New wing for Cuckoo's Nest hospital

The American mental hospital that gained attention as the set for the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and as a place where real psychiatric abuses occurred is turning a new chapter.

Oregon State Hospital unveiled a new wing yesterday that will replace most of the decrepit building made famous in the movie. Patients will begin moving in early next year.

The old crumbling hospital had toxic paint, asbestos, a leaky roof and was covered with piles of pigeon droppings.

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"You can see the place where they showered. You can see their scratchings on the wall," said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, a Democrat who helped get money for the new hospital. "They lived there. And then often people forgot them. They just took them there and it was over."

In its place is a hospital designed to facilitate modern theories in mental health treatment, trying to mimic as much as possible daily life outside the institution. One area resembles a city street and will allow patients to wander between a shop, post office, bank, hair salon, gymnasium and library, along with the more usual classrooms, an art therapy room and group activity rooms.

Group treatment rooms are smaller and six acres of outdoor space will give patients more access to fresh air. The hospital is also bringing in new staff and stepping up care to its patients, almost all of whom are involuntarily committed by a judge.

All patients will be required to get at least 20 hours per week of treatment. They won't have access to their bedrooms or to televisions during the day, encouraging them to take part in treatment programmes.

Just two years ago, the hospital was the subject of a scathing report by the US Department of Justice. Federal investigators found mice in rooms, deaths from pneumonia and outbreaks of scabies, along with nearly 400 cases of patient-on-patient assault in one year alone.

Portland newspaper The Oregonian has reported extensively on abuses in the hospital, including the death last year of a man who succumbed to a heart attack in his bed hours before anyone found his body.

Although One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - which won five Oscars, including Best Picture - was filmed at the medical facility, neither the 1975 film nor the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based specifically refers to Oregon State Hospital.Kesey drew on his experiences working the graveyard shift at a veterans' hospital in Palo Alto, California for the vivid portrayal of the rebellious patient Randle Patrick McMurphy - Jack Nicholson's role in the film - as well as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched and "The Chief" Bromden.

For all the attention the movie brought to abuses at mental health institutions, it was 30 years before enough support galvanised to demolish and rebuild the decaying shrine to psychiatry's dark history.

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Moves were not begun until state senators toured the hospital in 2004 and were stunned by a grim discovery: the cremated remains of 3,600 patients locked away and forgotten inside corroding copper canisters.

The remains belonged to patients who had died at the hospital between the late 1880s and the mid-1970s.

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