McMurphy convinces the other patients to support him in an insurrection against Ratched’s control she eventually puts an end to it by having McMurphy lobotomized.įew other works of fiction or nonfiction have so indelibly captured the horrors of psychiatric hospitals in the mid-twentieth century, from the lack of any real effort to cure patients to outright abuse of the kind the public relations man promised had disappeared the overmedication of the patients the forced inactivity the humiliating and unsanitary conditions (“ stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him”). The book centers around the struggle between Randle McMurphy, a rebellious small-time criminal who feigns mental illness to avoid prison time-memorably played by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film adaptation-and Nurse Ratched, the sadistic manager of the psych ward where he has been sent.

Boasting of how far things have come from the “old-fashioned cruelty” that used to reign in such places, he tells a group of visiting teachers, “What a cheery atmosphere, don’t you agree?… Oh when I think back on the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, brutality, oh, I realize ladies that we have come a long way.” 1Īs Kesey’s novel makes devastatingly clear, however, this new-and-improved institution simply offers the same old abuse in a different package. An urgent expos? of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.N EAR THE BEGINNING OF K EN K ESEY’ S 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the narrator recalls seeing a public relations man give a tour of the psychiatric hospital where the story is set. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable. She also surveys a range of efforts to address the problem, making the case for a large-scale overhaul of mental health care and criminal justice.

Investigating police departments, courts, jails, and emergency health care facilities across the country, Roth provides the first nationwide account of this mental health crisis-and uncovers the hidden forces behind it. She introduces us to ordinary people whose untreated mental illnesses drive them repeatedly into the justice system-and in some cases, to their deaths. She takes readers from the overwhelmed mental health units of the Los Angeles County Jail to the women's prisons of Oklahoma, which have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with mental illness in the country. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America's tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.

Insane by alisa roth