At 1:02: Duncan Trussell starts talking about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — "It's completely different from the movie... Ken Kesey, he was like..." — and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!" Trussell lets that go and proceeds to put the story, as told in the book, into his own words.
At 3:22: Duncan and Joe discuss the real-world medical practice of lobotomies: "They really did that"/"They really did that.... What happened to the person? 'They became a really good patient.'"
At 4:45: Duncan and Joe discuss Thomas Eagleton and electroshock therapy for depression. "Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"
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In The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how old Joe arranged Rosemary's lobotomy in 1941 without telling anyone, and its aftermath, both to Rosemary and the family. Horror-film stuff.
"They really did that?"/"They really did that."
Hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery in 50 years. 2075's podcast will be lit.
and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!"
Trussell: "When was the last time you read One Flew Over The Cockoo's Nest?"
Rogan: "Oh, it's been a long time...[something I couldn't make out]...Maybe I never read it."
"If you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"
Yes, and every single one of us knows this is just fake, fake, fake. We are all required to put on this fake mask and so we do. Without hesitation, because it hurts nobody. But we all know it's all BS. We just silently agree not to say that out loud.
We have enough problems as a country without having to resort to mentally unfit people (such as Mr. Eagleton, or you know, proto-pedophile Joe Biden) running our government.
Twenty years from now, we’ll look back on this trans surgery the same way. My thought is that medmal insurers won’t underwrite the doctors who do it. Too risky.
Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!
Only if he was the candidate of the Regime. Otherwise, they'd use it to label him a wacko and destroy him.
For example, the media writes sympathetically of Hunter Biden's courageous struggle with addiction, but they smear JFK as having a sordid history of drug abuse and womanizing.
Did it have a breast scene in it? If so, I vaguely remember it.
About two years ago, I listened to Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Of course, I had seen the movie and it was hard to accept the differences in descriptions of the main character in the book versus the movie.
I finally began to listen to Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" about Kesey and The Merry Pranksters. That was a tough one to follow but druggies are druggies. Kesey's life was weird AF but as I am now into the 4th chapter of "Sometimes a Great Notion", I cannot deny that he was a great writer. Too bad LSD, pot and stupid marijuana laws got in the way of him turning out more stuff.
I suppose we can thank him for the initial support of the beginnings of The Grateful Dead though their music is not for me.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Some people still swear by ECT but what does it do to your brain? Can you really do high-level work afterward, or is it just a given that you no longer can?
Seems plenty risky to me!
To be fair to Rogan, though, he had not "just said he read the book." What Rogan had just said was "Maybe I never read it."
I had a few lobotomy patients when I worked one summer in a VA psych hospital. This was being done in an era when no drugs were successful at calming behavior for some patients. The only drug being used was Chloral Hydrate. The fellow promoting lobotomies went too far but, at one time, it worked when nothing else did.
Well, seeing how much this blog has focused on the Bobby Kennedy it’s probably worth mentioning that his aunt Rosemary was very cruelly forced to undergo a lobotomy - and for what seem to be even more questionable reasons than they were ordinarily given. I’m realizing how far that might go in explaining his attraction to deadly medical conspiracies.
Lobotomy— best practices circa 1940. The science was settled!
My grandmother had electroshock therapy for depression and psychosis in the mid-1970s. While it was certainly done as humanely as possible, and with the best intentions, and seemed to be the best standard of care, I kinda doubt that you'd find any psychiatrist willing to defend it.
It would certainly explain 81 million Biden voters.
Frustrated lobotomists abound.
To be fair, Joe Rogaine is probably getting better results with his MDMA, ayahuasca, cannabis and magic mushrooms than he’d get after undergoing a lobotomy. But it might make him a more compliant foot soldier for the right-wing.
It’s good to see right wingers promoting a broadcaster who’s into a more diverse recreational drug regimen than their previous hero Rush Limbaugh was. He used to jump for joy at the thought of his next Oxy-Contin. Or I guess his Viagara would count.Joe Rogaine has way more pharmaceutical tricks up his sleeve, though.
Right-wing drug-induced broadcasting. It’s a thing.
"In The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how old Joe arranged Rosemary's lobotomy in 1941 without telling anyone, and its aftermath, both to Rosemary and the family. Horror-film stuff."
This is something RFK Jr. talks about in his recent podcast with Joe Rogan.
"Rogan: "Oh, it's been a long time...[something I couldn't make out]...Maybe I never read it.""
That's *after* he blurts out "Ken Kesey wrote it?" But before that, he asserts that he read it when he was in high school.
I believe Joe is interested in Kesey because of the CIA drug experiments and the drug culture.
so can turning on cableTV to watch MSM = self-electro-shock-?
and remember also years of CNN whenever travelled!!
At 1 minute in, Trussell said "I read it when I was in high school" and Rogan responds, "Yeah, me too."
Please stop correcting me. If you don't think Rogan said he read it, you're just plain wrong.
He changed to "Maybe I never read it" after he blurted out "Ken Kesey wrote it?"
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
I think Rosemary Kennedy spent her final years at the rest home at the catholic parish in Fort Atkinson Wisconsin.
Somewhere
How did the Trump satire video take over the post?
Helllp we've been colonized by orange man!
I have a good golfing friend, a successful businessman who founded, ran and sold two environmental testing companies, who has twice undergone electro-shock therapy. His family has a history of severe depression. He told me (after the second, most recent treatment a few years ago when he was approximately 70 years old) that he had the first in his late teens. He had been free of depression until he developed heart issues, which apparently re-triggered the depression (either through the heart problem or the treatment). He was so depressed that he was in inpatient therapy for several long stays.
After the second electro-shock treatment he was, for a while, quite profoundly "out of it;" both in terms of short-term and long-term memory, and had to be very carefully watched or he would get lost in stores, etc. But he gradually came back and now is more or less his former self.
I would have said that electro-shock treatment was barbaric and old-fashioned. But apparently in some cases it is all that works. It worked for my friend.
Rogan responds, "Yeah, me too."
I hear that clearly now. That's the part I couldn't make out before because Trussell is also speaking at the same time.
Please stop correcting me.
Okay, but...but...
Okay.
But it might make him a more compliant foot soldier for the right-wing.
You've obviously never listened to his podcast and are attacking him because you've been told you are supposed to hate him.
Rogan is far from Rightwing. He's called Rightwing simply because he actually allows Rightwingers to speak instead of censoring them. The same reason why you sheep hate Musk.
I have long maintained that Mayo Clinic killed Ernest Hemingway by treating him with electroshock therapy, taking away his ability to write. Probably one of the strongest examples of why the growth of this treatment was curtailed.
it’s probably worth mentioning that his aunt Rosemary was very cruelly forced to undergo a lobotomy
A Democrat allowed/supported the mutilation of their children instead of treating their mental illness? Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I knew someone - rather well - who had multiple ECT sessions in the early ‘60s, but I didn’t know the person before the ECT, only after. This individual clearly had significant mental illness over the 30+ years of our relationship (which ended when this person died), and from firsthand reports over the first 20 post-ECT years of this person’s life when I wasn’t around, mental illness was a constant companion then too - violent towards this person’s children when they were little, “creepy” behavior, impulsive, “no filter”, clear indications of borderline personality disorder (“I hate you! Don’t leave me!”), and so on. Quite intelligent too, and some of that intelligence was put in service of the cruelty at times :-(
But even with all that, the person was able to function - get married and raise a family (the spouse, whom I also knew, was an asshole and abusive to the children - slapping, making cruel comments - but not really mentally ill, and at least one of the three children turned out to be a wonderful person; the other two, not so much); hold down a job; be semi-charming in social situations when it was advantageous, balance a checkbook, etc.
I have no idea if the ECT in this case was punishment as depicted in Kelsey’s novel (which I find far superior to the movie), or was thought to be genuinely therapeutic. The precipitating event that led to the psychiatric hospital and the eventual ECT was threatened violence (think Fatal Attraction), and I know there were also various drugs used in the treatment too, but the pharmacopoeia was far more limited in the early ’60s than today.
“Hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery in 50 years. 2075's podcast will be lit.”
Much sooner than that. The potential litigants are children. No one’s waiting 50 years. When the cash cow moos, the lawyers will stampede.
Rosemary was crazy and Joe Kennedy was giving her the best medical treatment at the time. You always need to be suspicious when people attack Joe kennedy. He was on the wrong side of history because he supported appeasement. And has never been forgiven. The Left never forgives and they NEVER forget. And Doris Goodwin probably just plagarized it from a secondary source.
I liked the movie when I was a teenager, but when i saw it 20 years later, it was complete balls. And yes, its completely different from the novel because movies have to be more literal and follow a template. As for Kesey, he was like most novelists. He had a couple decents novels in him and that was that.
The Key point about Lobotomies and Freud, is that used to be "Settled science". anyone who disagreed was called a Kook or dumb rube. The same type of conformists who all thought Freud was the greatest thing ever, are now pushing whatever the Establishment dishes out. Sheep gotta go baaa.
Then Puddin' shows up to prove my point.
Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion" is a great book. One of my all time favorites. It's actually a pretty conservative novel, and my guess is that many commentators on this blog would enjoy reading it.
From Wiki: "The story centers on the Stamper family, a hard-headed logging clan in the coastal town of Wakonda, on the Oregon coast, in the early 1960s. The union loggers in Wakonda go on strike to demand the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor. The Stampers, however, own and operate a small family business independent of the unions and decide to continue working to supply the regionally owned mill with all the timber the laborers would have supplied had the strike not occurred. The rest of the town is outraged."
“In my case, ECT was miraculous. It was like a magic wand.”
--Dick Cavett
https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2017/04/21/stimulating-brain-without-therapy-and-science
Right-wing drug-induced broadcasting. It’s a thing.
Puddinghead doing his/her/it projecting again. Hunter could not be reached for comment.
I think the book/movie was part of the anti-institutionalization propaganda that has led us to where we are now. We've thought of it as a choice between living on the streets with no mental healthcare vs forced lobotomies. Our society doesn't seem to be willing to think about a middle ground.
It's a good story, and told well in both the book and the movie. We might have been better off if it weren't.
"Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness" by Elliot Valenstein provides a good overview of the history of somatic therapies for mental illness which included not only lobotomy but also insulin shock therapy and metrazole convulsive therapy. Antonio Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for developing lobotomy in 1949. Injecting the patient with malaria was used as a treatment for neurosyphilis. It was developed by Julius Wagner-Jauregg who won the Nobel Prize for it in 1927. These were "desperate cures" for severe illness for which there was then no other treatment.
Electro convulsive therapy was developed in 1934 and came into relatively common use in 1940. It rapidly replaced insulin shock and metrazole because it was much safer. It was the only successful treatment for severe depression until the mid to late fifties when antidepressants became available. The early antidepressants, both monoamine oxidase inhibitors and tricyclics, had significant side effects and more importantly a relatively low therapeutic index, the ratio of therapeutic dose to lethal dose. It was only in 1986, coincidentally the year I started my psychiatric residency, that fluoxetine (Prozac) an antidepressant with a high therapeutic index became available.
ECT continues to be used because it generally produces a rapid response in severe depression. Severe depression is not severe sadness. Severe depression may produce inanition resulting in death. In those cases, ECT is lifesaving. As happens with many treatments, ECT began to be used to treat mental illness for which it was not indicated and known to be ineffective for the usual reason of there is nothing else to do. As a result of the animus against ECT, it is now often very difficult to arrange even when the patient is requesting it, often resulting in long hospitalizations while trying to find a pill that works. There is a new treatment, inhaled ketamine, that shows promise in rapidly relieving depression but it is early days.
In response to wild chicken's query, "Can you really do high-level work afterward, or is it just a given that you no longer can?", please see Simon Winchester's story of his own ECT "The Man with The Electrified Brain: Story of a Man with an Electrified Brain." It provides a good description of severe depression and ECT. It is available on Kindle Unlimited or for $1.49 on Kindle. I leave it to you as to whether or not Simon Winchester produced high-level work after his ECT. I have personally seen an engineer and an RN who continued in their respective professions after ECT including one of them who received maintenance ECT. I will say as a psychiatrist with over 30 years experience, that if I present with severe depression, skip the pills and electrify my brain.
The very best Ken Kesey book, Sometimes a Great Notion. They made a movie of it that was an absolute travesty, Never Give an Inch.
ECT is still used in cases of severe clinical depression where therapy/drugs have not worked.
It has a very high success rate, most can return to their lives and the procedure is far more humane and civilized than portrayed in books/movies.
Kesey did write a couple of novels after Sometimes a great notion. "Caverns" was a collaborative novel written by Kesey and a group of creative writing grad students (At U Utah?) where he was teaching in the 80s. Not great but not terrible either. Not as bad as it sounds from my description.
He also wrote "Sailor Song" in 1992 which was pretty good. A bit off kilter like Cuckoo but good enough that I read it half a dozen times.
Demon Box was a 1986 collection of short stories and essays that was very good overall.
I stumbled across One Flew Over the Cuccoos Nest in 1968 in a library. I've read it 20-30 times since, though not for the past 10-15 years. Then it came up here and I read it again last year. It was great and I really liked it but it did not grab me to the extent that it used to.
Ditto Sometimes a great Notion. First read in 68, read it 20-30 times since but again, not for 10-15 years until last year. It held up much better for me than Cuckoo. It still absolutely nailed me to the floor. Both the writing style and the substance.
I never could decided which of the two was the greatest novel I'd ever read. Both were tied for first place. At least until I read "A Town Like Alice".
I watched the Cuckoo movie when it came out, saw it a couple times over the years and streamed it last year. I think it holds up well. Mainly because I think Nicholson is perfect as McMurphey. And pretty much any other role.
Nobody mentioned the movie of "Sometimes a Great Notion". Made in 71, starring Henry Fonda as Henry Stamper, Paul Newman as Hank and Lee Remick as Viv.
In one sense, it is not very true to the novel. In another, it is the single best adaptation of a novel I've ever seen in that it gets the feeling of it. It is well worth watching especially for Newman fans but also because it is a damn good movie. I saw it in 72 in a theatre a couple times since and again last year when I reread the book. It holds up very well.
One of the things that annoys me in the book is what a whiny little shit Leeland is. I get that he is upset and has reason to be. But every time I read the book I like him less and less.
Stick with it Marcus, the ending is great.
John LGB Henry
Lone Justice,
Shorter description of the novel:
Hank Stamper battles the Wakonda Auga River and wins.
Family motto: Never give a goddamn boogin inch to anyone anytime anyhow.
Or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes that blasted home, if one excludes this single house that acknowledged no zone of respect for nobody and surrendered seldom a scant inch, let alone a hundred or so yards. This house stands where it stood; it has not been jacked up and dragged back, nor has it been abandoned to become a sunken hotel for muskrats and otters. It is known through most of the western part of the state as the Old Stamper Place, to people who have never even seen it, because it stands as a monument to a piece of extinct geography, marking the place where the river’s bank once held . . . Look:
It, the house, protrudes out into the river on a peninsula of its own making, on an unsightly jetty of land shored up on all sides with logs, ropes, cables, burlap bags filled with cement and rocks, welded irrigation pipe, old trestle girders, and bent train rails. White timbers less than a year old cross ancient worm-rutted pilings. Bright silvery nailheads blink alongside oldtime squarehead spikes rusted blind. Pieces of corrugated aluminum roofing jut from frameworks of iron vehicle frames. Barrel staves reinforce sheets of fraying plywood. And all this haphazard collection is laced together and drawn back firm against the land by webs of wire rope and log chain. These webs join four main two-inch heavy-duty wire-core construction cables that are lashed to four big anchoring firs behind the house. The trees are protected from the sawing bite of the cables by a wrapping of two-by-fours and have supporting guy lines of their own running to wooden deadmen buried deep in the mountainside.
That's Hank's bell ringing right there.
John LGB Henry
People shriek in horror at lobotomy's but that was the best medical advice at the time. People need to remember that. The medical men who opposed Lous Pasteur weren't frauds or bad men, they honestly thought that Pastuer's germ theory was wrong or unproven.
Its just another reason why people should be open to debate. there is no settled science. We ae making new advances and discovering new things all the time. A sign over over every medical and science department should be required: "Closed minds need not apply".
Someone mentioned dick cavett. After watching his show, he was not only depressed, he was contagious.
I saw the movie "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" when it came out way back in the wayback. About ten years ago I read the book.
Also saw "Cool Hand Luke" when it came out. Then last year I read the book (which was originally published in ~1956 or so.
Movies don't do well with novels that have a lot of interior thought.
Anne,
Did you read Megan McArdle’s Wash Post from earlier in the year on lobotomies? Or listen to her on Russ Roberts’ podcast discussing it?
https://www.econtalk.org/megan-mcardle-on-the-oedipus-trap/
She talks about a concept called the Oedipus trap. That is, it is very, very difficult to get someone to change their mind and admit they were wrong, if by admitting that they were wrong, they’d have to come to terms with the fact that their wrongness caused serious harm–even if they never intended to cause harm.
The lobotomy pioneering doctor couldn’t come admit was wrong because he would have had to come to terms with what he’d done.
Obvious allusions to Covid and trans and abortion I reckon.
Joe Rogan smokes a lot of Pot. And he talks a lot.
He's the unreliable narrator come to life. Did he read the book, or just think he did?
Maybe he'll need some ECT in the future.
Someone talked about "Sometimes a Great Notion" the movie. What absurd casting. Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Lee Remick, and Richard jackel as Oregon Loggers.
Never give a inch Karen. Not "an"
From the plaque Hank grew up under.
John LGB Henry
As to how someone functions after ECT, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a fictionalized autobiography written by Robert Pirsig, who had ECT therapy in the years before writing it. It did not kill his ability to write. The main character in the book has similarly had ECT, we learn, and is in recovery mode. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, even the philosophical parts I didn't entirely understand.
I know that ECTs are done in at least 1 local Madison hospital.
(From someone who is present when it is conducted)
Well, this is what I heard! But anyone who would like to correct me, go ahead.
0:52 Trussel: When was the last time you read One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest?
0:54 Rogan: Ah, it's been a long time.
0:55 Trussel: OK. I think I must have read it, when I was in high school, I...
0:58 Rogan: Yeah, me too.
0:59 Trussel: ...just didn't pay attention? It's completely different from the movie. Like, 100 percent different.
1:06 Rogan: Maybe I never read it.
1:07 Trussel: Ken Kesey, he was like...
1:10 Rogan: Ken Kesey wrote it?
1:11 Trussel: Yeah.
Ann Althouse said...
At 1 minute in, Trussell said "I read it when I was in high school" and Rogan responds, "Yeah, me too."
Please stop correcting me. If you don't think Rogan said he read it, you're just plain wrong.
What’s surprising to me is that someone could know enough about Kesey to be surprised he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and yet not know enough about Kesey to know he wrote it.
Michael K said...
"Right-wing drug-induced broadcasting. It’s a thing.
Puddinghead doing his/her/it projecting again. Hunter could not be reached for comment."
He reads books, you know. He said so himself. The ones with pictures.
"It would certainly explain 81 million Biden voters."
Oh, that's easily explainable. There were 81 million voters who were neither ignorant nor deluded enough to vote for Trump or to allow Trump's reelection if they could help it, so they voted against Trump, (not for Biden).
The anti-heroes of that era haven't aged well. McMurphy the unrepentant rapist turned heroic rebel against the tyrannical bitch Ratchet. Bonnie and Clyde romantically blowing the heads off bank clerks and cops. Clockwork Orange's sadistic rapist Alex being "cured" and released back into society, then finally "cured" even more so he can freely enjoy bashing heads and raping and the classical music that was so cruelly poisoned for him during his original "cure."
At least it was just movies back then. Today, legislators vote for these dystopias, and we get to live in them.
Duncan Trussel must be the smartest human on earth because he has destroyed so many of his brain cells and still manages to sound simultaneously very intelligent and very stoned.
Man of mystery.
Robert Cook said...
"It would certainly explain 81 million Biden voters."
"Oh, that's easily explainable. There were 81 million voters who were neither ignorant nor deluded enough to vote for Trump or to allow Trump's reelection if they could help it, so they voted against Trump, (not for Biden)."
Because no one likes cheap gas, low unemployment and peace in the middle east.
Have you met puddin'?
Lou Reed's sister writes of his struggles with mental illness and his ECT. She sounds regretful, but I think Lou did all right post treatment. At least he achieved acclaim for his creative gifts, and, I assume, a comfortable wealth from his talents.
https://medium.com/cuepoint/a-family-in-peril-lou-reed-s-sister-sets-the-record-straight-about-his-childhood-20e8399f84a3
Whenever any current discussion of mental health goes immediately to A) Lobotomies and B) Cuckoo's Nest, turn the page. Did you know that baseball wasn't integrated? That many fewer women than men went to college? That people openly smoked cigarettes?
A few weeks ago, in the Washington Post, Megan McArdle wrote a powerful story which was about the trans-medicalization movement, without ever mentioning the trans-medicalization movement.
She talked about the father of lobotomies:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/14/walter-freeman-lobotomy-regret/
"What if you have already put your reputation and your sanity on the line? Well, remember that even if it would be shattering to realize you’d made a terrible mistake, it would be far worse to keep making it. […] In his desperation to become a medical hero, he had become a hero out of Greek tragedy: consigned to ignominy by his own hubris, and doomed to struggle against a fate that was inevitable."
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