Either conform and be released, or sustain your integrity and be stored in the ward. During his time working at the Menlo Recreation area Veteran's Hospital, this is actually the harsh reality that Ken Kesey discovered. Through never-ending observations and brief discussions with patients in the mental ward, he also started out to wonder, were these people really so different that they would have to be treated in a particular manner? Or, were they only different in the actual fact that society didn't feel like dealing with them, and for that reason took the simple way to avoid it by putting them in an institute and forgetting about them? (Wilson 288). These thoughts served as one of the many motivations for writing one his best items, One Flew On the Cuckoo's Nest. Taking place in the 1950's, this novel, when shared in 1962, offered as an inspiration to numerous, and is constantly on the have people questioning power, and more importantly, questioning insanity to this very day.
Ken Kesey implies that the collection which is attracted between sanity (health) and insanity (health problems) is based entirely on person perception, and therefore it is difficult to determine exactly where that lines should be drawn. Brains may be transformed through ingestion of approved medication, or be substance-free and shaped solely by interpersonal norms and principles, however in all cases the truth is been shown to be an entirely subjective experience. The apparently sane reader will take note in the beginning they are reading the narration of somebody who is paranoid and delusional, but sooner or later during the history this conscious recognition disappears and the difference is no more questioned. This no doubt mirrors Ken Kesey's own discussion with those termed "mentally ill. " By the finish of the storyline the reader may find that the majority of their preconceived ideas in what constitutes health or health issues have been shattered. The mad person here's more insightful than the caregiver. In fact, it is the forms of remedy which are considered curative that often keep the person locked in their condition with little if any hope of recovery. Health and health issues suddenly become gray areas rather than dark or white certainties.
The novel is defined in a mental health organization and is narrated by Chief Bromden who may have been institutionalised for many years. He is striking in stature and in looks, being over six and a half feet tall and a half-Columbian Indian. From a psychiatric point of view his illness is undoubtedly real. He perceives society as a huge, mechanised, controlling device called "The Combine". In his notion a healthcare facility is anywhere that those who do not conform are delivered to be set and Nurse Ratched is the Combine's agent. She can control time by means of a mechanical device in the nurse's place. The Chief exists most of the time inside a fog. This fog seems to have two purposes. It could be induced by the staff when they would like to cover something from the patients, or it can be a source of psychological comfort to the Chief when he feels uncomfortable using what is certainly going on around him. THE PRINCIPLE pretends to be deaf and dumb and does not talk to others on the ward at all. He discloses his known reasons for doing this:
I lay during intercourse. . . and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not enabling on I observed that which was said, and I pondered easily could ever react another way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that began acting deaf; it was individuals who first started behaving like I used to be too dumb to listen to or see or say some thing. (Kesey 179)
Chief Bromden's decline into what modern culture would explain as illness has at its basis the negative attitudes of society towards him. He is becoming what folks have wrongly identified him to be.
Those in charge of the Chief's health care have no idea of these facts. No look at has been made on their part to link happenings in his early life with the symptoms he is now experiencing. They can not see at night text book display of schizophrenia. Kesey is revealing to us that mental disorder isn't strictly a sickness at all. It really is just a form of individual expression which makes nearly all society feel uneasy. Therefore the best way of coping with it is to eliminate that each. People such as Main Bromden would be locked up in asylums for quite some time with no attempts at finding causative factors for his or her illness until psychiatry started to undergo paradigm shifts in this respect in the 1980's. By then the consequences of decades of institutionalisation recommended some got no anticipation of ever before rejoining society. There is a premonitory quality in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest considering that it was written some 20 years before psychiatry woke up to their mistakes and started out their programmes of treatment.
We are unveiled to sanity in the form of Randle P McMurphy, the protagonist of the story. Just moved from a jail work farm to be someone who "fights too much and fucks too much" (Kesey 11), he has been given the label psychopath. It really is clear right from the start that McMurphy is not experiencing mental illness in the way that the other patients are. He laughs readily and refuses to be controlled by Nurse Ratched. Chief Bromden "realize[s] all of a sudden it's the first giggle [he's] heard in years". McMurpy's have a good laugh is "free and loud" (Kesey 11). It really is McMurphy, not the hospital, who provides the therapeutic environment in which recovery can begin.
The Combine's answer to mental health issues is to lock people up, tranquilise them, use group therapy in which the patients attack each other in order to gain rewards, and in the cases of problem patients who won't conform to the guidelines, the utilization of Electric Surprise Remedy and lobotomy is commonplace. As the individual Sefelt explains "Just what a life give some people pills to avoid a fit, give the rest shock to start out one" (Kesey 132). In stark compare McMurphy offers his own form of treatment. Instead of locking people up he feels they should be set free. Instead of tranquilisers he favours recreational drugs such as alcohol and marijuana that can be taken through choice rather than enforced and which will enhance perception alternatively than deaden it. His form of group remedy involves a sportfishing trip where in fact the men figure out how to co-operate with the other person for the purposes of group tranquility. He has no alternative to EST as a treatment but after receiving it himself he becomes eerily quiet. His way of conquering the machine is to deliberately use the effect which they desire to his own benefit. For lobotomy, that defeats him in the end. The system has its most effective tool - they remove personality and with it the rebellion disappears.
The varieties of therapy found in a healthcare facility are completely ineffective in achieving anything other than a sterile, automatic and highly managed environment. The antagonist Nurse Ratched rules with dread. She damages the patients' self-esteem. As Tony Tanner says, "Within a crude way she embodies the concepts of Behaviourism, thinking that people can a must be tweaked to communal norms. . . [She] has reduced the men to puppets, mechanically obeying her rules" (Tanner 373). Nurse Ratched's goal is to remove any traces of the individual psyche and she actually is typically successful before McMurphy happens. Key Bromden's delusions of the mechanistic workings of the hospital may be considered a result of his insanity, but gleam metaphorical quality to how he recognizes things.
McMurphy supplies the only hope of defeating Nurse Ratched and therefore defeating the Combine. McMurphy's remedy is basically successful. He demonstrates to the men to be more outward looking. He stimulates their self-esteem. He recognises that they have all been dominated in a variety of ways by ladies in their lives and realises that this lies in the centre with their problems. To McMurphy these men aren't ill. They are simply in need of a means of expressing their sexuality. He has particular success in the case of the stuttering, infantile Billy Bibbit. He arranges for him to have sexual intercourse with Chocolate Starr. The therapy works well. Billy is a far more relaxed and happy specific but Nurse Ratched soon benefits back again her domination. By threatening to share with his mom, she reduces Billy to the unconfident wreck he was previously. Unable to cope with the prospect of his mother being told information on his sex life he commits suicide. This leads right to McMurphy's downfall. He brutally disorders Nurse Ratched and viciously attempts to strangle her. Finally she's the excuse she has been looking for. She actually is able to have McMurphy lobotomised.
Mental disease and mental health are actually defined and cured in various ways than these were in the 1960's. Like many others at the time, Kesey did not see what made the "insane" not the same as everyone else. Ken Kesey has given his readers various ways of defining what is health and what's health problems and shows us that while our perceptions are why is us individual, it is by other's perceptions that people are labelled. Both states of being can only just be recognized by the assumption or idea of almost all, that may always leave a minority who don't fit.
We are given no answers. The final outcome is negative. "It's a hell of the life. Damned if you carry out. Damned if you don't" (Kesey 154). Even the McMurphy whom we consider to be sane in the long run fulfils the "psychopath" label that your Combine has put on him by attempting to murder Nurse Ratched. However justified he may be, culture cannot condone his activities. McMurphy is continuing to grow through the storyplot from a self-interested con man to an altruistic messiah-like number that is sacrificed in the end for the higher good. McMurphy, unwilling to comply with any rules or criteria however does not symbolize a present-day day tyrant, or radical, but rather the normal hero archetype. The hero complex, which involves bravery, cleverness, and drive, does not fit McMurphy manifestly, but throughout the book as he lowers his shield and even more is shown, it is clear that he's viewed up to by the other men of the ward. He is the man that most of the men in the ward wish they may be, and the guy that the folks working in the ward fear.
But even altruism cannot conquer illness. To use the famously coined term of Kesey's, the only way of coping with life is to "go with the flow". The only problem is, just who's movement do we choose to go with? Our own? Society's? Will there be a difference? Is there such a thing as health? Will there be any such thing as disease? The novel gives us no conclusive answers.
