Examples Of Abuse In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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In the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we learn about a group of patients who have been institutionalized; they are very weak and drained. The patients receive Electro Convulsive Therapy and even lobotomy treatments, that do little to no good by way at treating there illness. Through this novel, Ken Kesey portrays the toxic institutional abuse that mental patients experience when they are removed from society and put into an institution to supposedly ensure their health.

One of the ways that Kesey portrays this abuse is through Nurse Ratched who over drugs the patients to make them compliant to the point of being non-responsive. Most of the patients on the ward do not know any other way of life other than being in and out of therapy and taking pills for their mental illness. The Chief feels he and many of the patients can not function much of the time because they keep them drugged to the point that they are unaware of anything around them. MindFreedom is an organization that is standing up and …show more content…
They are inadequately trained to properly care for the patients on the ward. They make the other patients cleanup for them because they are lazy and they know they can get away with it because they have not been trained otherwise. They abuse the Chief frequently by making him clean the floors and rooms like a janitor. The Chief says, "When they stuck a broom out for me to do their work up the hall, I turned around and walked back to the dorm, telling myself to hell with that"(224). The boys make the patients do their dirty work for free because they know the patients will not disagree because the boys work for the nurse and the patients fear her so much. The patients are not being helped; they are being used as slaves. Ken Kesey makes these obvious points in the novel stating that the patients are being taken advantage of and treated
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