The Idea of mental health is something that has evolved rapidly over the years. It went from something that made a person “crazy” and often times caused you to be locked up and treated extremely poorly, to something that is much more recognized as an illness. Ken Keysey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest” is a good example of the treatment not only mental health patients would receive, but also the treatment of minorities at the time. The attitude and beliefs of Native Americans in the 1950s and 1960s is showed in Ken Keysey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest” the protagonist Bromden and his oppression in the ward. 

During the 1950s and the 1960s, citizens in mental health institutions were treated with disrespect, and treated like they were lower than normal citizens. They were locked away in these mental institutions, where they were stripped of their basic human rights and often times treated like animals. In this time period, Native Americans were often times locked up in mental institutions, being described as “physically superhuman and emotionally and cognitively incapacitated” (Wilson 189).  In the 1950s, the government removed Native Americans from their lands, attempting to move them into big cities. They had to leave their tribes and take on the rights and responsibilities of an American citizen. Those who returned to their tribe faced many problems, along with a loss of pride and culture. 

In Ken Keysey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest”, the protagonist of the story, Bromden, can be argued to embody the counterculture of the time. The Native Americans were being opposed, and often times tried to fight for their rights, just like the young people or “hippies” of the time. “The rise of sixties counterculture witnessed an upsurge in interest in Native American culture and traditions, and indigenous customs were frequently figured as a deeper spiritual connection to the environment and a greater sense of personal wholeness” (Wilson 189). The counterculture of the time was all about thinking differently, and being an individual fighting for what you believe in, and while Bromden might not truly fight for his rights until the end of the story when he breaks free, the idea of his different thinking is what lands him in the mental hospital in the first place.  “From a countercultural perspective, Bromden’s schizophrenia is already closely related to his social status as a dispossessed indigene. As a native, Bromden already thinks differently from the machine culture he inhabits” (Wilson 194).  In many ways, Bromden’s “sickness” can be viewed as an escape from the real world, and a breakthrough into counterculture, when he breaks out of the ward and back into the real world. 

Bromden can also be argued to embody the oppression and racism towards Native Americans at the time. He is constantly called “Chief”, a racial slur that can be alluded to the name that they would call Native American leaders. These leaders lost their land and their power due to westward expansion and industrialization. In this case, however, Bromden is not fighting for control over land, instead fighting for control over his mind. Bromden attempts to fight his Schizophrenia, slowly returning back to his natural state of thinking without the sickness. While doing that, he is beginning to fight the oppression he faced every day in the combine, eventually breaking free. At the beginning of the novel, “Bromden’s opening line, “They’re out there,” communicates both Disability and Native American Counterculture 193 the schizophrenic paranoia that sets him apart from normative society and the very real threat of the racism and dispossession that he has faced all his life” (Wilson 193). Bromden is both oppressed in his mind by his schizophrenia, and in the world by the relations Native Americans had towards the government and the way citizens acted towards them. 

Not only is Bromden oppressed in the ward, but often times he is also deprived of his manhood.In the ward, Nurse Ratched does everything in her power to belittle the men who are in the ward, thinking that using this tactic will allow them to be more obedient. Nurse Ratched believes that if she takes away their manliness and ability to think on their own, they will blindly follow in everything she says, just going through the motions and allowing her to run a combine of basically zombie men. Wexler, in his analysis of “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” says that Nurse Ratched and her social order make it near impossible for Bromden to have any power in the ward, considering that he is both a minority and in the mental hospital, making her believe that he has to either conform or he would never be getting out (Waxler 230). Nurse Ratched uses this technique of both intimidation and making these men not feel like men to keep them in her institution. She believes the only way these men can be “normal” is to conform to the outside world, and she attempts to make them conform as much as she can. She believes that everyone should be a robot in their world, following and listening blindly to what people of authority have to say. 

Bromden also deceives everyone in the ward, allowing everyone to believe that he is deaf and mute. They believe this, claiming since he is Native American, he is so dumb that he cannot even hear or speak. Bromden, however, is not deaf or mute. He uses this to his advantage to find out secrets, and infiltrate the ward more than he would be able to before. Since everyone was deceived by his lies, they talked in front of him thinking that he could not hear, which was obviously not true. He uses this tactic to attempt to fight the oppression he is being faced with. He uses the fact that people believe that he is deaf and mute, due to his minority status, to his advantage.

Bromden is a minority, and because of this, people believe that somehow that makes him less of a person, and a lower status in their eyes. Due to the fact that he also has schizophrenia, he is again treated as something less. The mental institutions of the time were the epitome of people being treated poorly. Often times they were just dropped there and forgotten, left to deal with the poor standards they had for the mental health patients of the time. This also connects to the counterculture of the time, and Bromden in many ways can encompass the ideas the young teens or the hippies of the time had about their culture and the assimilation of the time.  This story confirms what we know about the historical era, and can still contain relevant information that we could pay attention to today. Although the treatment of mental health patients has come a long way from how it was when the book was written, it is no where close to perfect and ideal. Not only is the treatment of patients not ideal yet, but the idea of minority treatment is still a big issue. Racism and mistreatment is still something very prevalent today, and also needs to be changed or fixed, which can only happen with the help and unification of the country in fixing these issues.
