Psychological Issues In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

However, everything changes when a new patient McMurphy is admitted. He, unlike the other patients, stands up to the Big Nurse. This creates a power struggle as they pull and push against each other. McMurphy illuminates the corruption of the ward and bands the men together to try and fight against this. The men of the ward are highly hesitant to fighting back, though, as they have been

McMurphy is the joker needed to save the men from paralyzing angst and lack of self-confidence. He accomplishes this by exposing the men to new experiences and stirring conflict with the nurses and guards. The antagonist of the film is Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) who is the chief caretaker of the patients. Her character is the antithesis of McMurphy as she is cold and follows the rules absolutely. At every instance McMurphy tries to free the patients of routine Nurse Ratched is there to corral the men back to mundanity.

The story is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a patient who learns from McMurphy and fights for his freedom. In Ken Kesey’s comic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, gender is a definer of one's power in the hospital, and this leads to Nurse Ratched hiding her femininity, the patients’ attempts to boost their own masculinity, and both sides trying to expose the other. Kesey uses these examples to explain that men cannot handle a female leader. Nurse Ratched, a female who is head of the ward, attempts to hide her femininity so the men respect her power. At the beginning of the novel, Bromden is describing the Nurse’s appearance.

As a result, Nurse Ratched feels threatened by McMurphy’s ability to stay happy in the ward. She decides to discipline him so he does not gain any power. She demonstrates these totalitarian powers when she orders a Lobotomy for McMurphy towards the end of the novel. This procedure will change his life for the worse, and the Nurse is satisfied with that because he will no longer disturb her ward. She is a heartless individual, with the ability to dismantle someone’s life for her own benefit.

The struggle between conformers and non conformers creates a schism in society. In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey asserts the overarching importance of individuality through the use of a conflict between the patients and the nurse as a microcosm of society. In the novel, the delusions of the narrator create a surreal world that reveals a strong message on the nature of conformity. Chief Bromden is a quiet patient that pretends to be deaf and mute. His transition to being a narrator is an important metamorphosis from his state of silence.

This could be taken on one level as Chief just hallucinating so bad he can’t get to bed, or, it could have a deeper, more meaningful allusion. Chief, being manipulated and debilitated by the fog, could be taken as him being weakened and beatdown by the harsh conformity enforced by the ward’s head nurse. But Chief states that none of the other patients complain about the fog, and that McMurphey can’t understand why the others don’t want to act out, or even laugh: “That’s why McMurphey can’t understand, [the patients] wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at”(Kesey 114). This states how McMurphey is trying to help the others out of the dehumanizing pit of rules and regulations put in place by the Big Nurse, and how the other patients have given into her rule.

The nurse is torn, but fearing of reprisal if orders are disobeyed, so the nurse is appalled at the over-riding a patient’s wish by force feeding him agains his wish. According to the case scenario, this is an ethical dilemmas because there is a choice between two equally appealing mutually exclusive choices that is shown as the nurse’s awe while against the prisoner’s wish among of the fear of reprisal if disobeying orders. The RN is working in military, so obeying orders is the most important rules in where the nurse practices. Therefore, the nurse notes that a moral distress arise while following the healthcare members’s decisions which are considered as

Beatrice is the main character, in the book Insurgent Series by Veronica Roth, Beatrice was trying to figure out how she was going to confess what she has done. Beatrice is Divergent, she has different traits and emotions compared to other people in the society. She was in Candor, a courtroom where she can let her anger out and no one can judge her for what she has done, especially from the ones she loves. When the attention was pointed to her, she was scared to tell the full story about what was bothering her. Beatrice thought to herself, “Safe places, where confessing that I shot one of my best friends would be easy, where I would not be afraid of the way that Tobias will look at me when he finds out what I did.” This quote shows that people shouldn’t hold secrets in, but to let it out even how bad the secret is.

Once medicine could not avoid the idea of solidarity, which sprang from recognition of physicians’ and patients’ limits. There has been a shift from the ethics of solidarity in facing troubles to an ethic of escape and fear, escape from relationship and fear of losing the mask that everybody creates when faces someone’s pain, withholding therapy in a sick baby is an easy shortcut: maybe too easy to be effective. The feeling of anguish experienced by doctors withholding life support ("Anguish invades us and leaves its mark. We baptise him and then we kill him"; "On days of withholding care I don’t feel good: they are heavy, they are not like other days"8) arises from this point. But one cannot always escape from the unknown, i.e., what he cannot manage: "Modern western medicine is ‘scientific’, in the sense that it presumes to control and dominate things.

Consider that when A stabbed B he did so under a delusion that he was in fact fighting with a monster of fictional sorts, and that this said delusion was caused by a mental disorder. Though A’s act was voluntary, through no fault of his own he did not understand the reality what he was doing. It would therefore be very harsh to find A culpable for B’s death. So A has proven himself to be a danger to others and will need expert treatment before being allowed to return to society. The law deals with these situations by treating insane offenders as patients who bear no criminal responsibility for their actions, but who must go under medical care if medical experts think it is necessary.