Opening Skinner's Box Analysis

Has anyone else ever wondered how many sane people have been misdiagnosed or even committed to an institution unnecessarily? In chapter three; On Being Sane in Insane Places, in the novel Opening Skinners Box, Lauren Slater has written about experiments conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1972 and again by herself sometime in the 2000’s.

The book The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan details her experience of being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder before she is correctly diagnosed and treated for autoimmune encephalitis. Determined to help others that have been failed by our healthcare system, Cahalan investigates David Rosenhan’s 1973 study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” and sheds light on the evolution of the field of psychiatry. Cahalan’s reflections in her book have shifted my previous views about mental illness and caused me to further question the field of psychiatry. Cahalan’s experience with psychosis was traumatic and made her realize ways her body can and has broken down on her.

The novel One Flew Over The cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey follows the experiences of Randle Patrick McMurphy who has pretended to be insane in order to a psychiatric hospital and escape from serving time in a prison work farm. The novel frequently refers to authorities that control individuals through restrained methods. The authority of the ward is most often personified in the character of “Nurse Ratched” or “Big Nurse”. The patients of the ward are afraid of Nurse Ratched that they fallow her orders without question. They “ long ago gave up the struggle to assert themselves.

“Opening Skinner’s Box” is a book set up differently than I’ve ever read. Lauren Slater narrates a series of compelling experiments in the form of stories in a given chapter. Each chapter follows a different innovative thinker or scientist while Slater provides her own take and response to the experiment. Each experimenter thought differently than anyone else during their time and often performed dangerous and innovative experiments to get their psychiatric analysis.

Mental Asylum Day 20 A hear the metal door open and close with a bang. A trembling nurse walks into the room with a barely balancing a glass of water and handful of pills on a tray. The clattering of the glass bounces off the walls. My heart races and voices play in my head. What’s up?

“Opening Skinner’s Box” In the first chapter of her book, Lauren Slater mentioned about the strange rumor of B. F. Skinner: Skinner tried to bring up his daughter like an experimental animal in a “skinner’s box” which is known for his notable discoveries about operant conditioning for animals (7-8). Of course, this is not truth, and his experiment for his daughter was quite loving one which could even assist her growth. Then Lauren decided to apply his method of operant conditioning to her baby to make her not crying during midnight. Even though operant conditioning could help children’s growth like Skinner’s or Lauren’s cases, is it really safe enough not to give them some trauma?

The patients are confined to their quarters in the mental hospital or so it is ought to be. In the reality of the film the hospital has been overtaken by the lunatic patients and the staff thrown into cells in the dungeon. Thus the staff has been imprisoned and the mad patients are living freely in the mental institute being looked after by Dr Silas Lamb, a mental man there for murdering soldiers in his care during the Afghan War. The imprisonment of the real staff of Stonehearst evokes terror in the viewer and creates

In order to address the modern perversion of democracy, Ken Kesey constructs the mental institution as a microcosm of society, which serves as a lens to examine the autocratic state of government and its promotion of mass ignorance, and condemnation of dissent within Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Most significantly, Kesey depicts the doctor’s deceptive expression of the “Therapeutic Community [as] a democratic ward, run completely by the patients and their votes”(48). Although Spivey and many of the patients firmly hold onto this belief of possessing self-determination, Kesey indicates that the ward’s mission statement is merely an optimistic delusion to appease the patients by making it appear as though their opinion matters; however, the grim reality of the

Analysis Before I even began to read O’Brien (2011), I had already made the assumption that the content was filled with horror stories about her days spent in a mental hospital. After reading the title, I prepared myself for the stories of abuse, neglect, over medication, thoughts of suicide, and calls for help. O’Brien (2011) outlined her typical day in the mental hospital where she had been staying and to my surprise, she concluded by clearing the stereotype known by many about mental hospitals. I found the first fifty-five minutes of her day to be quite depressing myself.

Charles Dickens had a great interest in psychiatry and the treatment of the insane. For instance, in Household Words, with W. H. Wills, he wrote about their visit to Saint Luke’s Hospital at Christmastime in 1851. Dickens describes the patients’ “oppressive silence,” and return to their usual solitude after dancing. He says that the patients gathering round a Christmas tree gave him “a very sad and touching spectacle,” and concludes, “the utmost is necessarily far inferior to the restoration of the senses of which they are deprived. To lighten the affliction of insanity by all human means, is not to restore the greatest of the Divine gifts; and those who devote themselves to the task do not pretend that it is.

Ken Kesey’s novel “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” was set during the psychedelic sixties of the post war American society, where many social changes were influenced by psychedelic drugs. During the end of the 1950s Psychiatry had reached the peak of its apparent prestige in the American Society, where psychiatric hospitals were seen as “a utopian monument to the virtues of separating the mentally ill from the community for successful treatment.” In “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, Ken Kesey displays an era with the widespread practice of “Therapeutic community” through the eyes of Chief Bromden; the narrator who suffers from Schizophrenia and is seen as the observer in the novel. Ultimately, through the portrayal of a post war American Psychiatric hospital setting, Ken Kesey explores how society smothers difference even though it may come as a valuable aspect to society.

In the book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest” Ken Kesey shows that the “insanity” of the patients is really just normal insecurities and their label as insane by society is immoral. This appears in the book concerning Billy Bibbits problem with his mom, Harding's problems with his wife, and that the patients are in the ward

That's what gives me the commandments about the Nash case, which we gave the wrong diagnosis. Or rather psychiatrists gave guidance to psychoanalysis in 1959 for his erroneous diagnosis, and since then it was inadvertently

At the end, the protagonist is surgically operated to make him mentally deranged. The nurse and the department were certain that McMurphy was faking insanity, but they agreed that he was dangerous. The nurse, in spite of discharging him, kept him on the premises to undo the wave of excitement he brought to the asylum

Madness, insanity, lunacy, these words are more than clinical diagnoses. These words are in part, social constructions rooted in a specific place, at a specific point in time. In 19th century America, state insane asylums thrived. Not in terms of the environmental conditions of these institutions, but in terms of overcrowding and to the extent that individuals could be involuntarily committed. The purpose of this essay is not to expose the conditions of these institutions.