<P> One night, after bribing the night orderly, McMurphy smuggles two prostitute girlfriends with liquor onto the ward and breaks into the pharmacy for codeine cough syrup, and later unnamed psychiatric medications . McMurphy persuades one of the women to seduce Billy Bibbit, a timid, boyish patient with a terrible stutter and little experience with women, so he can lose his virginity . Although McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift starts, he and the other patients instead fall asleep without cleaning up the mess of the group's antics, and the morning staff discovers the ward in complete disarray . Nurse Ratched finds Billy and the prostitute in each other's arms, partially dressed, and admonishes him . Billy asserts himself for the first time, answering Nurse Ratched without stuttering . Ratched calmly threatens to tell Billy's mother what she has seen . Billy has an emotional breakdown, and once left alone in the doctor's office, commits suicide by cutting his throat . Nurse Ratched blames McMurphy for the loss of Billy's life . Enraged at what she has done to Billy, McMurphy attacks Ratched, attempting to strangle her to death, tearing off her uniform and revealing her breasts to the patients and aides who are watching . McMurphy is physically restrained and moved to the Disturbed ward . </P> <P> Nurse Ratched misses a week of work due to her injuries, during which time many of the patients either transfer to other wards or check out of the hospital forever . When she returns she cannot speak and is thus deprived of her most potent tool to keep the men in line . With Bromden, Martini, and Scanlon the only patients who attended the boat trip left on the ward, McMurphy is brought back in . He has received a lobotomy, and is now in a vegetative state, rendering him silent and motionless . The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow during the night in an act of mercy before lifting the tub room control panel that McMurphy could not lift earlier, throwing it through a window and escaping the hospital . </P> <P> One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written in 1959 and published in 1962 in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America . The 1960s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization, an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel . The novel is a direct product of Kesey's time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California . Not only did he speak to the patients and witness the workings of the institution, but he voluntarily took psychoactive drugs, including mescaline and LSD, as part of Project MKUltra . </P> <P> In addition to his work with Project MKUltra, Kesey experimented with LSD recreationally . He advocated for drug use as a path to individual freedom, an attitude that was reflected in the views of psychological researchers of the time . In the 1960s LSD was thought to offer the best access to the human mind . Each individual's experiences were said to vary; emotions and experiences ranged from transformations into other life forms, religious experiences, and extreme empathy . It was Kesey's experience with LSD and other psychedelics that made him sympathetic toward the patients . </P>

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