When we mentioned One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest during an interview with Hanna Conder-Ołowska and Jolanta Januszczak, two head nurses at Warsaw’s Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, they sighed and frowned.

To them, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece. More than that, it did damage to how people perceive psychiatry, because it contributed to the hurtful stereotype of mental institutions while showing little about the reality of the work done by nurses and doctors there.

In an interview with Harbingers’ Magazine, Conder-Ołowska and Januszczak provided insight into the reality of their work – twelve-hour shifts, therapy sessions with patients, and attempts to understand their thinking.

“Our hours, spent simply sitting in silence with patients to make them feel safe… this is mentioned nowhere in the film,” one of them said.

As Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest turned 50 this year, the film, widely considered a masterpiece, was screened across the world – together with the story’s villain, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who is portrayed as a cold and harsh woman who doesn’t truly care about the patients in the institution and acts as if she were simply fulfilling her own dream of having full control over a group.

What truly amazed us was how the approach to the job of a nurse differs in the movie and in reality – while Nurse Ratched sees the patients as puppets or pawns that are moved around in an order assigned only by her, with no sign of freedom or empathy, the relationship between the patients and nurses is very different – founded on passion, devotion and respect towards those under care.

The film may have raised concerns about the reality of psychiatric institutions in the 1970s, but it also contributed to the fact that even today a harsh attitude is sort of expected from the personnel of psychiatric hospitals.

It’s easy to understand that, because working at a mental institution might be extremely hard, draining, and even dangerous. And do any movies ever show happy people working in such institutions? We might have even asked ourselves: why would anyone want to work there?

We asked head nurses at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw why they chose to work in the field and what brings them the most satisfaction in their job. The answer is not what you might expect. Nurse Hanna Conder-Ołowska told us that she had the opportunity to work in an international corporation, but she turned it down.

“When you ask why, I’d like to know that myself. Maybe then I’d be making loads of money. I don’t know. This is my place, I guess that’s why,” she said.

This might seem like a simple answer, but it reveals how deeply people working there care about the patients and the job itself – even an opportunity to earn more, possibly have an easier job, was not enough.

And how real are situations like the one depicted in the movie? To remind: the plot revolves around Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), who is faking a mental illness in order to evade prison. The film sort of assumes not only that it’s something frequent but also that it is really easy to trick the system.

The nurses laugh it off. “Over there, there is the Forensic Psychiatric Evaluation unit. That’s where these kinds of dilemmas are resolved,” nurse Januszczak said. She added that while their Institute has the resources to determine such cases, in reality they are extremely rare and usually quite complex.

This added weight to their critique of Forman’s film – in reality, there are whole separate institutions to determine the sanity of those accused of crimes, and the likelihood of deceiving them is very low.

The challenge of balancing authority and rules with freedom and the well-being of patients in a psychiatric hospital is a leading issue in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the film, Nurse Ratched struggles to incorporate both of these characteristics into her rule and control in the ward. In fact, she doesn’t even try to do so.

Meanwhile, when we took a day to look at real-life nurses who commit to their work with the patients every day, we found that what is portrayed in the movie is not true – the nurses work hard to find a balance of measures that keep the patients safe and give them the freedom that they need.