One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Treating mental health problems is a tricky project. The mind is a staggeringly complex structure, composed of layers of experiences and biology that, when overlaid on and enmeshed with each other, create systems that are extremely difficult to understand or even articulate, much less fix when something goes wrong. Consequently, treating the mind requires discipline, empathy, and years of hard work on both the doctor and the patient. That sounds boring, though, so for most of human history it was easier to just think people with mental illnesses were weird and/or cursed, and as we all know the best way to deal with people who are weird and/or cursed is to put them in a big building and lock the doors and hope they don’t kill each other. Such was the state of mental healthcare in 1975 when Milos Forman directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an Oscar-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey’s book of the same name. One Flew Over is empathetic in its approach to mental health, exposing the deficiencies in how it was treated and grounding its social commentary in spectacular performances by Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. In today’s episode, then, let’s look back at this classic and see how it’s held up. Let the games begin!