One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: HW 1

     I feel that the issues underlined by these prompts would be more controversial around the time period of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. These days if you were to ask anyone if it was acceptable to experiment on human beings, you would be hard pressed to find a positive response. In the modern context therefore, such a prompt as this is barely thought provoking. Further into the past however, when the patients in a mental hospital were virtually untreatable, It must have been a common and acceptable practice to experiment on patients. How else would a man such as Walter Freeman have developed his lobotomy procedure into mainstream practice? Mental illness was utterly misunderstood, and to a sane individual of the past, a mental patient probably would have been falsely deemed as less than human.
      Another topic that is subject similarly to the time period is the distinction between mental illness and physical illness. In the past, mental illness was understood on a very small scale. It was most often incurable. As far as Doctors knew, mental illness was not due to any physical problems in the brain. In more modern medicine, mental illness seems to fall into two categories: trouble caused my a physical defect in the brain, or else psychological trouble. I think that in these terms, a physical defect such as Alzheimer's disease or a brain tumor is the same as any other physical illness. Psychological trouble such as post-traumatic stress, is more complicated. It may have an actual physical effect on the brain, but we are still limited in our ability to understand the brain, so treatment has to been done through psychotherapy. I think in this case, until we understand more, psychological illness (not mental illness in general) is different than physical illness.