Mental Illness In Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo

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Mental Illness

Over the years, mental illness has been seen as something that is made up, or is incurable because it is thought to be not real. Then it went to being seen as something that could be cured by physically changing the brain. In 1947, a man named Walter Freeman work to create a cure for mental illness, he did this by physically changing the brain. He called this method of medicine the Lobotomy, and he became famous for the “curing the symptoms” of mental illnesses. The so called “medicine” was Freeman taking an ice pick into the eye socket and hitting a part of the brain in the frontal lobes. The many test subjects were people who were left in institutions and weren’t were never asked for consent, along with many of the families not being asked. Most patients weren’t cured of …show more content…
Other medical professionals did not agree with the process but didn’t show their concerns publicly so the lobotomies continued to happen. This causing Freeman to become very famous and well-liked, even though his work wasn’t actually curing mental illnesses like he said it was. He traveled around the United States and completed thousands of these procedures without the consent of many of the patients just to show how his “treatments” continued to do what they were suppose to do. Throughout Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he shows acts of abuse to the patients by the staff in many different ways. The book is told through the character of Chief, a patient within the institution, he speaks many times of the things he sees while in there. Once he states “Black boys in the white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them”(3). And again later in the book he explains why he is given a sleeping pill, “That’s why the staff gives me the pills; at the the old place I took to waking up at night and catching them performing all kinds of horrible crimes on the patients sleeping around me”(75).
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