The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P9
- Shidonna Raven
- 1 day ago
- 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
Alexis Pedrick: One of the pseudopatients was described as a famous abstract painter, the only one admitted to a private psychiatric facility. But Susannah started pulling one thread from Rosenhan’s notes about her, and it quickly came apart. First, Rosenhan claimed that he paid for the stay himself, but she was supposedly there for 53 days, which would have been extremely expensive.
Then there was this. David wrote that during her stay, the hospital invited him to come consult on a case, and it just happened to be her case. What a coincidence, especially since Rosenhan wasn’t even a clinical psychologist. Susannah also found something else odd. Letters from people David knew who had really been patients in psychiatric hospitals were tucked into the notes for his book, and some of those details were surprisingly similar to some of his supposed pseudo patients.
When Susannah started writing the book, she really admired David Rosenhan and wanted to tell the stories of the pseudopatients.
Susannah Cahalan: I didn’t have any radar about this. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to unmask this. You know, I’m going to figure out the truth. It was more like, who would do this and why? And how did it affect the rest of their lives?
Alexis Pedrick: After the book came out, Susannah went out to dinner with two of the people who knew David best, two psychologists named Florence Keller and Lee Ross.
Susannah Cahalan: She was the one who said to me, maybe he made this all up. And also, you know, Lee Ross is this great kind of giant in psychology, so insightful and smart. And he was pretty convinced Rosenhan had at least fabricated parts of the, of his study. I mean, I think that’s undeniable. The question is how much really.
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