One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest By Key Kesey

Deepening Depression and Perpetual Paranoia

A mental illness is defined as a medical condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Mental illnesses are present in both the Shakesperian play, Hamlet, as well as the Ken Kesey novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Over the course of the stories the main characters deal with depression and paranoia respectively.

In the story of Hamlet, the main character, Hamlet deals with a myriad of mental issues including: bi-polar disorder, hysteria and most of all depression. Depression is a form of mental disorder “marked by feelings of profound sadness and lack of interest in activities. It is a persistent low mood that interferes with the ability to function and appreciate things in life. It may cause a wide range of symptoms, both physical

Paranoia is a form of “delusional psychosis, in which the delusions develop slowly into a complex, intricate, and logically elaborated system”(Encyclopedia Britannica 1). This paranoia is displayed fairly early in the story when Chief believes that “they got special sensitive equipment detects [his] fear”(Kesey 3). Chief's paranoia also causes him to believe that “[t]he ward is a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is”(Kesey 40). Over time his delusions and paranoia become less frequent as he gets cured however “[he] still had [his] own notions—how McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save [them] from the Combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal, how he was too big to be bothered with something as measly as money—but even [Chief] came halfway to thinking like the others”(Kesey