Day 114: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.  ISBN: 9780141181226.

I've always found the concept of group therapy interesting.  I actually participated in it for awhile sometime around 2nd or 3rd grade.*  In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the logic for group therapy is to show how the patients don't fit in to normal society by having the rest of the group critique them.  See, this is why I never really got group therapy (and on some level this includes AA and similar groups): how are you supposed to judge what is normal when the group consists overwhelmingly of people who have the same problems you do?

I do think it's valid to have these groups.  It is useful to have some feedback on your behavior and thoughts from people at different levels of recovery/craziness who have been where you are now and can show you that it is not impossible to be cured.  But it might be more beneficial to have a slightly higher mix of people who don't have the same problems, or possibly who are victims of the problem (because let's face it, those people need therapy too).  These people would not need extensive training, but would definitely need some and must be empathetic to the patients' plight.  I would be interested to see if there have been studies that used this method, and how successful it was.

I've also noticed that people who are drawn into psychotherapy tend to be slightly crazy themselves.  It's like you almost have to be a little crazy to want to help crazy people.  And most of the professionals don't seem to notice it about themselves, but I've talked to other patients of therapists I've had and they've agreed with me, "Yeah, the doc is a little off."  I'm sure that those who don't start out crazy eventually end up that way.  I know I had to do a little impromptu therapy at the insurance job I had, and by the end of my shift the last thing I wanted to do was deal with anyone's problems but my own.   It kind of makes you wonder if there are any "normal" people left: if the crazy people are normalizing the crazy people, won't they still bit just a tiny bit crazy?

*I was misdiagnosed with Depression, when I was actually just depressed.

Day 113: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.  ISBN: 9780141181226.

This is one of those books that I liked, but didn't like.  And yes, this is going to be a sort of review post, because I don't think I can let this one slip.  There are things I hate about this book, but unlike Catcher in the Rye, I can actually see a lot of value in it.

For one thing, there's quite a bit of blatant racism and sexism present.  This is not something I'm comfortable with.  At all.  On the other hand, this was a work of its time and I think it accurately depicts how people actually thought.  It was normal to casually harass women and throw around racial epithets.  It explains my grandfather's beliefs and put it into a context for me that I wouldn't otherwise have had.  Yes, my grandfather was racist, but at that time everyone (particularly in his economic class) was racist and slung around terms that I thankfully never heard from him first hand.

However, I also wonder if maybe this behavior was intensified because of the situation these men were in.  Most of the patients were white, and here they were being run by a large breasted matron (seriously, her breasts were mentioned often) and a squad of black orderlies.  In a time when these were considered inferior beings that was probably a difficult notion to wrap a straight white male head around, especially if already put into a situation of powerlessness (institutionalization).  In some ways they actually used racism and sexism to regain some amount of power, or at least what they perceived as power.  I'm not saying this is right, because obviously it's not, but it's interesting that this was part of the white male psyche at the time.

There was also quite a bit of insinuation that the black orderlies buggered the inmates.  I don't know if that actually happened on the ward, but this is another instance of the power play that goes on in this book, and it adds another element of race/sex/power/powerlessness.  Most white men aren't used to being buggered, and even more aren't used to being forcibly buggered.  This would be another reason to try to regain some sort of authority in a situation where they actually have none.  I somehow feel that this may also be a little bit of the author's racism showing through, because it appears that all of that black orderlies participate in this activity, and therefore all blacks must be sexual deviants* (but then, that may be because Nurse Ratched hand picks the orderlies).

This novel also helped me discover exactly why I don't like Catcher in the Rye.  The narrator is fucking crazy.  I can't get in to crazy head space.  It noticeably agitates me, both physically and my way of thinking.  It's almost like anyone who can write crazy that well has to be crazy/stoned/both.  I'm pretty sure Kesey was both.  Bromden was a little easier to deal with than Caulfield, simply because I liked Bromden better.  He actually had shit to complain about (being threatened with shock treatment and lobotomy), where the worst that Caulfield really had to complain about was "a bunch of phonies" when he was the biggest damn phony there was.  This is also why I didn't like the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  The crazy really seems to get to me.  I don't know if that means that I'm prone to craziness myself, or if it's so different from the way I think and see the world that it's completely disorienting and therefore unpleasant, but I think I'll be avoiding Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, and anyone else who writes the crazy particularly well.  I salute your efforts, really I do, but I like my headspace where it is.

*I rather hope no one takes that out of context.