Prof. Bekim
English 24
17 February 2015
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, tells about the mental patients. All male, are in mental asylum are divided into Acutes, who can be cured, and Chronics, who cannot be cured. They are ruled by the Nurse Ratched, a former army nurse who runs the ward with harsh, mechanical precision. During daily Group Meetings, she encourages the Acutes to attack each other in their most vulnerable places, shaming them into submission. If a patient rebels, he is sent to receive electroshock treatments and sometimes a lobotomy, even though both practices have fallen out of favor with the medical community. Basically, even though some of the Acute patients were able to do basic things like other normal people, they were still treated like the Chronic by the asylum staff. They were not given an opportunity to prove that they would be able to recover psychologically.
According to Positive Psychology: An Approach to Supporting Recovery in Mental Illness, by Schrank “identifying character strengths and using them more in daily life, keeping a blessing journal, focusing on good instead of bad memories, … or helping others.” (99). This quote is basically trying to refer to the fact that McMurphy when he came to mental asylum he wasn’t crazy mentally. He thought asylum is easier place to stay than jail. He helps positively to people help play basketball and other things. In the book all the men in the asylum are scared from Nurse Ratched and they follow her rules. But McMurphy doesn’t really care about her rules. He wants that all men are follow to his rules. He took the men out of the asylum and they go to fishing trip. Before these men are went same place their life wasn’t change like every day doing same thing. They had fun trip and all the men was happy, they were follow more McMurphy’s rule than Nurse Ratched. Also McMurphy forgets about bad things that he did in past, he only tells positive and fun stories to the people. According to Brownell, “preventing people from expressing negative emotions, and helping people to avoid difficult but necessary therapeutic processes” (96). This quote proves that Nurse Ratched in her meeting discuss people’s negative emotions and their problems. She helps to the men to express their story in front of the others. Others were listening and they were discussing the problem. Actually it’s helpful for the mentally illness people to think more and feel free to say their problems in the past. In this way they could forget about bad happening things. These kinds of people are scare to tell their story in front of others, they always tries to seat alone. In the world we have lots of people have problem with mentally illness. We have to help them to express their feelings.
According to the research that has been made by the News Media Framing of Serious Mental Illness and Gun Violence in the United States, 1997-2012 by Emma “Mental health researchers have long suspected that news media portrayals of violent persons with SMI contribute to negative public attitudes about persons with serious conditions like schizophrenia” (406). This statement basically means that mental illness people can be do things like killing someone or themselves. In the book character Billy is in asylum, his mother and Nurse Ratched are old friends. At the last chapter Billy had sex with Candy which is girl from outside like prostitute. Nurse Ratched saw that Billy had sex with her and she tries to scare him by saying these things to his mother. But Billy doesn’t want to Nurse Ratched tell her about the story. Then he will get nervous about it cause him schizophrenia and he killed by himself. Actually Nurse Ratched did wrong thing to scare Billy, because he has mentally problem. For this kind a people we have to be careful to saying things like belongs to the patient. Also Billy’s kills himself is effected to other men, they saw