Nothing too shocking

I agree. Why should it be disturbing though? More than anything it's a glimpse inside madness.

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I think what's most upsetting about the movie isn't so much the individual scenes--though they are upsetting--but the way the movie ties everything together into a sort of narrative. It seems to me that the entire movie is set up to tell the story of life in the asylum: it starts with entering the asylum, passes through the various elements of life in the asylum (viz. wandering around among the other inmates; being bathed and fed and groomed by the staff; being warehoused nude in some cold, empty room; undergoing various seemingly useless psychological check-ups; etc.), and ends with getting out through death. That's life there: you're in until you die, and there's no real hope of getting out or improving your situation. Indeed, you're just going to deteriorate inside, and no one's gonna do anything about it. Notice that we never see anything that seems like treatment at all, and we never see anything suggesting that anyone's situation is improved by being in the institution.

This, I thought, was what made the paranoid patient so important: he seemed relatively rational, and he seemed right that, if this place was having any effect on him, it was making him worse. And even so, he couldn't get out. Not only that, but, given what we see, it seems there's nothing he could say or do to get out. At first, his problem was that he was depressed. So they treated his depression, and then he ended up paranoid. So now they want to give him tranquilizers to deal with that paranoia, which means he'll most likely ended up depressed and lethargic again. And the whole cycle will start over--except that maybe he'll be easier to deal with for a while, which, it seems, is what the staff is really aiming for.