Personal Narrative: Overbrook Asylum

Resisting the idea of being institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital, Jamison writes, “Mostly, however, I was concerned that if it became public knowledge that I had been hospitalized, my clinical work and

He went on to explain that the people in those institutions are very limited to the things they are able to do and the choices that they can make. Simple choices such as what to eat, what to wear, and what to do in your freetime are made for the mentally ill by the workers. The patients are forced to take medication against their will and are also limited to everyday things such as being outside. There is so much dehumanization that occurs that the mental hospital doesn't feel like a place where the patients are receiving help. Instead, the patients themselves refer to being at the mental hospital as “doing time” as they would in

A patient's first thought when they enter a mental ward is, this could not have been as bad as someone thought it would be. Only once they meet certain people in it is

My fingernails dug so deeply into my palms that red ribbons began to flow from the gashes. “What the – Jay, let’s scram!” Footsteps thundered upon the floorboard as the intruders made their escape. I doubled over, freeing a heavy breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

When one thinks of an asylum their minds go directly to insane, illness, and crazy; or at least that was what people of the 1950s transitioning into the 1960s. Instead, they contributed to the beat down of the mentally ill; abuse of the people who tried to get help when they thought they were sick. In Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the mistreatment of patients in the asylum wing in a hospital is exhibited showing the cruelty of the workers or the stereotypical thought of someone who belongs in such an institution (when they do not even belong there). The main character Chief Bromden is a patient in the ward who pretends to be deaf in order to hear all information floating around in conversations. He is the narrator of the novel

This causes someone to grow lonely and forces the mind to occupy itself. As demonstrated in Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the patients are taken out of their normal lives to be put in ward. Narrator Bromden expresses that “some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over” (Kesey 12). He illustrates that being surrounded by other insane people could drive one a to higher extent of instability than originally admitted with. Correspondingly, Faulkner exemplifies the mental instability through separation in his short story “A Rose For Emily”.

In the drama film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest, Patrick McMurphy was moved from a prison farm to a mental institution to get evaluated for his erratic behavior. Upon being transported to the institution, all his assumptions about his new home were completely wrong. The head nurse, Nurse Ratched, has the whole hospital under her control with little to no freedom for the patients. All the inmates at the institution go through rigorous training to become obedient to Nurse Ratched and her strict schedule and rules. The institution was a very controlled environment with the patients having no control over their own life’s while there.

Published in 1962, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of Patrick McMurphy, a newly-admitted patient at a psychiatric hospital where individuals with various mental conditions are treated. Run primarily by Nurse Ratched, a demeaning autocrat who exhibits complete control over others, the patients are subjected to various forms of treatments and therapy with the intent of rehabilitation (Kesey 5). Most forms of treatment depicted in Kesey’s novel, such as group therapy, are an accurate representation of what typical psychiatric patients may encounter while under care at a mental facility. Yet others, particularly electroshock therapy and lobotomies, were quite controversial at the time of the novel’s publication. Such treatments were questioned for their effectiveness at improving patients’ condition – and while these procedures were still occasionally performed at the time, they often did not benefit the treated individual.

Screams and cries of insanity can still be heard echoing down the halls of Eastern State as men and women were being hooded in order to leave their cells. The faint cries of children can be heard as they were roaming around half clothed in Pennhurst. The cells in Eastern State were surprisingly accommodating considering the circumstances, but they were not someplace a person would call “home”. Life in either of these facilities was nowhere near enjoyable. If someone was not crazy when admitted they soon would become so.

In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey provides a storyline about personal experiences he saw occur in a mental asylum. Ken Kesey worked as a staff member in an insane asylum in Oregon. When he wrote the book, he was providing personal memories about the patients and other workers into a story. The entire novel is about patients that are checked into a mental asylum, and their unwillingness to act against the nurse. Throughout the novel, there is a theme of “manipulation” implied.

Throughout human history, humans have been known to execute gruesome acts. Whether these acts are small and insignificant or massive and change history, humans are capable of performing horrific plots against one another. To make matters worse, most of the people who commit these terrible crimes are people who are entirely in a clear state of mind. Nevertheless, there are some cases in which the line between sanity and mental instability blurs. For example, there is an ongoing debate regarding the mental health of the main character in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily.”

The change in terminology symbolizes the idea that mental health does not imply that the individual is a lunatic. Rather, the term “hospital” shows a transition and acceptance of mental illness as a health problem. Individuals struggle with a variety of problems and the goal of the facility is not to confine or isolate these problems, but to help those in need of medical

Nellie Bly told us that the mental health patient were abused and treated unfairly. Nellie Bly, a famous muckraker, exposed the real process in an insane asylum by pretending she was ill and went to the hospital. The staff in the hospital abused their patients in various harmful ways. In Nellie’s story, she interviewed a patent who said that she was getting her hair ripped out and put in ice cold baths until she froze. The food there was so bad people would rather starve themselves, while the staff got great food.

In Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, focuses on the destruction of the patient’s way of life caused by Nurse Ratched emitting fog to continue running a perfect combine machine, or system, throughout the ward. Nurse Ratched has continued to run a perfect system on the ward, and now that McMurphy is determined to rebel against her, she makes a fog appear to stop rebellious actions from happening. After McMurphy failed to switch the television to the time when the World Series game is on, Nurse Ratched “[switched] the fog machine on” and has began rolling in quickly to where the patients are “lost in it” to feel “safe again” (101). In this particular spot, Kesey provides an image of how the fog affects the patients. The fog prevents

Mental Asylum Day 20 A hear the metal door open and close with a bang. A trembling nurse walks into the room with a barely balancing a glass of water and handful of pills on a tray. The clattering of the glass bounces off the walls. My heart races and voices play in my head. What’s up?