When people pass a mental institute, most will not acknowledge the people that are inside. Some will say that the people have a screwed up life or they had a bad life being raised others will say they are just crazy in the head. Can you really define the word crazy? In the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the author portrays many different people in a mental institute. The life that some of the people in the novel have are way beyond what some people might call normal.
Some of them have tried to committed suicide while another is not good enough for his wife and doesn’t like his womanly hands. While a new patient on their ward is rowdy and outrageous and what you might say is full of life and isn’t afraid of what life will bring him. The patients in the hospital don’t have to be there but some have chose to be admitted because they felt that they weren’t able to function on the outside of the hospital. They don’t feel safe on the outside of the hospital and others in the novel say they don’t have the guts to go out into the streets.
When they say they don’t have the guts to face the real life in the world they actually do have guts because they admitted themselves to the hospital and they knew that it was the right thing for them to do in their life. The views of the people in a mental institute are very low not many people actually think of them as belonging to civilization. Younger people just like me don’t really have an opinion of the people who are mentally ill. Once you read the novel your insight about the mentally ill just might be changed.
The characters that are in the novel do have problems that some people may be able to handle but the ones that are admitted to the hospital don’t know how to handle them. When you look around and see someone that reminds you of Harding you wonder why Harding was in hospital but the other person wasn’t. Many men may feel inadequate to their wife but they don’t go to admit themselves to a mental institute. As I read I thought about it to myself and when you get further into the book, you begin to learn he has more problems in his life. The problems that he has faced he has tried to face them but he has a hard to get to the reality of them.
One of the other patients on the ward is Billy Bibbit. He is one that has faced many emotional problems such as he has tried to commit suicide and he has burned the backs of his hands with cigarettes. I didn’t think that anyone would try to kill themselves over something when life is so precious. When the new patient comes on to the ward named McMurphy everything in the ward just basically changes. He arrives because when he was working on a work farm and didn’t really like it so he acted as if he was mentally disable and ended up on the ward.
It is hard to believe that anyone would want to end up in a mental hospital when they have the freedom of the world outside. They will have to follow a schedule that the hospital sets up to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. Then, on the outside world you can do what ever you want. It wouldn’t seem right that some would do that unless some people want to be away from the outside world. There is a nurse on the ward that is a bit over controlling and she has too much order. She has one thing that she likes to have done to patients and she abuses it. That one thing is Electric Shock Therapy also known as EST.
When one of the patients is disruptive or doesn’t react to their medicine she will send them to EST. I don’t know how she could be happy sending someone to get EST when that person has bolts of electricity going through their body. Some people are just do not know where they are for days and can not function as they did before. It is just don’t logical that you could go to sleep at night knowing you just fried someone brain. When you look at the world around you do not notice that some people do need mental help. It is hard to understand that when they do go for help you can not think of them as freaks.
When you see them on the street you can not say look at that freak or call them a name. Some people are very fragile and you can’t judge them by who they are when they went in for help it is that when they come out you should not judge them then either. There are different types of people in the world and you have to open your eyes to all of them and not judge them because of where they were. When people do judge them they have to realize that the person was brave enough to go in and get help that was needed. The people in the world should be thankful that the person did get help and they are not running around the streets.
