

This ending is devastating, it upsets both the characters in the story and readers reading the novel. The person that brought the hospital to life, the person that brought the fun back into these patients' lives after years of nothing but obeying every command and being abused. McMurphy saved these people not only from themselves but from the cruel people around them. He gave them hope and reason, he showed these patients that they have the right to be treated just like any other human. I had grown fond of McMurphy’s character, I was upset at Bromden’s character for killing his friend. Even though what Nurse Ratched did to McMurphy was inhumane, taking one’s life is not something that should be handled by anyone other than God. According to Kesey and other patients having a lobotomy was worse than any death. The patients feared receiving this procedure, which Nurse Ratched used as leverage.

I was hoping for a happy ending from Kesey. I think that maybe this was a lesson to us to show us that even people fighting for the helpless with good intentions will not always succeed. It is a dark lesson but it is true, the reason why mental institutions in the 1950s could get away with these inhumane treatments is that they always cleaned up their mess. No one came looking for these patients and no one came to check on them to see how they were being treated. No one would know when something like this happened. These patients are now forever stuck in fear and shame, forced to conform to this inhumane life that has become their reality.

This fictional novel has historical significance, while these events may not have happened, many similar events have. This novel is written in a time when mental illness was something that was not understood and mental patients were seen as less than human. Many of these patients were mistreated and abused: from the mental and emotional abuse from the staff to the actual physical abuse through electrical treatments, lobotomies, and actually prescribed medication that was meant to keep them in a state of hallucination. Many of these methods of “treatment” were thought to somehow “cure” the patients of their mental illness; which we know now, was absurd. Unfortunately, many patients were lost in unfortunate casualties like McMurphy due to unregulated treatments. Mental illness is something that needs to be taken more seriously and people need to have a safe place to go to be treated professionally. I think that Kesey’s novel did a great job shedding light on a subject that many people push to the side. It really lets you as a reader reflects on how society influences the way you act, and how conforming we are as humans.