Biology Talk

rpautrey2 · Guest

'Cuckoo's Nest' Hospital to Be Torn Down
125-Year-Old Building Will Be Torn Down This Fall
By BRAD CAIN
The Associated Press
SALEM, Ore.
July 15, 2008

So long, Cuckoo's Nest.

Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed, is making way for a new
complex. Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be
torn down and replaced starting this fall.

Although mean Nurse Ratched was pure fiction, the Oregon State
Hospital has struggled with some very real troubles over the years,
including overcrowding, crumbling floors and ceilings, outbreaks of
scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members,
and patient-on-patient assaults.

Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the
hospital, but didn't get serious about it until a group of legislators
made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of
3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room.
The lawmakers were stunned.

"Nobody said anything to anybody," said Oregon Senate President Peter
Courtney, who dubbed the chamber "the room of lost souls."

The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the
late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so
shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families
in institutions.

"It just created such an emotional momentum" for replacing the
hospital, said Courtney, who led the effort to build a new
institution.

Although "Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed here, neither the movie nor the
1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based makes any specific
references to Oregon State Hospital. Kesey drew on his experiences
working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., and set his
satirical story at an unnamed institution in Oregon.

Actor Michael Douglas, co-producer of the movie, scouted various West
Coast locations and chose the Oregon institution because then-
Superintendent Dean Brooks agreed to give the moviemakers unfettered
access.

"They wanted to make it on location with real patients," said Brooks,
now 91, who was given a speaking part as a weak-willed doctor who
acquiesces to Nurse Ratched. Brooks said 89 patients were hired as
extras.

Douglas, Jack Nicholson (who played the rebellious Randle Patrick
McMurphy) and Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched) were regulars at the
hospital during shooting.

Milos Forman, the director, lived for six weeks at the institution and
had his actors study real patients, according to a 1975 account in
Rolling Stone magazine. Nicholson became depressed because of what he
saw, including electroshock being administered to a patient.

State leaders decided in 2006 to build a new, $300 million, 620-bed
hospital at the site of the oldest and most dilapidated part of the
complex, the J Building, a yellow-painted brick structure with brown
trim, a towering cupola, and iron gratings on the windows.

The front section of the building, including the cupola, will be
preserved as a museum on the history of mental health care.

Other parts of the building were abandoned decades ago and are now a
ghostly sight. The paint has been scoured off the bricks by the
weather and the passage of time, and the wings are cluttered with old
equipment, fallen plaster and piles of pigeon droppings. The third
floor is so rotted it is not safe to walk on. The building is also
contaminated with lead paint and asbestos.

Construction of the new hospital is set to begin next spring and
should be completed by the fall of 2011.

It is not just a bricks-and-mortar exercise Oregon is undertaking to
improve care for the mentally ill. State leaders have pledged beefed-
up staffing levels, new treatment programs and better living
conditions.

Among the 590 current patients is 44-year-old Mike Wyffels, who has
been at the hospital for five years with bipolar disorder. Wyffels
said he welcomes the state's plan to give most patients their own
rooms in the new hospital. In some cases, he said, as many as seven
patients share a room.

"When you've got a bunch of people in one tiny room, it's chaos. I
can't even study in my room because I don't have the privacy to do
it," he said in a conference room while other patients milled around
outside in the hall, talking or listening to music.

In May, Portland resident Debbie Osborne came to the hospital to
collect the canister containing the remains of her great aunt Clara
Johnson, who died of pneumonia 60 years ago. Osborne plans to give the
ashes a proper burial this summer.

"It's really sad that we still have a stigma" about mental illness,
Osborne said. "But it's changing; it's a lot better."

Courtney wants the museum to include a display of ashes not yet
claimed by relatives. "You've got to remember your past to make the
future better," he said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=5379962