Inequality In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

a mad world

Madness, lobotomies, electro-shocks, misfits, normality; these words are the ones the people use when they talked about mental illness in the 19th Century. The 50’s and the 60’s were difficult times to live with a mental disorder, due to the fact that they were a stigma to the society and we all know how a stigma works: it consumes the people with fear. In the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey puts in the spotlight the mental institutions and the “great solutions” that the government and psychiatrists developed. And it makes you wonder: Were they mentally ill or they made them believe that? Throughout Ken Kesey 's novel, “One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest,” the use of manipulation is a recurring, the character that uses it the most if the Nurse Ratchet. She uses it to manipulate patients to keep an order in her ward; and also, because she 's a control maniac.
This shows you one of the most powerful weapons that the humans have: manipulation and fear. In the 19th Century many of the people who didn 't "fit" the standards of normality according to the society, were sent to an evaluation to determine if they were mentally ill. Then in the hospital Nurse Ratched used the patient 's insecurities to attack them, therefore they felt ashamed and depressed with themselves. In part II of the book, we discover that most of the acutes were in the institution as volunteers, McMurphy yells at them, trying to figure it out why are they still there? Which