Shock Therapy

1962: Oregon

Shock Therapy

The Shock Therapy text found in Lapham’s Quarterly is an excerpt from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The novel sets place in a psychiatric ward and is about Mr. McMurphy, a new patient who reaps havoc in the ward. The nurses and orderlies view the patients as men that fall outside of the societal norm but McMurphy helps the patients realize that they are just as normal as any other human being.

The Shock Therapy text shows us the scene where McMurphy is being given a tour of the facility by Mr. Harding, another patient, and discovers electroshock therapy, which is used as a method to treat the psychiatric patients. The passage begins by describing a hallway in the ward where the men sit and wait on a bench that leads “that metal door”, the door “with nothing marked on it at all” (159). McMurphy mentions how “another victim inside is getting his treatment and I can hear him screaming” (159). We can see that this treatment that the patients, or as McMurphy calls them, the victims, receive is painful.

When McMurphy asks Harding what goes on behind “that metal door” Harding responds with “an experience no human should be without” and continues to inform McMurphy of the “Shock Shop” and electroshock therapy (159). Harding considers the men that receive this treatment to be “fortunate souls” and compares the treatment to “a free trip to the moon” (160). After demanding what the Electroshock Therapy is for, Harding tells McMurphy that it’s for “the patient’s good…everything done here is for the patient’s good”. The advantages of shock treatment in Harding’s eyes are that “it’s cheap, quick, entirely painless” (160).

Harding explains how shock therapy was invented by two psychiatrists who were visiting a slaughterhouse, “watching cattle being killed by a blow between the eyes with a sledgehammer”. After noticing that some cattle were not killed but instead fell to the floor and mimicked the convulsions of an epileptic seizure, the psychiatrists realized they needed to do this for their patients because “men coming out of an epileptic convulsion were inclined to be calmer and more peaceful for a time”. Since a sledgehammer would be too risky to use on humans, the psychiatrists chose electricity for its accuracy (160).

McMurphy brings up the point of “didn’t the public raise Cain about it?” when electroshock therapy first began and Harding responds with “when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way” (160). I believe that Kesey is trying to send a message with that line, which is that the public fears what is not normal to them and they will do anything to keep people in line with societal norms.

During the 50’s in America, many people were experimenting with drugs, including Ken Kesey and I believe drugs were one of two reasons that he wrote such an odd yet interesting story. The second reason that I believe Kesey wrote this novel is because of his life experience in a psych ward. In 1958 Kesey “took a night job on the psychiatric ward at the VA Hospital”. These two experiences are without a doubt reflected in Kesey’s novel.