The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P1

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 1973, a bombshell study appeared in the premier scientific journal, Science. It was called, “On Being Sane in Insane Places.”

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: Dr. Rosenhan, you did a study and in the study you got yourself committed to an institution, a mental institution. How did you get them to believe that you were, you were mentally ill or that you had an emotional problem? What it really amounted to was faking a set of symptoms. Did the doctors ever catch on? Never.

Alexis Pedrick: Does that sound as wild to you as it did to me? Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1969, at Swarthmore College, just outside of Philadelphia, there was a beloved psychology professor named David Rosenhan. He was known for his tweed jackets with elbow patches, his large bald head, and his deep authoritative lecture voice. This is Susannah Cahalan, the author of a book about him called The Great Pretender.

Susannah Cahalan: Rosenhan, you know, he was this raconteur, he was funny, and he had this great voice, and he could command a room, and people really loved him, really gravitated towards him.

Alexis Pedrick: But one day, a group of undergraduate students visited him in his smoky basement lab to complain. They were taking his abnormal psychology seminar, and it was too abstract. How would they ever really understand mental illness without any real-world encounters?

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: This whole thing began when I was planning to bring in an undergraduate seminar in a hospital to give them some sense of what schizophrenics are really like and what patients are really like. Let’s not talk about them, let’s not go visit them, let’s go live with them for a while.

Alexis Pedrick: That was David Rosenhan, speaking to an NPR reporter on stage at an American Psychological Association convention in 1982. And, yes, his idea was that the students would get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals, secretly, by pretending to have a mental illness. But first, Rosenhan had to prepare his students. He got them acquainted with the work of academics and journalists who had gone undercover in psychiatric hospitals, and there was a common theme to their reporting. Probably the nicest way to say it is that they had an unfavorable view of mental institutions. You see, psychiatry had gone through a boom time in the post-World War II years. Freudian psychoanalysis was all the rage. Mental asylums reached their peak numbers, and the first anti-psychotic drug, Thorazine, was hailed as a rare breakthrough.

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