What Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did for Ronald Reagan and the California Ideology

Madness and California

Ken Kesey was a great ideologue of California libertarianism. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gave a countercultural punch to the governmental forces that wanted to close mental institutions. Combine that with indifferent and underfunded state homes for the mentally ill, tyrannical psychiatrists and an animus against institutions that Right and Left shared and boom, you have one reason for the crisis of homelessness you see in the Golden State.

Andrew Scull author of Madness in Civilization does a good job of historicizing the demise of mental institutions and the evolution of psychiatry. De-institutionalization was supposed to reduce the stigma of mental illness as if social stigma was a psychotic’s biggest problem, and not hallucinations and waves of darkness in one’s head. The promise of releasing the mentally ill to halfway houses and reintegration never really panned out.

Ken Kesey thought the streets were better than the asylums. The streets of 1960s California were so much kinder than they are now. Hippies and even punks could find a way of living on the margins of a city that did not include fentanyl or meth. Choosing the streets today as so many have done because they’re afraid of institutions just like the old hippie and Ronald Reagan is choosing an unimaginable kind of suffering. But the California ideology shrank public services and gave people freedom of choice, freedom from power — remember Michel Foucault?

I’m trying to understand what happened to some one I know, who is fighting for his life in the ICU.