Over the cuckoos nest: RESEARCH

 Find out 5 facts out regarding psychiatric hospitals in the 60s: 

1. In the 1960s, most psychiatric hospitals were suburban or rural. Many were 'total institutions', as Erving Goffman described, places of residence and work where many like-situated individuals, cut off from wider society for an appreciable period of time, led an enclosed and formally administered way of life.
2. In the 1960s, social revolution brought about major changes for mental health care including a reduction in hospital beds, the growth of community services, improved pharmacological and psychological interventions and the rise of patient activism.
3. Psychiatric wards were gender segregated, but some hospitals were ‘bringing the genders together for civilised activities
4. Overcrowding and understaffing in the psychiatric hospitals combined with escalating NHS costs to force providers of mental health services to turn towards the community as the location of care.
5. People with mental health problems were considered ‘lunatics’ and ‘defective’ and were sent off to asylums. ‘Insanity’ was thought to be incurable and there was no incentive to treat it.