Mental Asylums in Fiction: Sanity, Conformity, and Control

This is a FREE event; registration is required here.

Who gets to decide what’s sane? Explore the metaphor in modern literary asylums.

Who decides what’s sane—and who benefits from that decision? Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Literature’s mental asylums are rarely just hospitals—they’re stages where our culture’s deepest conflicts play out: Who has power over whom? What separates sanity from madness? And what happens when the price of freedom is being labeled insane?

The mental asylum has long served as a powerful metaphor for our deepest fears—helplessness, corrupt authority, and losing our grip on reality itself. In this presentation, we’ll explore how writers transform the institution into a mirror, using mental asylums to ask dangerous questions about conformity and control. From the electroshock therapy of The Bell Jar to the colonial gaslighting of Wide Sargasso Sea, from the wartime bureaucracy of Catch-22 to the contemporary memoir Girl, Interrupted, these literary asylums still speak to our moment, when questions about institutional power, diagnostic labels, and the right to define our own reality feel more urgent than ever.

Joel Clements is a local writer and teacher. He has taught literature and writing for Bend LaPine schools, COCC, and OSU-Cascades, and presented multiple Deschutes Library and Novel Idea seminars over the years. As a writer/performer, he has contributed to multiple regional and national publications, and his most recent short film appeared in festivals in the US and Europe. “The Times” once identified him as a humor writer of note. He worked professionally as a storyteller and comedian for several years. He lives in Bend with his wife, Michele, and kids, Zoe, Oscar, and Phoebe.