The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P7

Shidonna Raven
Mar 4
3 min read

July 23, 2024

Source: The Scince History Institute

Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,

Host: Alexis Pedrick

Senior Producer: Mariel Carr

Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez

Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan

Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

“Color Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

Psychology professor David Rosenhan made waves with his “On Being Sane in Insane Places” study, but decades later its legitimacy was questioned.

WFGD Studio

Transcript

Chapter Two. The Other Pseudopatients.

When Susannah Cahalan decided to write a book about Rosenhan, she was surprised by how such a widely cited study was still full of such mystery. David Rosenhan had ultimately gotten eight pseudopatients to join the study, but decades later, no one had managed to unmask them.

Susannah Cahalan: And I thought, who are these volunteers? Who were these eight people? Why would they do this? None of them were named. And the fact that no one had talked about it, and no one had been, except for the author, David Rosenhan, that was intriguing and exciting, and it felt like something buried, but I had no idea how buried at the time.

Alexis Pedrick: That chance encounter David had that changed everything happened at a lecture he was giving in Santa Monica. According to his notes, he was speaking about his hospital stay to a married couple who were both retired psychologists, and they were so intrigued that they decided to try it for themselves.

They were pseudopatients 2 and 3, and they both got admitted to the hospital, were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and had similar dehumanizing and traumatic experiences as David Rosenhan. Despite this, Rosenhan’s notes say that two more anonymous volunteers went and got themselves admitted to two more hospitals, resulting in similar experiences and diagnoses.

By 1970, the data was pouring in. And even though Rosenhan hadn’t published anything yet, word was getting around that this could be a major contribution to the field. Unlike those undercover accounts Rosenhan had his Swarthmore students read, he now had within his grasp an experiment that was solid, evidence backed, and most importantly, scientific.

It was so promising that Stanford recruited him to teach in their psychology department, and it was there that he met the first pseudopatient that Susannah Cahalan managed to unmask.

Bill Underwood: My name is Bill Underwood. I am a retired computer engineer, actually. But prior to being in engineering, I was a psychology professor. And before that, I was a graduate student in psychology at Stanford with David Rosenhan as my supervising professor.

Susannah Cahalan: And at the time Bill took part in it, he was part of a seminar. And it was very clear to Bill that David was trying to recruit people in the seminar to take part in the study.

Bill Underwood: David was a very charming man. He was very charismatic. When you were interacting with him, he was really focused on you. You felt like you were sort of the center of the universe at that point. It was easy to get involved in the things that he was interested in, and so everyone basically said, oh yes, that sounds like a good thing to do, but in the end, I think only two of us actually did the pseudo patient experience out of the seminar.

Alexis Pedrick: Whatever reservations Rosenhan had before about putting students through such a traumatic experience were now pushed aside. These students were older, at least, graduate students, but that also meant that some had more at stake. When Bill Underwood left to fake his way into a mental hospital in San Francisco, he left his wife home with his two young children.

Bill Underwood: I don’t think she was thrilled about it, but she sort of, I guess, understood that it, that it could potentially be an interesting and valuable thing to do. But, um, I, I think it would be fair to say that she was not enthusiastic about it.

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