The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P10

Shidonna Raven
1 day ago
3 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: 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.

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