The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P6

Shidonna Raven
2 days ago
4 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: Chapter Three. The Fraud.

Not including Harry in the study seemed a bit suspect, but there were other things that caught Susannah’s attention too.

Susannah Cahalan: What was interesting to me was, in the timeline of when this would have been squared away, he would have been one of the final people involved, because the paper was actually submitted to Science shortly thereafter. So I thought, there is a lot of mistakes here.

Alexis Pedrick: David Rosenhan wrote in the study that a legal document called a writ of habeas corpus was prepared for each of the entering pseudopatients during any every hospitalization. Basically, if one of the hospitals refused to release a pseudopatient, a lawyer would present this document and they’d be forced to go to court where the whole charade would be unveiled and the pseudopatient would be released. But Susannah found they didn’t exist.

Susannah Cahalan: There were no writs of habeas corpus that David Rosenhan claimed to have filed that was never done. There seemed to be no safety protocols in place.

Alexis Pedrick: And then there was this question. Why didn’t Rosenhan warn Bill Underwood about the potential hazard of Thorazine’s coating melting and burning your tongue?

Susannah Cahalan: And I thought, gosh, if this is his eighth pseudopatient, he should have learned a little bit by then. You know, it just was strange to me.

Alexis Pedrick: The more Susannah dug, the sloppier things got. Numbers seemed off. Rosenhan wrote in the study that the pseudopatients were administered 2,000 pills, but in an interview, he says 5,000.

Susannah Cahalan: The numbers would be, like, staggeringly off. And also kind of, ridiculous too. I, you know, there would be a hospital that would be enormous. And, and I’d look at the area they’d say, and there’d be no hospital that in that area that fit that bill. So there was just kind of all of these signs. I didn’t know where they were pointing, but they were not, they didn’t make sense for a kind of a legitimate Science article to have this many kind of inconsistencies.

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 pseudopatient. 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.

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: He asked me such questions as, how did you get along with your parents? And I told them my mother was my very close friend while I was growing up, but the relationship sort of cooled when adolescence came.

Alexis Pedrick: The Science article quote from the medical record goes on. “A distant relationship to his father is described as becoming very intense.”

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