The Golden Age of Mental Health Care in the U.$....

Rating: 9/10 (11 January 2016)

Here in "No Care" North Carolina, what we find in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST seems almost quaint. Let's say you were feeling a tad suicidal after a serious operation about ten years ago. What would happen is this: you'd find yourself shackled to a chair in a "mental health facility." The following day, you'd be driven to another city, where you'd find yourself in a run-down building in the worst part of town. In the bathroom, you'd find the floor and walls literally covered with blood. Some of your fellow inmates would be controlled via "chemical restraints." They'd walk around like something out of a George A. Romero movie, drooling and staring sightlessly at you. If you could get to sleep at night (because of all the snoring), you might find yourself awakened by an old man standing over you, cursing you for no reason at the top of his lungs (which he would do once too often and end up being beaten so badly by the brutal, hulking staff members that he literally wouldn't be able to sit in a chair); or find yourself flat on your back, the stitches from your heart surgery just a few days old, lifting your feet to try to fend off a pair of combatants coming your way (they would stop just short of where you lay, but would tower over you until they resolved their "issue"); or find yourself mere moments from defending- very possibly to the death- a nurse attempting to give out the daily "meds" to a psychotic patient actually seven feet tall... In the end, they would give the patient a bus ticket and put them on a bus to any other city in the country they wanted to go to. That facility, I've been told, has been closed for the better part of a decade. Nowadays, if you're extremely lucky, you can talk to a therapist in another city on a television screen once every two to six months for thirty minutes. The solution to the problem of mental health care in this state has been to outsource everything to the Prison Industrial Complex. And Electroshock Therapy IS still used these days. At least HERE, in "No Care" North Carolina.