The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P2
- 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
Madness and Medicine Archival: Thorazine, the first of the major tranquilizers, was given to several million patients within months of its introduction. The drugs couldn’t have come at a better time. Patient populations were rising and the drugs promised to slow that growth.
Alexis Pedrick: But by the 1960s, the backlash had arrived. This is sociologist Andrew Scull, the author of several books about psychiatry.
Andrew Scull: There’d arisen a growing skepticism among intellectuals about psychiatry, what now we tend to call anti psychiatry.
Alexis Pedrick: In 1961, a Hungarian American psychoanalyst named Thomas Szasz made waves for criticizing his own profession.
Andrew Scull: And he wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness, in which he said, you know, mental illness is a myth. This is a creation of the profession.
Titicut Follies: You, you looked at me and you tell me I’m a schizophrenic paranoia. I, how, just how do you know? Because, because I speak well, because, uh, because I, I stand up for what I, what I think. Because you get, because you get the psychological testings.
Alexis Pedrick: And it wasn’t just books. In 1967, Frederick Wiseman’s film, Titicut Follies, documented life at a hospital for the, quote, criminally insane, and provided evidence for Thomas Szasz’s arguments against forcible psychiatric treatment.
Titicut Follies: May I ask just why I need this help that I, uh, that you are literally…
Alexis Pedrick: The growing anti psychiatry movement went hand in hand with the civil rights movement, and was embraced by the growing counterculture of the decade. People started asking, ‘was labeling someone as mentally ill just a way of singling out difference, or of calling out nonconformity?’
Andrew Scull: And then there was, within my own profession, and my colleague briefly, while I was at the University of Pennsylvania, Irving Goffman, and Goffman had written a book in 1961 called Asylums, in which he compared mental hospitals to concentration camps and prisons. And he said that the mental hospital was something that dehumanized people, that destroyed them, that damaged their ability to act as autonomous people and, in effect, sort of manufactured madness.
Alexis Pedrick: Everything Rosenhan assigned to his students describes psychiatric hospitals as authoritarian, degrading, and illness maintaining. So it’s pretty clear what he expected them to find when they got themselves admitted.
Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: But before I did that, it seemed reasonable that I should do it first.
Alexis Pedrick: That’s right, David Rosenhan got himself covertly admitted to a psychiatric hospital. And what followed in the wake was, to use a colloquialism, completely bananas. His undercover mission grew. It became a scientific study that the prestigious journal Science published in 1973. And it changed psychiatry forever. From the Science History Institute, I’m Alexis Patrick, and this is Distillations.
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