Topic > The treatment of people with mental illnesses in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

The environment of a psychiatric ward can be intimidating for anyone. The feeling of being confined as if you were in a prison cell can terrify even the most sane people. Doctors originally held people with mental health problems in hospitals as a means of keeping them off the streets and away from normal people who were just trying to go about their daily activities. The treatment of people with mental illnesses has been a controversial topic for years due to the mistreatment of patients and the failure to fully understand what is wrong with them. The use of fear and forced labor are one of the ways in which psychiatric ward patients are sometimes mistreated. The characters in our story are forced to do menial, clean jobs every day and are given orders by the staff. Nurse Ratched kept some patients around who were basically just zombies as a way to instill fear in them and maintain control over them, a sort of reminder of what could happen if they step out of line. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The use of fear was prevalent throughout the story with the nurse and her black boys. If a patient left the queue, they were threatened with being sent to the Ailments department. They also tried to instill fear in the patient as soon as he set foot on the ward. Every time a new patient arrived, one of the black boys would chase him with a thermometer covered in Vaseline. They would take the person into the shower and turn the showers on so that the only thing you could hear was the water hitting the sound of the tiles. If parents believed a child was unruly during adolescence, they often sought the advice of a doctor. This was the case with Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Their daughter, Rose Mary, was often subject to mood swings and did not perform up to her parents' high standards. Joseph spoke with a doctor and they discussed a procedure that would later also be performed on patients at mental health facilities. The lobotomy procedure was performed on Rose Mary Kennedy and eventually rendered her incontinent. The surgery was confusing and caused her to gain the mental capacity of a two-year-old. The procedure, when performed on patients with mental health issues, has been shown to make the patient calmer, less aggressive, and more manageable if performed successfully. This procedure has long been controversial because the small number of people it helped with their condition could not outweigh the much larger number of people it harmed, such as Rose Mary Kennedy. The procedure was performed on Randle PMcMurphy in our book after he nearly strangled Nurse Ratched in an altercation following Billy Babbitt's suicide. One procedure used to treat depression and agitation or aggression is the use of electricity. A small amount of electricity is passed through the brain causing the body to have a seizure. The electroconvulsive therapy procedure has been a thorn in the side of medical professionals because it was often performed by people who were inadequately trained and administered too high a voltage or because it was sometimes performed without the use of anesthesia leading to memory loss . and sometimes leads to broken bones. This sometimes doesn't seem to have much effect on patients and other times works as a means of instilling fear in them. The use of ECT has been used for patients in our book and although most.