The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P8

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

Alexis Pedrick: In his notes, Rosenhan describes a Bill Dixon.

Bill Underwood: Bill Dixon. Yeah, I was gonna use Nixon, since I was not fond of our president at the time, and so I thought the idea of portraying Nixon as a psychiatric patient, that had a certain amount of appeal for me, but I was sufficiently paranoid about being found out that I thought, no, I’m not gonna do anything that obvious, so I changed it to Dixon.

Alexis Pedrick: Rosenhan wrote that he was a red bearded Texan who was prodigiously normal. If anyone wasn’t going to fool psychiatrists at the gate, it would probably be Bill.

Bill Underwood: I felt like I was going to be found out. I was extremely nervous. I thought, you know, there are all these people that have gone in and succeeded at this, and I’m going to be the first failure.

Alexis Pedrick: But he did get in, again, based on the same symptoms.

Bill Underwood: Empty, hollow, thud, not, like, complete sentences or anything of that sort.

Alexis Pedrick: He was interviewed again at the hospital where the psychiatrist pressed him to admit that he was gay. I know Freud at one time had a hypothesis that paranoia was linked to homosexuality. It may be that this was sort of a leftover of that general idea among Freudian analysts.

Alexis Pedrick: Psychiatric interviews were not the only thing pseudopatients had to navigate. Rosenhan knew that if they were diagnosed with schizophrenia, they would surely be given Thorazine, which was no minor worry. After 15 years on the market, severe side effects were emerging. Things like Tardive Dyskinesia, an irreversible neurological syndrome that causes repetitive involuntary movements. Not to mention, it knocked people out and into submission, which meant it was often used more as a control measure than a therapeutic tool. The only thing Rosenhan could do was show his volunteers how to make it look like they were taking it, but really spit it out.

Bill Underwood: We had a little practice with, aspirins and stuff where you would put it in your mouth, put it under your tongue. Swallow some water, wander around, spit it out, because you don’t really want to be taking those drugs.

Alexis Pedrick: But on Bill’s first day in the hospital, they brought the pills around at lunchtime, and he couldn’t leave the room. The doors were locked.

Bill Underwood: And so, I thought, well, I’ll just leave it under my tongue, and then after lunch, I’ll go spit it out. But the coating melted, and that stuff kind of burns. And so, it was burning the area under my tongue, and so I thought, you know, this is crazy. I’m just going to go ahead and swallow it. I’ve went out to the general ward area and promptly fell asleep. I mean, I was out and Marian, my wife, came by to see me. And I mean, I was just barely conscious. Marian was very upset, of course, because she didn’t know what was going on, and I just kept asking her to leave because I just really wanted to sleep.

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