| One Flew Under the Cuckoo's Nest is a dark | | | | The cacophony of the sterile hospital environment |
| commentary on the dismal state of mental health | | | | leads the reader to ponder what is causing more |
| care in modern society. The book follows Bernie as | | | | damage to the patients? The never ending cycle of |
| she battles through a schizophrenic fugue trying to | | | | medication, psychotherapy, and shock itherapy leave |
| make sense of her own mental state. She struggles | | | | the reader to feel the despair and desolation of the |
| through her treatment trying to make sense of her | | | | patients. Do the treatment and the environment of |
| life, her passions, and her circumstances. Over | | | | the ward cocoon the patients or lead them further |
| medicated, under treated, she is caged like a beautiful | | | | down into the depths of their individual madness? |
| bird beating her wings against the constraints of the | | | | Amara's frighteningly realistic depiction of the book's |
| facility in which she has been placed. | | | | characters leaves one wonderng if the world has |
| Bernie's fight to free herself from her illness takes | | | | truly gone mad. Her work thoughtfully addresses the |
| her on a journey through a system filled with | | | | very real stigma associated with mental illness in |
| caregivers, misguided family members, and health | | | | modern society. The mentally ill sit locked away |
| care professionals who are each sympathetic to her | | | | behind a door, unseen and in deafening silence waiting |
| problems. What is missing is any empathy for her loss | | | | for release from their illness. Their release is often |
| of rational thinking. | | | | into the only community left open to them in their |
| The ward is filled with those who are ill and require | | | | fragile mental state...the society of the |
| the help of those who are trained to help them. The | | | | disenfranchised, the Society of the Perpetually |
| working conditions and the feeling of hopelessness of | | | | Homeless and Hopeless. |
| those who are in a position to treat the mentally ill | | | | This book raises multiple issues about the care of our |
| become themselves ill in the process. Do they treat | | | | mentally ill members of society as well as the |
| the ill because they themselves are ill or is the | | | | troubling trend in the collapse of the mental health |
| madness like a virus and "catching" and they become | | | | care infrastructure. Seeing the plight of the ill through |
| mad themselves? The fruitless work, the ineffective | | | | their own eyes leaves the reader with the conviction |
| therapies, and the failure of the public health care | | | | that more must be done. It also leaves one with a |
| system to effectively care for the mentally ill are all | | | | feeling of despair that we really do not have a clear |
| dynamically presented in One Flew Under the | | | | notion of what that 'more' is that must be done. |
| Cuckoo's Nest. | | | | |