Dean Brooks

Dean Kent Brooks (July 22, 1916 – May 30, 2013) was an American physician and actor. Brooks was the superintendent of Oregon State Hospital for 27 years from 1955 to 1982. He was born in Colony, Kansas.

Life and career Dean Brooks graduated from the University of Kansas with a bachelor's degree and the University of Kansas Medical School in Kansas City, Kansas in 1942. During college and medical school, he was an accomplished trombonist and played in nightclubs with some of the most well-known big band performers in the country. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1943 and became a naval medical officer during World War II Brooks was known as a progressive state hospital administrator who established a Superintendent's Committee composed of patients and a study process on dehumanization in which both patients and staff reviewed the state hospital from the perspective of the patients themselves rather than the "purchasing agent". He initiated a psychiatric residency program at Oregon State Hospital which gained accreditation after only two years. An outdoors program letting the film crew stay at the mental hospital; Brooks also portrayed "Dr. John Spivey" in the film. Because of his strong interests in the criminalization of the mentally ill, he established a fund under the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care to "decriminalize the mentally ill" and recruited many renowned leaders from across the United States in psychiatry, law, journalism and psychology to work as the Dorothea Dix Think Tank.

Personal life Brooks was married to Ulista Jean Moser, until she died in 2006. Brooks died of natural causes in his Salem, Oregon home, at the age of 96.

Filmography One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) as Dr. Spivey