Rough Draft: Research Paper One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest“All men are created equal; [who] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; [that] among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (Thomas Jefferson) Written on July 4, 1776 by Thomas Jefferson and many other authors, the Declaration of Independence, defines what is given to every American citizen; these rights will never be legally taken away from him. Fast forward now to the 21st century, where people are limited due to minor mental defects and are deprived of our basic rights. There is a lack of funding and importance placed on mental hospitals because mental patients are not believed to be normal human beings. In Ken Kasey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the patients are treated as secondary human beings and their needs are not put first, they are not given a voice and thereafter their basic rights are taken away. The book correctly describes hospital life in some ways, but funding from the US government and overall treatment must increase to protect current and future patients. The lack of funding for psychiatric hospitals causes worse and unsafe living conditions in psychiatric hospitals than in the past. to be. Basic treatments such as AIDS testing are ignored, and patients remain vulnerable to life-threatening diseases. Steve Graff in his report on living conditions and life inside a hospital in the United States said: “With such a high-risk group, it is imperative to test patients regularly to improve care and reduce transmission to others. Historically, however, HIV testing is often not implemented in mental health care.” (Graff, Steve). This is important because it is an example of how hospitals do not treat patients the same as human beings... middle of paper ......Ken Kasey's health hospital can be comparable to life in an asylum for criminals. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest accurately describes life in hospitals in some smaller aspects, but overall the book is a dramatization of what life was really like in the 1960s and what it is like now. There has been a great change for patients who have worked to increase their autonomy, but within hospitals nothing has been done to improve their lives. With funding from the U.S. government, mental health hospitals can increase and improve staffing and care, which would make the process faster and healthier for the patients who ultimately release them back into the world. Funding has declined significantly over the past few decades and our future generations will not have enough funding to have the ability to receive mental health treatment in the future..