Examples Of Flaws In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Governmental and Medical Agencies Flaws in the 1950s and 60s
During the mid 1950s, which was the cold war era, the CIA hoped to develop mass mind control as a weapon. They used hallucinogenic drugs to try and control the people. These drugs insured that people become easily manipulated. Likewise in the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest the nurses in the mental hospital were using electro-shock therapy and pills to manipulate and control the patients. The most important word in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey is control because of the society and government wanting everyone to be the same and to be controllable. During the time period in which the novel was set we see the same flaw in the fact that a government agency and

The combine is “an entity that unifies individuals to further its own corporate interests” as well as “a machine that threshes, cuts, and cleans whatever is in its path”(xv). In the novel the mental institution illustrates one part of the combine as the goal of Nurse Ratched and the other workers is to make the patients minions of society, and of the combine, will not curing them of their own individual mental illnesses. They were trying to make them the same as the rest of society by giving them different types of so called therapy instead of helping them confront their mental illness. The nurses were using the theory of the therapeutic community on them which is basically “forcing the internal soul to fit someone else's ideas of the external environment”(xi). Nurse Ratched and the other workers were doing this by using what they called treatments such as shock therapy,pills, and by sending them to the restrictions of the disturbed ward. They were using these things to control the patients so that the patients would become sociable, quiet, and would conform. These treatments or therapys really were ways of manipulating the patients into acting like everyone else in society because the nurses in the mental institution as well as the rest of society and government wanted there to be no individuals, everyone had to be the same. These treatments would

In the novel the word control is used as a noun and it has many denotative meanings. One such denotative meaning of the word control is the power to influence or direct people's behavior or course of events and another is the means of limiting or regulating something. In the novel the denotative meaning of the word is shown through the way the Nurse Ratched talks to the patients and uses different “therapeutic” methods to limit and regulate what they do as well as to influence and direct the behavior of the patients. Making the patients in the mental institution very aware of the fact that “you’re safe as long as you keep control”(66). That you’re safe as long as you let her manipulate and change your life for her idea of the better and of what your life should be like. Control is a word that is repeated in the novel and is used when talking about the only way they can stay safe from the treatments as well as when the patients are talking about who Nurse Ratched doesn’t have control of. In the novel there is one character that the Nurse Ratched and the other nurses don’t have control of which is Pete. Pete is a chronic which means that he is someone that the nurses in the mental institution are not able to fix, however he is the only chronic that has been a chronic his whole life. The others had become chronics through the