American Literature

People with mental disabilities are often disregarded and their words are not being heard. They have been ridiculed by the public and even if they did recover from their illness, most people still choose not to listen to them. Once a person becomes a mental patient, he or she will forever carry the illness.

A mental patient is deemed ill when he or she develops a physical or behavioral disability. They are often categorized to those who can be cured and those who are incurable and are separated from each other.

It is the peoples culture not to listen to individuals that had or have mental disabilities. In the earlier times, officials even imprison their enemy and activist in mental institutions because they are afraid to let their enemys voices be heard, they know that if their enemy is seen at a mental institute, the public will disregard all their enemy has to say, living them free to do anything they want. Even if a mental patient got out of the mental institute, they would be condemned to being mental and crazy to the eyes of the public, everything they do will still be disregarded because of it.

In the novel One flew over the cuckoos nest, the story teller Chief Bromden has been ridiculed for his illness, the ward thinks that he is dumb and often disregard him, instead of being depressed about his situation, he used this to his advantage, listening to the ward officers and theyre current agenda while in the novel of Paulo Coelho Veronika decides to die, the protagonist enjoyed being in a mental institute because she believes that people with mental disabilities are the people who are freest and those living in the real world are chained to cultural boundaries.

In both of the novels, the power of word is important, since mental patients are not being noticed in the society, they can do anything and say anything they want, the down part is, since they are ill in the mind, people wont listen to them and put them aside. It is in peoples culture to ignore those who have suffered from having mental illness and they are often disregarded and put in one side.

In the novel One Flew over the Cuckoos Next, the patients can do what ever they want they can play inside the institution and express anything they want. The character named McMurphy represented their freewill he constantly disobeys the orders of Nurse Ratched and often does what he wants. McMurphy is also the reason why most of the Acute snaps out of their lucid state. McMurphy shows how free he is, despite how he got there, unlike the chief, he accepted how the society treats the mentally ill, he was okay with how the society puts the mentally ill people aside.

Nevertheless in the novel Veronika Decides to Die, the main character symbolizes her being free when she was admitted in the hospital, she committed suicide twice and failed at it, she was sent to a Vilette, a mental institution, to regain consciousness about the real world. In her stay at Villete, she realizes that those who can be called free are the people are outcast, the mentally ill. The culture dictates that they cannot be freed because of their illness, but being outside of the walls, subjects them to follow rules and regulations, thus not really being free.

Being in a mental institution have its advantages, they can dance naked and no one would even bother as long as they are not hurting anyone. They have been accused of being mentally ill and the culture does not take the mentally ill individuals seriously, they are often outcast and taunt by other people even after they have regained being normal.

The only problem in becoming mentally ill is that a person subjects himselfherself to the mental institutions view of sanity. A person cannot be called normal again until the mental institution the person was admitted to deem you normal. The Problem with some mental institution is that they sometimes experiment on the mentally ill, trying their new projects and since they are not capable of thinking clearly, they cannot do anything. In some cases, the officials of the mental institution tend to bully them and make a joke out of them, an effect from the culture of how mentally ill patients are seen.

In the case One Flew over the Cuckoos nest, Nurse Ranched has makes a joke out of the patients in the institution, making them spy at each others hidden secrets and reveal it at group sessions. By doing this, she lowers the self moral of the patients, making them turn to each other. Instead of helping them regain their minds natural order, she is forcing them to be even more damaged than before. The mental illness came from being oppress outside or in the real world and Nurse Ratched making them sneak and taunt each other is oppressing them of having the option to regain their self awareness. Exposing their darkest secrets will only make them go further from the normal state of mind and they will repress more and slow down, if not stop the chance of having a normal mind.

In Veronika Decides to Die, Veronika was also experimented on, Dr. Igor did not tell her she wasnt really dying, she believed it all through out her stay at the mental institution but unlike the shock shop (Kesey 15) in Keseys novel, she learned to live in the moment and escaped from the institution and remain living in the moment believing that she would be dying soon, In that way, according to Dr. Igors thesis (the final chapter of his work would be entitled An Awareness of Death Encourages Us to Live More Intensely) the girl has gone on to eliminate Vitriol completely from her organism, and would quite possibly never repeat her attempt at suicide (Coelho 208).

Nurse Ranched also use excessive shock therapy that harms to the patients rather than curing them or making them better. The shock shop(Kesey 15) as the black boys call it was the are where the shock treatments were made, some acute patients brought there became chronic patients when they get out, the extensive shocking damaged their brain and left them looking like a vegetable, Ruckly was one of them, they called his shock treatment a mistake, making him the youngest chronics in the mental institute, And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two button sized plugs stitched one above each eye (Kesey 15-16).

Shock therapy has been condemned, but few mental institutions still use Shock therapy in hopes that it will cure the mentally ill. The novel One Flew over the Cuckoos nest shown that shock therapy did not cure the mentally ill, thus creating more damage to the person, condemning them to the mental institution forever, instead of them having hope of getting out of the mental institution.

Since the culture has taught its people to treat the insane differently from normal people, a lot of them have lived through it, one of them is Nurse Ratched, who have terrorized her mental patients and instead of curing them, she subjected her mental patients to further disorient their mind.

Her dominance in the institution has made the patients even worse than first admitted, unlike Dr. Igor who did not go with the flow of how culture dictates people to treat the mentally ill and have dedicated his life to curing mentally ill patients, he did not spend his life terrorizing the his patients.

People need to change how they treat the mentally ill individuals and stop the follow what has already been dictated. The cultural boundaries of how people treat mental patients should be wider. They are ill for a reason and they wont be better if people keeps taunting them and keeps them from being better, people should stop treated them as if they dont exit and start treating them as a human being.