One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Sociological Analysis

143 Words1 Pages
The article explains the sociological perspective on mental hospitals is congruent with the caricature presented in the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Mental illness is viewed as residual deviance, and mental hospitals as total institutions in which patients who are not really sick are oppressed by authoritarian mental health professionals. Propositions explain why this negative stereotype has been widely accepted. What originally were advanced as ideal types have been treated as empirical types by some researchers who have found what they expected to see Crude labelling theory has displaced a disease perspective. The reformist bias of sociologists, an anti-establishment, pro-underdog sentimentality, and naive reliance on pseudopatient