The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P3
- 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 One. On Being Sane in Insane Places.
So how did David Rosenhan get himself admitted?
Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: I went down the first time of my wife, which was a harrowing. There was my wife walking that. What I call that narrow line between an experiment and reality. Here she was, taking her husband and committing him.
Alexis Pedrick: She must have had a lot of faith, because it was a big thing he was asking her to do. It was a big thing he was asking himself to do, which might have been why he was so nervous leading up to it. Rosenhan was potentially putting himself into a situation he might not have been able to get out of. Still, he persevered, faking his symptoms.
Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: The symptoms went something like this, I’m hearing voices, the voices are saying, dull, empty, thud.
Alexis Pedrick: Rosenhan was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to the hospital. He spent nine days there, enduring what he described as a dehumanizing experience.
Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: The food was awful, but after five, six days, you didn’t notice that either. It wasn’t really bad physically. And people who judge a hospital on the basis of its physical characteristics are making some enormous mistakes. No hospital is an ideal place to live.
Alexis Pedrick: Rosenhan couldn’t sleep because of the constant noise. Yelling, fire alarms, attendants cursing at patients to get out of bed. And being an undercover psychiatric patient had its own unique stresses. On one hand, he was constantly worried about being found out. On the other, being seen as a real patient was a traumatic experience.
Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: Sometime what struck me the most was very invisibility. You’re standing there as a patient, perhaps as being brutalized by a staff member. Nobody, nobody stops because you’re looking. Because obviously you’re crazy, you’re in the way. But then down the hall comes a nurse or another staff member. Suddenly, everything stops. I’m so used to being visible. All of us are. I’m so used to having some power that I think one of the most distressing is just being invisible.
Alexis Pedrick: But if you thought Rosenhan was invisible because he spent all of his time acting like a mentally ill patient, you’d be wrong. As soon as he was inside the hospital he began to behave normally, because, and this is important, he didn’t want to just find out what psychiatric hospitals and patients were really like, he was also interested in that Thomas Szasz theory, that mental illness was a myth, a creation of the profession. He wanted to test whether psychiatrists could actually tell who had mental illness and who didn’t. In his words, could they tell the sane from the insane? And it might seem like a strange question now, but in the context of what was going on in psychiatry at the time, it made sense. The field was at war with itself.
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