The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P13

Shidonna Raven
Jun 3
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

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.”

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: My father and I weren’t such good friends when I was a kid, but he was my best friend during my adolescence and early adulthood until he died.

Alexis Pedrick: “His attempts to control emotionality are punctuated by angry outbursts and spankings.”

Archived Audio of Dr. Rosenhan in Conversation: Do you ever spank your children? To which I responded, my son twice, my daughter once, in fact. He never inquired under what conditions do you spank your children, or did you spank your children? What becomes very interesting is how they interpret it. So you take this, what I consider to be unexceptional case history, uh, was interpreted as reflecting my enormous ambivalence in interpersonal relationships.

Alexis Pedrick: This excerpt from Rosenhan’s medical record was used in the Science article as evidence that once someone was inside the walls of a mental institution, psychiatrists were primed to see mental illness. There was just one problem.

Susannah Cahalan: So you have a whole part that is supposedly word for word from the medical record. It was very Freudian. It was psychoanalytic. It was about the father and the mother and this relationship, and it was entirely made up.

Alexis Pedrick: Susannah had David Rosenhan’s actual medical record. And after the wig revelation, she looked more closely at it. It revealed the hospital where he’d been, Haverford State Hospital. And at first, it tracks with the symptoms every pseudo patient was supposed to claim. But then Rosenhan went off script. Way off.

Susannah Cahalan: I found the medical record that Rosenhan had said things like, I put copper pots over my ears to drown out the noises, and that he had been suicidal for many months. I mean, these are very serious symptoms.

Alexis Pedrick: “He has felt that he is sensitive to radio signals and hear what people are thinking. He realized that these experiences are unreal, but cannot accept their reality. One reason for coming to the hospital was because things are quote, ‘better insulated in a hospital.’”

Susannah Cahalan: These are very serious symptoms, and understandably, a psychiatrist looking at it would be concerned. And, you know, even psychiatrists that I showed today, they said the suicidality would be an issue. That there’s such a crisis in mental health care, they probably wouldn’t get a bed. But if there was a bed available, maybe he would have gotten a bed today. The suicidality thing really shocked me.

Alexis Pedrick: None of these details made it into the article itself, or any of the scores of lectures or interviews Rosenhan gave after the Science article was published.

Susannah Cahalan: It was a fiction, it was a fantasy that, that, that, that Rosenhan made up, and he published it in Science. And it was shocking to me.

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