The Fraud That Transformed Psychiatry Series, Transcript P17

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

Susannah Cahalan: They started the DSM III right after. This study was published and in the resulting publicity, so it was definitely a reaction to what was going on.

Alexis Pedrick: A serious, anti-Freudian, biologically minded psychiatrist was tapped to lead the revision, Robert Spitzer. His goal was to get rid of the Freudian influence, remove the psychobabble.

Susannah Cahalan: In general, it was a reaction to this kind of very loose, Freudian, uh, schizophrenia could be a million different things under the Freudian model.

Andrew Scull: The Freudians saw symptoms as the tip of the iceberg, the thing you needed to get behind. What Spitzer did was say, no, the symptoms are the disease, basically.

Alexis Pedrick: Robert Spitzer was not a fan of David Rosenhan or his study. He was a man of hard data, references, and classification. The vagueness of the Science article screamed sham to him, and he let Everyone in his orbit know it

Susannah Cahalan: Spitzer wrote two, maybe three articles. I think there were actually three articles about the study and he actually, he hosted a conference based on taking down this study. And he was the kind of guy I think that once he got something in his crosshairs, he wanted to chase it down. And he was really a tough guy and he really went after this study big time.

Alexis Pedrick: The problem was that his audience was other psychiatrists. So, it didn’t get out into the mainstream like Rosenhan’s study had. So, all he could do was use the opportunity to rewrite the DSM.

Susannah Cahalan: Rosenhan was a big topic of conversation why they were writing criteria for the DSM III. So they would constantly ask themselves, Would this pass the Rosenhan test? He was a specter haunting the creation of this, like, foundational biblical document for psychiatry as it stands today.

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