Chief Bromden, the narrator of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, has been a paranoid-schizophrenic patient in the psychiatric hospital as he suffers from hallucinations and delusions. Everyone believes that he is deaf and dumb, although this is merely an act on his part that he has kept up due to the fear of huge conglomeration. Nurse Ratched is a nurse who runs the ward with harsh and systemized rules for the mental patients. For an example of what happens in the daily life of patient in her ward, she encourages the patients to attack each other in their most vulnerable spots, shaming them during daily meetings, which she concludes as “therapy”. In any case patient rebels against the rules set by her, he is sent to receive electroshock treatments. This leads to ethical violations that slowly build upon each other with empathic breaches and sadistic interventions to the mental patients by Nurse Ratched; which actually seek to impose order and exercise control, sometimes at the expense of the individual 's (mental) health, but certainly at the expense of each patient’s independence and freedom. Through death; McMurphy spirit and inspiration have developed well beyond any influence that came by that he might have been able to exercise as a "patient".

The mental patients, all male, are divided into Acutes; who are there for treatment and will eventually be released and Chronics; who are in the hospital permanently.
The Chronics can be also those who can walk whereas some can