Earlier in the film, at McMurphy’s admissions interview, the weak, emasculated man in charge, Dr. Spivey, tells him that prison officials, in fact, suspect he might be faking his craziness, and they want an evaluation to determine whether or not he’s really mentally ill. The evidence he’s nuts: He’s “belligerent, talked when unauthorized, been resentful in attitude toward work in general,” and that he’s “lazy.”
You hear that when you’re eleven years old, you see where Breaking Rules can get you.
An Italian neuropsychiatrist in the 1930s, Ugo Cerletti, was studying the link between epilepsy and schizophrenia, and that research, combined with a slaughterhouse visit where he watched panicked pigs electrocuted to docility just before getting their throats cut, sparked the idea of electroshock therapy as a form of psychiatric treatment. He killed a lot of dogs, first, by placing electrodes at each end of the animal; he eventually learned to put them on either side of the head, which allowed the current to bypass the heart. He moved on to humans in 1938 and had positive results with an itinerant, jibbering man from Milan, whom he zapped back to a productive lucidity. By 1940 electroshock was in use in the United States, the new Holy Grail of convulsive therapy, viewed as more humane than Metrazol shock or insulin coma, more progressive and civilized than the “treatment” of dumping the straitjacketed or shackled “insane” in hellish asylums for life, and, despite subsequent memory loss or disorientation or broken bones or spinal injuries from the severe spasming (or from being restrained), more effective.
Electroshock reached a zenith in the early 1950s (see: Sylvia Plath), then began a slow tapering downward during the development of antipsychotic drugs. The practice hit its nadir in the mid to late ’70s, but a 1985 conference of the National Institutes of Health acknowledged its efficacy, and electroshock — now referred to as ECT, electroconvulsive therapy — is back on an upswing; the National Mental Health Association has reported roughly one hundred thousand people a year are receiving it, primarily as a treatment for depression. Advocates say most of the kinks have been worked out — the equipment is upgraded, the appropriate voltage standardized; anesthesia and muscle relaxants are administered to prevent the bodily convulsions; the current is applied unilaterally rather than bilaterally, for fewer side effects.
But whichever side you’re looking for, whichever side you’re on, it’s tough to find an article or book on electroshock therapy written after 1975 that doesn’t reference One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That image smacked both culture and science hard. Some attribute that one depiction of electroshock to the overall decline of the practice in the United States; others claim ECT was already on the wane, and the movie simply heightened awareness or hastened its fall from grace. They weave discussion of Randle P. McMurphy in among actual case histories of real people and words like hypothalamus, the temporal cortex, neuroendocrine hypotheses, cognitive dysfunction, neurotransmitters, and joules.
But for me, at eleven, it isn’t a cultural phenomenon; it’s the most brutal, cautionary thing I have ever seen. It’s the iconic electric chair that bursts a prisoner’s head into smoke and flames. It’s the cop’s stun gun shocking the belligerent perp; it’s the blue fluorescent bug zapper that fries any creature that stings. It’s bang, bang, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer coming down upon your head, it’s the throbbing cartoon thunderbolt of agony stabbing the brain in aspirin commercials. It will be the time, later, when I am fifteen and working in a bakery, that one of the older guys in back tells me to Put your hand, here, on the metal side of a dough-mixing machine, and Okay, now grab on to this post, and I do, and I hear the burr as all my marrow jerks up hot and vibrating, my jaw snaps, the roots of my teeth begin to burn, and every thought I have ever had of owning myself is for a flash seared away. It’s the imagined whiff of cerebral scorch. It’s the image of cocky, swaggering, feral Jack Nicholson reduced to an electrode-wired animal in a cage and temporarily made meek. It’s the terror of that one day happening to me, if I ever step out of line, ever become belligerent, ever talk when unauthorized, ever appear resentful in attitude to work in general, ever become lazy.
Because most of all, I learn, it’s something people in power can do to punish you.
I had a blind Aunt Edith, one of my grandmother’s six siblings. As I child I saw her on holidays and the odd family occasion when we’d all go out to a formal Chinese restaurant. I remember her as pleasant and smiling and dull, a well-groomed aging lady in a boxy suit and careful bouffant who smelled of Aqua Net and fruit Life Savers and gave crisp $5 bills as presents. Most of the time she would be perched on the couch next to my grandmother, who brought her miniature quiches and cocktail dogs on a napkin; it was my job to escort her to the bathroom once or twice during an evening, where, always forgetting, I would lean in to turn on the bathroom light for her and then be embarrassed at the light switch’s click.
My mother and I would visit Aunt Edith at her Miracle Mile apartment, and I was amazed at how tidy it was, every knickknack in place. Once I remember Aunt Edith talking about a book she was writing, the story of her life, and she waved a thick sheaf of neatly typewritten pages at us. She had big, big plans for it. I remember an unusual spark in Aunt Edith that day, an off-kilter excitement that seemed unusual for her. A simmer that somehow made me uncomfortable.
Edith was born sighted, but lost the sight in one eye from a bout of babyhood measles, and a few years later had the incredible bad luck of losing the sight in the other after a schoolyard accident. Each of her six brothers and sisters took on defined family roles: the Beauty, the Businessman, and so on. Edith, in addition to being the Blind One, was also considered the Bright One. My grandmother Ethel, the second youngest, was the Party Girl, the classic ’20s flapper, but she was also, always, Edith’s Caretaker, even after she married my grandfather at nineteen.
In her early twenties, Edith married a man named Everett, who was partially sighted and a genius with electronics; they started a successful business together, and she became more independent of my grandmother for many years. But when the marriage ended, it seemed to trigger an alarming change in Edith — now she became the Crazy One. She began showing signs of manic depression; during wild upswings of energy she’d get angry and mean or ramble about the big, big plans she had for her life. She’d also hit the bars at night, picking up men and having a lot of sex. She was still relatively independent — living on her own, getting by on savings and disability, getting around in cabs — but she’d make incoherent and frenzied phone calls to my grandmother in the middle of the night. She was robbed and beaten up at least once; she might have been raped. Then she’d crash and disappear for a while, to my grandmother’s despair and panic and perhaps my grandfather’s relief. She’d return, apologetic, brushing off concerns, picking up her life, and all would be fine. Then the mania would start again, the upswing of frenzied partying and sex, the shrieking, volatile phone calls — my grandmother was terrified Edith would get herself killed, and my grandfather became increasingly resentful at being Edith’s Caretaker, the role he inherited when he married my grandmother. It was during one of these manic periods that my grandfather decided to commit Edith to the mental institution at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.