(June 12, 2013) Dr. Dean Brooks – the man author Pete Earley calls “the Dorothea Dix of the 21st century” – has died at the age of 96, leaving the mentally ill without a compassionate champion.
Brooks is most identified with his role as the Oregon state mental hospital director who opened the hospital’s doors to film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and appeared in the movie as the institution’s chief psychiatrist. Cuckoo's Nest was described in E. Fuller Torrey’s landmark book, Surviving Schizophrenia, as “the quintessential film for the counterculture: the mental institution as a metaphor for the abuse of authority.” The image of the hospital in the film helped fuel a well-intentioned but misguided policy that has left the US with too few beds to treat people with severe mental illness.
While the film is credited with speeding up the process of deinstitutionalization, Brooks in recent years grew increasingly alarmed by the consequences of wholesale public hospital closings. He called jails and prisons the “new asylums” and said community care was failing to help people who need it the most.
His voice will be missed.
Even though Brooks was an ardent advocate for people with severe mental illness, Oregon still has a severe shortage of public psychiatric beds and jails three times more people with severe mental illness than it hospitalizes, according to our 2010 study, “More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals.”
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