The Sociologists Look at the Cuckoo's Nest: The Misuse of Ideal Types

The prevailing sociological perspective on mental hospitals is congruent with the caricature presented in the movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Mental illness is viewed as residual deviance, and mental hospitals as total institutions in which patients who are not really sick are oppressed by authoritarian mental health professionals. Propositions are advanced to explain why such a negative stereotype has been widely accepted. What originally were advanced as ideal types have been treated as empirical types by some researchers who have found what they expected to see. Crude labelling theory has displaced a glib disease perspective. The reformist bias of sociologists, an anti-establishment, pro-underdog sentimentality, and naive reliance on pseudopatient studies have led some sociologists to forget that mental patients actually may suffer pain. Hence they may find the negative aspects of hospitalization not only more tolerable than participant observers would believe but actually helpful.