The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P6

Shidonna Raven
Mar 4
2 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

The publishing of Rosenhan’s study On Being Sane in Insane Places set off a chain of events That changed psychiatry forever. It was an immediate stab to the profession’s credibility. Psychiatrists don’t know what they’re doing. They’re institutionalizing, sane people. All of this fed into an existing fear about psychiatric diagnosis.

Andrew Scull: There was growing anxiety in a few quarters about the fact that psychiatrists seem unable to agree more than about 50% of the time. The council of the American Psychiatric Association called a frantic emergency meeting within a month of this study appearing and said, oh my God, we’ve got to fix this problem with diagnosis. We’ve got to create a new system that allows psychiatrists in Walla Walla, in Saskatchewan, and in Florida and New York, confronted by the same patient, give that patient the same diagnosis, because otherwise we look like fools.

Alexis Pedrick: Psychiatric asylums, which were already in decline, began closing at an even more rapid clip.

Susannah Cahalan: But it was the kind of essential part of the system that started to shut down after the Rosenhan study.

Alexis Pedrick: The study went on to be one of the most widely cited psychology studies ever. It still appears in textbooks. So it came as a surprise nearly 50 years after its publishing, when author Susannah Cahalan discovered that the study was not at all what it was supposed to be.

Susannah Cahalan: You knew something was off? Upon looking at the archives, but you didn’t know to the extent, it took years of, of work to uncover it.

Andrew Scull: What was remarkable was if that information surfaced at the time, it would have completely discredited the study. It’s what I regard as one of the biggest social scientific frauds of the 20th century.

Alexis Pedrick: In a way, the study itself was meant to be a fraud. It was based on people faking their way into psychiatric hospitals. But this is not the fraud we’re talking about. Susannah Cahalan discovered a different, bigger fraud. So, what was it? And does it mean that everything the study stood for and set out to do should be thrown out? Or can something based on a lie still reveal any truths?

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