Fly by the Cuckoo's Nest!

Which one of you nuts has got any guts?...
I must be crazy to be in a loony bin like this.

Anyone with any knowledge of great movies and the even greater Jack Nicholson and the Academy Award roll he played in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He perfectly played the personal wrench in the machinery of the bureaucracy of the mental health hospital and also showed the inadequaces of the way we treated mentally ill persons.

Once a ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Now a Museum 

SALEM, Ore. — Nurse Ratched slept here. 

The punctiliously cruel psychiatric ward tyrant in the book and movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was brought to cinematic life by the actress Louise Fletcher during filming here at the Oregon State Hospital in the 1970s. 

But the melding of real life and art went far beyond the film set. Take the character of John Spivey, a doctor who ministers to Jack Nicholson’s doomed insurrectionist character, Randle McMurphy. Dr. Spivey was played by Dr. Dean Brooks, the real hospital’s superintendent at the time. 

Dr. Brooks read for the role, he said, and threw the script to the floor, calling it unrealistic — a tirade that apparently impressed the director, Milos Forman. Mr. Forman ultimately offered him the part, Dr. Brooks said, and told the doctor-turned-actor to rewrite his lines to make them medically correct. Other hospital staff members and patients had walk-on roles. 

Now jump cut to the present: the office and treatment rooms of the hospital, which opened in 1883, have been turned into a Museum of Mental Health — one of only a few around the world that are part of a still-functioning hospital, which sprawls behind the old brick structure. 

In the museum, a steel examination table sits near a photograph of the Oregon State Insane Asylum baseball team, which once played against local challengers in and around Salem, Oregon’s capital. A straitjacket and a spilled bag of handcuffs fill another display, with a notation from the night watch book recorded at 2 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1913. “Mrs. Bernard would not remain in bed,” an attendant wrote. “Restrained her with jacket and belt.”
The juxtaposition of real and celluloid, truth and fiction, that emerged on the “Cuckoo’s Nest” set continues. A photograph of Ms. Fletcher’s character, steely smile and nurse’s cap in place, adorns a wall near a television that blares the movie itself on a continuous loop showing the movie’s patients watching that very television, which was retrieved from a hospital trash bin and saved after the filming ended. 

The result — physical evidence of the hospital’s past alongside the Hollywood portrait — creates questions that McMurphy and his cohorts might have asked. What is real and what merely seems real? Was the hospital, which had a large number of voluntary admissions in its early years, a place of sanctuary, an old definition of the word “asylum,” or of confinement? Darkness and dread, or escape? 

Dr. Brooks, now 96, and living near the hospital in a retirement home, minces no words when he says that mental health treatment in years past had its flaws. But anyone looking back, he said in an interview, should also look hard at the present. Institutions like the Oregon State Hospital, which he supervised for nearly 30 years — from the mid-1950s to the early ’80s — might not have been perfect, he said, but they were at least out there and trying to help. Today, he said, prisons have taken over the job, with barely a pretense of treatment. “Three-fourths of all mentally ill people are in jails or penitentiaries,” he said.
But the new museum raises questions about what the hospitals themselves were created to do, and how many patients were actually mentally ill by modern definitions....

I'm reading an interesting book called My Brother Ron and it covers how in the 1960s America decided to move from institutionalization of the mentally ill to outpatient treatment with new miracle drugs.  Well the miracles didn't quite work out as well, federal judges decided people had a right to be nuts and  our streets are filled with the homeless and our prisons are acting as mental facilities.  Gotta love it.  But if you wnat a great flick, check our Nicholson and a young Danny Devito in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest!