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Examples Of Mental Illness In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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Ken Kesey’s Relationship with Mental Institutions and its Effect on His Novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey is known as one of the most exceptional American authors of the twentieth century, producing novels such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Throughout his lifetime, he had toiled with many different mental health issues that influenced his writings and views on problems in the world. Specifically in One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey sets the story in an insane asylum with the characters as patients. A connection between Kesey’s mental health, a mental institution background, and his novel is found throughout the story. The novel was released during the height of insane asylums and the controversy over how effective locking up inpatients is. This quarrel caused a great amount of backlash from readers and critics, with conjointly some positive feedback that altered some of the views of readers. Overall, Ken Kesey’s relationship with mental health and his experience in mental institutions not only affected his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but moreover the audience learning from the story.

During the 1960’s, a extensive movement …show more content…

Literature critic Daniel Vitkuson states “the ward's mental patients are victims of a society that demands conformity to what (Chief) Bromden calls ‘the Combine,’ a term suggesting a huge machine as well as a kind of socio-economic conspiracy.” (Vitkuson, 65) He continues to write about how “the Combine” is “slowly but surely turning society into a dehumanized, homogenized culture in which each person is "a functioning, adjusted component.’” (Vitkuson, 65) Kesey’s rush of mind-altering drugs allowed him to have a high during his publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

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