ABSTRACT
The American Psychiatric Association lists hundreds of mental disorders in the fifth and most recent edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 2013, categorized as to type as well as degree of seriousness. The depiction of mental disorder in Western literature boasts a lineage that stretches back millennia before film. In 1945, Mary Jane Ward received a letter from her literary agent in response to her inquiry about her proposed third novel. The film, released in 1975, is set in 1963 in a psychiatric ward that’s run by Nurse Mildred Ratched and her minions, the orderlies or attendants, whom Kesey condescendingly and anachronistically refers to as “the black boys”.
