Breaking Down Anxiety

It’s been about a year or two now since I’ve felt as though I have had little to no control over my personality. It’s hard to describe because it’s hard to notice it myself until I sit down and think about it and realize I’m nothing like I was the other day. But every week or so, or sometimes randomly halfway throughout the day it feels like I’m given a random “amount” of introversion/extroversion. There were days when it first started at Beeber where I wanted to talk to everyone in my class and then other days where I didn’t want to talk to anybody. And other than that, basically all of my personality traits are never consistent with every now and then they have a drastic change. We don’t really see a character (at least yet) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that has a sort of “multiple personality disorder” (even if I wouldn’t really define myself to have it) but the closest I could think of is every characters shift in extroversion/introversion when affected by Mcmurphy.

Mcmurphy over a couple of weeks, made almost the entirety of the ward more extroverted and made the community more involved with each other from day 1. And then later one when he hears that he might not be able to leave when promised, his entire personality shifts to being quiet and collected, not wanting to break any rules. Cheswick was being rowdy and asked McMurphy for backup; instead of jumping in (or leading the charge) like he would usually do, Bromden described that “all he got was silence.” (Kesey 133). Even though McMurphy’s came from a direct cause, the sudden shift of personality is something that connected with me. His personality shift from loud to quiet felt uncontrolled and sudden. But when this did happen, it made me wonder more about if my different “personalities” come from some cause. Because prior to reading this (and seeing other similar examples) I was fairly certain that it was random on how I was feeling. When looking into it I found a lot of extreme answers like Alzheimer’s or brain tumors that I’m fairly certain I don’t have but what stuck out to me was anxiety. I’ve had anxiety problems ever since I was little and it’s been a while since I’ve really been affected by it. But connecting it to the book, Bromden is very fitting of the description (plus more) of having anxiety. Even though we’re not supposed to be diagnosing the characters, I think Bromden is more fit for paranoid schizophrenia, but they’re similar as they both are almost a form of panic attack. We “concluded” in our group discussion that the fog in the ward could be Bromden’s schizophrenia taking over whenever he is worried. We assumed this because as soon as Nurse Ratched lost control of the patients, it’s said that “There’s no more fog any place” and it was removed when “we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog.” (Kesey 115). And although it may be a weird connection, if I put myself in Bromden’s shoes, basing it off of my life, McMurphy would be like my mother. When I was younger I had 2 main sources of my anxiety: being left alone and getting on airplanes. My experiences and Bromden’s were both put at bay by what is called exposure therapy; which is basically a technique to get rid of a fear by being exposed to it. For me, my mother would take me on planes more often and purposefully make stops at stores so that I could beat my anxiety over time. With Bromden, Mcmurphy would “pull him out of the fog” to stand up against Nurse Ratched. Granted anxiety always comes back, as we see the fog returning when McMurphy stops standing against Big Nurse, but there’s no preventing that.

Reading about Bromden’s mental illness really made me grateful for my mother and how she would be willing to help me, no matter how difficult it would be. Bromden didn’t really have an outlet and when he finally got one, it only lasted a few days. It also gave me a realistic comparison for a representation of my anxiety, that being the fog. Of course it would be different for me because I wasn’t in a mental institution but the way the book looks at it is very accurate. I think if my anxiety ever does come back in a major way, Bromdens’ situation reminded me of a proper way to look at it and a proper solution.