"On Being Sane in Insane Places" - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

 

The 1975 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is a very interesting film. Randle P McMurphy is sent to prison for battery, gambling and statutory rape. To avoid having to do prison work on a farm he feigns mental illness to get sent to a mental hospital where he's evaluated. Although he's perfectly sane, I think he's diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder. McMurphy thinks he's the only sane patient in the hospital but he finds out the he's the only patient who has been committed and all the rest are voluntary patients. They can leave the hospital at any time.

Nurse Ratched is a control freak and McMurphy is a manipulator and recusant. He doesn't submit to any authority and there is a battle of wills between McMurphy and nurse Ratched. McMurphy attacks nurse Ratched and he's lobotomized and turned into a vegetable.

Psychiatry likes to portray itself as a scientific discipline but it can hardly be an exact science because much of it can't be subjected to scientific scrutiny and method. There have been numerous psychology experiments where psychology students have feigned mental illness to see if they could trick a psychiatrist and get sent to a mental hospital.

The famous Rosenhan or Thud experiment, was conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The study was conducted by a Stanford professor of psychology called David Rosenhan. Rosenhan and eight other people feigned auditory hallucinations to try and gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the U.S. The study "On Being Sane in Insane Places", was published by the journal 'Science' in 1973.