The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P11

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: 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.

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

How can such practices impact your health? How Why?