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Ptsd In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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Throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the narrator, Chief Bromden, has a slight mystery surrounding him, like several of the other characters. That is, what mental illness is Chief in the ward for exactly? The answer might seem like the obvious post traumatic stress disorder, but is it really? While he does have the necessary traumatic experience for PTSD to occur, he doesn’t necessarily show all the symptoms. In fact, he shows just as many symptoms for depersonalization/derealization disorder and schizophrenia as he does PTSD. So just what mental illness does Chief Bromden truly have? To begin, according to the ptsd.va.gov, “PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) is a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event, like combat, a natural disaster, a car accident, or sexual assault” (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). In chapter 15 Chief talks about how the fog machine works, how he learned this during the war. So with the knowledge that he had participated in a potentially traumatic event, the war, heightens the possibility of PTSD. Nihm.nih.gov and ptsd.va.gov both states …show more content…

If anything, it remains possible that Chief previously had building schizophrenia before the war, but came back with PTSD which landed him in the ward. Then the drugs they would give him made his schizophrenia surface more. This is plausible as schizophrenia can be found in genetics and what happens to the child before birth, meaning Chief could have had it his entire life up to the ward. So it remains, Chief was born with schizophrenia, which stayed hidden, until he went to war and returned with PTSD, which caused him to be placed in the ward, and the extra mind-altering drugs caused his schizophrenia to come in full

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