The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P12

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: But it was one interview that started to unravel the entire story. During a phone call, a psychologist who had worked with David Rosenhan told Susannah a funny story about him.

Susannah Cahalan: He had these parties, and at one party, Rosenhan was kind of regaling the room with his stories of being a pseudopatient, and he marched everyone upstairs, opened his closet, and he took out a wig. And he said, this was the wig that I wore as a pseudopatient. And I’m on the phone, we’re laughing about him kind of dancing around, putting the wig on and I thanked him for the end of the interview. I hung up the phone. And then I remembered that there was a medical record that was, uh, you know, of the David Rosenhan pseudopafitnesstient. And there was a picture attached to that record. And it’s very grainy. It’s very hard to see clearly. But you can very much see. The light gleaming off his bald head. He was not wearing any wig at all. That was a complete fabrication. And it was so strange to me to lie about that. Why would he lie about that?

Alexis Pedrick: If you lie about a wig, what else are you lying about? Something big, it turns out.

Susannah Cahalan: I think the smoking gun for me was the medical record. So that was just astounding. And when I saw that, that was when I knew I had something more serious going on here than a wig.

Alexis Pedrick: Rosenhan didn’t include his or anyone’s whole medical report in the final Science article. The reason he gave was that he didn’t want to reveal which hospitals they stayed in. But he does include a whole paragraph, quoted directly from someone’s medical report, and by comparing it to things Rosenhan said about his own stay, it’s clear that it was his own. Here’s what the paragraph in the Science article says, “This white, 39-year-old male manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships. A warm relationship with his mother cools during his adolescence.” And here’s what David Rosenhan said in an interview.

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

How can such practices impact your health? How Why?