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Control In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

1085 Words5 Pages

Psychiatric hospitals are proven to provide assistance and treatment to those who live with mental illnesses. The system is designed to take away the suffering, assist in the patient’s recovery, and put them on the path toward good health and a happy life. Although hospitals are supposed to take a certain level of responsibility over a patient; in this ward, the control over the patients are clearly interfering with their well being. In Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched’s suffocating authority and the ward’s power over the patients are exacerbating their illness instead of helping these patients heal, proving that them being mentally ill is a faux. Nurse Ratched controls the men with her therapeutic community. …show more content…

The Electrotherapy and Seclusion are the two main machines helped to mold them into perfect members of society. McMurphy is given unwanted and unnecessary electroshock treatments. The patients are meant to be “fixed” even though they were never broken: “When the fog clears to where I can see, I'm sitting in the day room. They didn't take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion” (Kesey 97). At first, Chief describes fog as a hallucination; however as the novel progresses, it serves as a symbol of his state of mind. When he sees this fog, it is when he is medicated or powerless against Nurse Ratched and her tactics. This is when he is most likely to hallucinate. This hospital makes one feel isolated inside themselves :”This morning I plain don't remember. They got enough of those things they call pills down me so I don't know a thing till I hear the ward door open” (Kesey 14). Forcing the men to take these pills is another method used by Nurse Ratched and her team to keep everyone under their watch. Although they use machines to manipulate, they also use pills to control the

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