The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P5

Shidonna Raven
2 days ago
5 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

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: Did patients suspect that you weren’t another patient with psychological problems? Man, they sure did. Nobody ever spotted it except the patients. The patients would walk right up to me and say, ‘You are not, you’re not a patient. You’re a college professor or you’re a journalist.’ One of the clues they had is that the moment we got into the hospital, we would constantly write. I had a big yellow pad and everything that was going on, I would grab my pen, I’d write it down. We wrote reams of stuff. The patients would see us writing and immediately infer, well, he’s observing and he is writing. He must be a journalist or a professor. Staff would see us writing and they never made such an inference. It would say patient engages in writing behavior. Writing behavior being one subset of crazy schizophrenic behavior that people engage in when they’re nutsy.

Alexis Pedrick: Susannah found her second pseudopatient through Bill Underwood, and his experience was very different from both David and Bill’s.

Harry Lando: I’m Harry Lando. I knew David Rosenhan because he was my major professor when I was at Stanford. I was taking this small seminar from Rosenhan, and in that seminar he talked up the study. I also remember he invited us over to his house, uh, for dinner. And his wife made this fantastic gourmet meal and it just, you know, it sounded like kind of an exciting opportunity. And so, you know, Bill and I decided to go ahead with it.

Alexis Pedrick: Harry called up his hospital from a phone booth in San Francisco and gave the same script. He’d been hearing voices, dull, empty, thud.

Harry Lando: A psychiatrist from the hospital interviewed me right then and there in the phone booth, and the psychiatrist got the impression that I might be suicidal. He kept saying, you’re forcing my hand. I was nervous. I answered his questions. I’m sure I didn’t deliberately say anything that would suggest I was suicidal.

Alexis Pedrick: He was ultimately diagnosed with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia.

Harry Lando: I later understood that that’s kind of a wastebasket diagnosis, kind of a catch all.

Alexis Pedrick: Harry knew his experience was going to be different as soon as he walked into the hospital.

Harry Lando: You get a sense of a place, and it just was a benign atmosphere. It was not dark and dingy. I had visited Bill before that, and it was just an incredibly depressing environment. This was well lit, open, the doors were not locked. And so immediately there was a, I think, a much more comforting vibe.

Alexis Pedrick: Even Harry’s accidental experience with Thorazine was different.

Harry Lando: And Rosenhan had told us about tonguing pills and so forth, not swallowing them, but that first night they gave me liquid Thorazine, which I was not going to tongue, and I think I was so wired that I didn’t even notice any effect of the Thorazine. I just remember, I think, feeling surprisingly calm.

Alexis Pedrick: Surprisingly calm is how you could sum up Harry’s entire story.

Harry Lando: I felt very comfortable in the hospital. Rosenhan talked about for the nurse’s station being off limits, which was not at all true here. You know, we would go in, we used to have jam sessions with the nurses. You know, they were amazingly approachable. I even developed a serious crush on one of the nurses. The ways that Rosenhan described his experience, that was not going to happen with him. There was a patient whose wife came out from New York on the bus and got to San Francisco, had no money, no place to stay, and a nurse put her up in her own home. And I feel myself being emotional when I actually say that.

Alexis Pedrick: All of this seemed to have a positive effect on the other patients.

Harry Lando: One of the things I really saw was a lot of empathy and caring among the patients for other patients. Often, you know, a new patient would come in highly agitated, and then usually within 24 hours they would calm down significantly. But there was a patient that came in, and we were doing group therapy and stuff, and she turned her chair away, you know, not facing the group, and she kept saying she’s been damned by God, and other people who were in the group were, you know, quoting Bible passages at her saying God is all forgiving these kind of things.

Alexis Pedrick: Rosenhan was surprised by Harry’s experience and intrigued.

Harry Lando: He seemed so excited that I was having the experience I was having and kept talking about how he wanted to do more with that and whatever. And then that never happened. And so the next thing I knew, the Science article had come out, and I was a footnote.

Alexis Pedrick: And this is where things take a turn. David Rosenhan didn’t include Harry Lando in the study. Instead, he wrote in a footnote, “Data from a ninth pseudopatient are not incorporated in the report because, although his sanity went undetected, he falsified aspects of his personal history. His experimental behaviors, therefore, were not identical to those of the other pseudopatients.” Harry felt terrible, like he had somehow failed.

Harry Lando: I think that I felt like at that time that, yeah, I was responsible because I had had details that were not accurate, even though I made no effort to act in an abnormal way when I was in the hospital.

Alexis Pedrick: But Harry didn’t fail. It was only years later when Susannah Cahalan interviewed him that he got the full picture.

Harry Lando: There were things I took at face value that turned out not to be accurate. And it became pretty clear that if I had had an experience similar to Bill’s, that I would have been included and Susannah found that I had been in an earlier draft. It just didn’t fit with his thesis.

Alexis Pedrick: Chapter Three. The Fraud.

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

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