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The Real Hospital Behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Oregon State Hospital Documentary

Hallways Of Time

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Long before Hollywood turned Oregon State Hospital into the unforgettable setting for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it had already earned a reputation built on tragedy, overcrowding, and controversial care. This episode follows its rise, its darkest decades, and the legacy that still echoes long after the cameras stopped rolling.

CHAPTERS:
1:53 Chapter 1 — A State That Didn't Know What to Do With Its Broken Minds
6:00 Chapter 2 — Building a Cure on Asylum Avenue
10:50 Chapter 3 — A City Unto Itself
16:44 Chapter 4 — What They Did in the Name of Healing
23:01 Chapter 5 — Three Thousand Five Hundred and Forty-Five Souls Behind One Set of Walls
27:07 Chapter 6 — Cuckoo's Nest and the World That Came to Watch
34:14 Chapter 7 — The Senator Opens a Door
41:17 Chapter 8 — Building a Memorial on the Grounds of Forgetting
47:31 Chapter 9 — What the Urns Remember

This content is produced for educational and documentary purposes. Some visual materials may be used under fair use for historical analysis and storytelling. All ownership remains with the original rights holders. Please reach out if there are any concerns.

Core sources links:
www.mentalhealthportland.org
www.ohs.org
www.oshmuseum.org
www.oregonencyclopedia.org

20 Comments

@ralphbieker8104 3 weeks ago

“IT’S NOW CALLED SALEM”!!!

@lisamcdonald9792 1 month ago

What an amazing video! I pray that the patients who were "finally reunited" with their families were made to feel fully at peace. ❤❤

@reneeparker7475 2 months ago (edited)

I now live in Oregon. I was born in and grew up in Virginia, about 35 miles east of a similar place there, Western State Mental Lunatic Asylum founded in 1828. One of it's directors, Dr. Joseph Dejarnette, who was an advocate or eugenics. He built his own "hospital" near Western State, which he controlled. I have seen that place and it struck me as evil and I was glad that it was closed and in decay.
One of my great-grandfathers is buried on the grounds of Western State in 1888. I don't know what he was there, but he is buried there in a grave marked only by a stone reading "1887."
Oregon is not the only place that this horror happened.

@CatMomsCottage 2 months ago (edited)

I’ve lived in Portland for nearly thirty years. I still remember the Oregonian’s front-page series about the hospital and the canisters back in the early 2000s. The descriptions of the areas they were still using were horrifying, and the forgotten ones in their copper tins were tragic. I’m so glad there are people like Phyllis working to reunite them with their families, and that they have a dignified, peaceful place to rest.

Having the second hospital in southern Oregon means families don’t have to travel as far to visit their loved ones.

Also, the story mentioned that a percentage of people at the hospital were there because they’d reached the coverage limits of their medical insurance. There had already been some movement on parity laws, and iirc, Oregon passed a law requiring health insurers to cover mental health needs the same as they do physical health conditions, whether chronic or acute. Mental health parity became a federal law a few years later.

@darthmillennia 2 months ago

Oh hey I live like 15 minutes from this :)) they have a really dope museum and the entry fee is $7!! It displays actual equipment used throughout the years and tells the stories of those that lived here. The museum employees were amazing too! The hospital itself has also gotten much better from what I’ve heard :))

@alangray9117 2 months ago

Oregon State Hospital shared so many similarities to all the mental hospitals of the time.

@spyderwebs78 2 months ago

Lifelong Oregonian here and this is in my hometown 😊 I drive by almost every day and they’ve built apartments/houses on some of land that had belonged to the OSH. They say there are “no bodies” left there but one can’t help but wonder if that’s really the case. It’s an eerily beautifully setting in the fall 🧡

@teresamquint 1 month ago

I was doing ancestry and found out that my grandmother left my great aunt’s ashes there after she died in the hospital. I was able to get her ashes back so she could rest in a better place.

@toribern419 2 months ago

47:13 damn. That is incredibly sad. And such a beautiful person Phyllis is for bringing these ppl back together. ❤

@sindyyoung5144 2 months ago

To me, it is noticeable that the story omits President Reagan shutting down thousands of psychiatric hospitals, rather than demand reform. Prayers to the families who made the hard choice to leave the disturbed relatives in the streets. They think they have no options....

@MichaelG-q6k 1 month ago

I didn't know this was set in Oregon, but the movie/novel had a huge impact on my life. For decades, I avoided any sort of psychological therapy, for fear of getting caught up in something like this.

@rebeccamoore6382 1 month ago (edited)

In the early 2000s this was one of the most dangerous hospitals. Staff were being attacked daily, suffering life changing injuries. Admin didnt care, they just swept it under the rug. Oregons mental health system is backwards mess. You have to twist yourself into knots to get someone help. They wait till the person kills someone before they do anything about it

@julienielsen3746 1 month ago

In 1917 my great grandmother had a hysterectomy in Portland. Something happened maybe with hormones or? But, she had some mental issues because of it. So they sent her to the Oregon State Hospital. A few months later she died there. I didn't know about this until about a year ago. When I was doing family research. - I was in High School when they were filming "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". One of my teachers said he was going to try out to be an extra. From what I've heard they didn't hire any extras.

@latricaluna668 2 months ago

I grew up seeing the hospital everyday even lived in felony flats ( house's built-in the shadows of the prison walls

@PersephoneDaSilva 2 months ago

I really like how you provide background information for the locations of the places you're covering. It's a great detail.

@hrbailey379xhd 2 months ago (edited)

"A state that didn’t know what to do with their broken minds". I think an argument could be made that they still don’t. I worked for some years in the care community and what we do to one another as humans, with no concern for our loved ones is still very prevalent in Oregon. Families still drop family members off at a care facility, sell all the assets and never show up again. Care attendants are still fired and arrested for abuse of residents. Corporations that own the care facilities only staff to the absolute bare minimum and even when given the opportunity to change the staffing levels, Oregon caves in to lobbyists rather than base on facts, numbers and science.

@robertjohnston5040 2 months ago

Deinstitutionalization is only partially true. Many are now sent to prison instead. I worked on 48C during the 80's. It wasn't too bad when I was there. They sure got better food than the jails. Treated pretty well unless they were a physical danger to others. Then controlled, but not abused.

@nancynichols-l2l 2 months ago

the hospital behind cockoo's nest is the veterans in Menlo Park.

@SHADLESKY-z8x 2 months ago (edited)

Born and raised in Oregon. And lived in or near Salem For Most of my career I was involved and aware of social services offered. The saga and history of The"mental hospital" was quite interesting to me. I'm curious to know more, so thank you. And oh, I spent some weeks working at The State Hospital as a nursing student. My experience there in 1988 was just HORRIBLE. The patients were not treated with compassion and sometimes the staff mistook us student nurses as being patients. The staff were condescending, rude. I felt a bond with the mental patients, not with the staff. I hated my time there

@rickclagett9070 2 months ago

Since moving here in 2001 it became clear to me that Oregon has more than its share of the mentaly challanged. Many of which spend their days just down the way in the state house