50 th Anniversary Re-release of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest - A Lived Experience of Electroconvulsive Therapy for Moviegoers

     The Miloš Forman film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a 4K restoration re-release this July. It is the only modern movie besides Silence of the Lambs to ever win the “big five” at the Oscars: Academy Awards for best screenplay, director, actor, actress, and picture.

     Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the effervescent rogue R. P. McMurphy delighted audiences, but also horrified them with one graphic two minute segment when he is given electroshock treatment. Nicholson had observed a number of electroshock sessions and their aftermath at the Oregon mental hospital where Cuckoo was filmed so that he could realistically show as a “lived experience” the horror he had observed.

     Consequently, his electroshock scene seems “real”…or if not real – it is a movie, after all – certainly truthful. Proponents of electroconvulsive “therapy” still would have you believe otherwise.

     “Of course, ECT today is nothing like that,” they say. “The patient is anesthetized and his body paralyzed so there is no pain. It is not punishment. Rather, it is proven to be the most effective treatment for those who have not benefitted from the more conventional psychiatric approach of pharmaceutical therapy.”

     Yes, today’s ECT recipients may not feel the pain. They are now paralyzed and anesthetized, but the violence of that 460 volt zap of electricity and the subsequent seizure is still realistically shown in Nicholson’s face during that two minute movie scene.

     Psychiatry’s blatantly false pronouncement that ECT is not harmful begs people to ignore what they’ve seen with their own eyes in that scene.

     The ongoing pie-in-the-sky pubic relations patter by psychiatry about the benefits of ECT ignores the fact that no valid, placebo based trial have ever shown ECT to be effective. However, many studies have shown it increases the risk of suicide, causes irreparable memory loss, and poses post-ECT cardiac conditions for too many of its recipients.

     The brutality of an electroshock session can now be a “lived experience” of ECT for moviegoers who now see the truth about the barbaric procedure, a truth which cannot be glossed over by any of psychiatry’s marketing lies.