Beyond ‘Cuckoo's Nest’: One Family Keeps a Revolutionary Legacy Alive

SALEM, Ore. – India Civey and Dr. Ulista Jean Brooks could talk about their father for hours. They often do when they visit or volunteer at the Oregon State Hospital, where they grew up and where they want to showcase their father’s legacy.
 
They talk about the patients who babysat them as children and made them pancakes, the adventure camp for patients in the mountains near Baker City, the way their father would show up unannounced on the wards just to check up on what was going on. They talk about the movie — the Oscar winning classic — and why their father wanted Oregon State Hospital patients to be included in it.

“This museum embodies how we were raised and what was going on in our lives,” Civey says. “We need to keep that message going.”

Dr. Ulista Jean Brooks and India Civey.

That message is the reason the two sisters have established a Donor Advised Fund at Oregon Community Foundation to support the Oregon State Hospital Museum of Mental Health in Salem. It is a multigenerational fund, designed to outlast them, built around a simple conviction: that the era their father shaped at Oregon State Hospital holds lessons worth preserving.
 
Their father was Dr. Dean Brooks, superintendent of Oregon State Hospital from 1955 to 1981. Under his leadership, the hospital became a national model for compassionate psychiatric care — and the unlikely filming location for one of the most celebrated films in American cinema.
 
Growing Up Among 3,500 Patients
 
Civey, Ulista Jean and their older sister, Dennie grew up on the campus of Oregon’s state psychiatric hospital at a time when the institution housed 3,000 to 3,500 patients. It was self-sustaining, with onsite dairy herds, orchards, wheat fields, a bakery, a pharmacy, dental clinic and surgical suites. Nearly every patient had a job. The staffing ratio was roughly two or three employees to 100 patients on a good shift. 

Dr. Dean Brooks

“The place wouldn’t run if the patients weren't doing it,” Civey says.

Patients worked in the Brooks family home. They babysat the children. When Dean and his wife, Ulista, left for a few days, a patient stayed with the girls.

“Our friends’ parents would ask, ‘Aren't you scared living there?’” Civey recalls. “And it was like, no. We were completely secure. That was the kind of community we had.”
 
Their father worked to build that community deliberately. He unlocked every ward except for the forensic unit. He abolished uniforms for patients and staff alike, so everyone on campus wore street clothing. He established the Superintendent's Council — a patient-only body that met with him weekly to raise concerns, with no other staff in the room. Patient mail went to the top of his pile, the governor’s letters to the bottom.
 
“The underlying thing was always patient first,” Ulista Jean says.
 
His favorite saying, both daughters recall, was “Find fact, not fault.” They heard it so often it became a kind of family philosophy — a reminder to stop, ask the real questions and resist the urge to assign blame before understanding.
 
Their mother, also named Ulista, helped shape the Oregon State Hospital too. She is a constant presence in her daughters' telling of their story. “She often said, ‘I raised three daughters and a husband,’” Ulista Jean says with a laugh. “He'd come home all wound up over some conundrum, and she'd say, ‘Well, let’s find out what really is going on here.’ She was fierce and down to earth, and she helped him grow tremendously.”
 
Ulista Brooks started the hospital’s volunteer service program, worked with the Red Cross and led tuberculosis case-finding programs. She died in 2006. Dean died in 2013. Their daughters make a point of sharing credit between them equally.
 
The Film That Changed Everything
 
In 1975, the producers of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” came to Oregon State Hospital. California institutions had turned them away. Dean Brooks said yes — but only after going ward by ward to speak with patients and get their approval. The patients agreed, with one condition: they wanted to meet Michael Douglas, the film's celebrity producer. That happened.
 
Dennie Brooks served as an on-set coordinator, working with producers to cast 89 patients as extras and crew assistants. Much of the background staff seen on screen were patients. The doctors in one group photograph were real OSH physicians — with the exception of Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched, and Brooks himself, who appeared as psychiatrist Dr. John Spivey.
 
The American Psychiatric Association condemned the film as stigmatizing institutional care. Brooks never agreed with that reaction.
 
“He understood, with a little help from [Director] Miloš Forman, that this was not just about a hospital,” Civey says. “It was about every institution. Think about yourself. Do you have a Big Nurse in your life?”
 
Brooks spent years traveling and speaking about the film, its patients and its meaning. For his daughters, who have spent decades giving the same talks at screenings and conferences — the film celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025 — it remains the clearest expression of what their father believed: that patients are human beings first, and that involving them in their own care and their own community changes everything.
 
Carrying It Forward
 
Ulista Jean Brooks followed her father into Oregon State Hospital in 1986 — not as a psychiatrist, but as a board-certified internist. She ran the geriatric ward andstayed 35 years, retiring in 2021. Her practice, she says, mirrored her father's philosophy in ways she only recently fully recognized.
 
As an internist working with psychiatric patients, she made a point of ruling out physical causes before accepting a mental health diagnosis. She found brain tumors, thyroid conditions, acute tendonitis dismissed as delusion — conditions that had been overlooked because no one had listened carefully enough.
 
“I was translating that patient-first ethic into care without even realizing it,” she says.
 
India Civey took a different path but carried the same instinct for institution-building. Living in Everett, Wash., she helped establish an endowment for the Everett Public Library through the Snohomish County Community Foundation. That experience gave her a model. She reached out looking for something similar in Oregon, was connected to OCF, and began talking with her sister about what they wanted to leave behind.
 
The result is the Brooks Family Donor Advised Fund — a multigenerational vehicle with India and Ulista Jean as founding advisors, their daughters as successor advisors, and sister Dennie included in grant decisions. The fund will support the Oregon State Hospital Museum of Mental Health, housed in the historic Kirkbride Building on the OSH campus where “Cuckoo's Nest” was filmed, along with other causes the family holds dear.
 
“We feel really good about starting a fund at OCF,” Civey says, “because there will be something here when we're gone. The idea is that we lived this history — and this is a way for it to live on.”
 
The museum, all three sisters believe, is where that history speaks most clearly. It is where the lessons of their parents’ work are most accessible to the public — and where the Brooks family’s commitment to dignity, community and the humanity of every patient can be passed to the next generation.
 
“We want something in this community that recognizes: this man and this woman lived here and made a difference,” Civey says.