One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Research Paper

“Love is a serious mental disease”- Plato. What is the definition of mental illness? Acting crazy. Thinking in a different way, or just going against the majority? How are we as humans in charge of determining what is a disease and what is not? And who gave us the power to treat these “diseases” of the mind? To avoid repeating the past, we in the 21st century should be asking ourselves these questions. Kesey brings to light in his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the treatments implemented in the metal hospitals of the 1940’s and 1950’s are shown by Nurse Ratched’s methods of controlling the patients rather than curing them. The “effective” mental health policies that were implemented in the 40’s and 50’s negatively affected patients …show more content…
Since modern science was not available and it was a new challenge to the medical field, this new disease caused scandal and worry. Many of the people found with a mild mental illness were treated as if it was a major disease. Disease, noun, a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that has a known cause and a distinctive group of symptoms, signs, or anatomical changes. The modern definition of disease seems very logical and can be applied to many aspects of our lives. In my anatomy and physiology class, when we started, Dr. Murphy always told us two things, one “moment is life” and two “dis-ease, something that causes the human body to be out of ease, can be physical, or mental.” A simple word that impacted thousands of lives in late twentieth century America. Reportedly has been showing progressive personality changes over the past 2 or so years. Grew withdrawn and asocial, couldn't or wouldn't work, & spent most of his time reading or doing nothing. Grew a beard, ate only vegetarian food and lived life as a beatnik - to a certain extent. (Frank 489) That was the report that “medical examiners'' gave Leonard Roy

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Research Paper