The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, P4
- Shidonna Raven
- Apr 30
- 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
This is Andrew Scull again.
Andrew Scull: American culture after the war became saturated with psychoanalytic ideas. Social scientists in the university embraced them. Historians embraced them. Hollywood embraced them. Broadway embraced them. Novelists.
Alexis Pedrick: Freud brought a brand of psychiatry called psychoanalysis to the U.S. and you know the stereotype. A psychiatrist sitting in a chair, smoking a pipe, asking a patient who’s lying on a couch about her dreams.
Andrew Scull: The Freudians saw symptoms as the tip of the iceberg, the thing you needed to get behind. They were interested in the psychodynamics of this particular patient in front of them and putting a label like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder on them for them was just a waste of time.
Alexis Pedrick: Even though the Freudian psychiatrists were small in number their influence was growing.
Andrew Scull: They can treat 2,000 patients at a point where there are about 400,000 patients in America’s mental hospitals just to give you a comparison
Alexis Pedrick: And over time, they came to dominate medical schools and psychiatry departments across the country.
Andrew Scull: So by 1960, virtually all of them, other than Washington U. in St. Louis, were led by a psychoanalyst or somebody sympathetic to psychoanalysis.
Alexis Pedrick: Psychiatry was grappling with how important diagnosis was, in large part because they had a new tool. Before psychiatric drugs came along in the 1950s, specific diagnoses weren’t super important in asylums, because there were limited ways to treat any condition. Sure, they had to keep track of their patients and divide them up into groups, but categories could be vague. When Thorazine came out in 1954, diagnosis started having more ramifications. Thorazine was good for schizophrenia, whereas Lithium was good for bipolar disorder, so you wanted to get the diagnosis right.
Although that right diagnosis didn’t happen for David Rosenhan. Even though he said no if anyone asked him if he was experiencing symptoms or hearing voices, his diagnosis never changed. Score one for Thomas Szasz. When Rosenhan returned to campus, his colleagues and students noticed a change in him. He seemed humble, worn out, older. He decided he couldn’t send any undergraduate students in his wake. It was too traumatic. The experiment was done. But then, the very next month, in March of 1969, a chance encounter changed everything, and David Rosenhan realized he had a real scientific experiment on his hands, and he didn’t need undergraduate students to do it.
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