Its funny you cite the novel whereas the author, psychedelic guru Ken Kesey, based the book off his real life experience working as a nurses aid in a psychiatric ward while simultaneously being part of a CIA program testing hallucinogens.

For those unfamiliar with the back story of the novel, Kesey conceived the plot and characters while tripping on peyote while at work in the ward...his revelation being the patients were the sane ones and the workers enforcing the rules where insane, which was a metaphor for the modern dystopia he lived in. Times Magazine described it as: "a roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them."