In light of society’s recent focus – one might even say hyper focus – on mental health issues, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the concept in question. What is healthy in a psychological sense? What’s the difference between sanity and insanity. Where is the line drawn, and most importantly, who draws it?
Those were some of the questions that Dr. David Rosenhan claimed to investigate in his famous clandestine experiment.
How did he do it? Back in the early 70s, Rosenhan enlisted the aid of nine experimental subjects tasked with infiltrating mental hospitals on the East and West coasts. Acting under assumed identities and faking schizophrenia symptoms, they ventured into a place where no sane person wants to go.
Once on the inside, the pseudopatients as Rosenhan called them stopped displaying their fake symptoms and resumed acting normally. It was then that the test of the mental health system itself began. How long would it take the hospital staff to notice that the psuedopatients were actually sane?
According to Rosenhan’s paper, the answer was “never.”
Instead of noticing that the fake patients were sane, it was reported that hospital staff viewed all of the pseudopatients’ behavior through the lens of their false disorders. Even the most ordinary activities were seen as outgrowths of the pseudopatients’ “insanity.” The paper notoriously recounted one staff member labeling a pseudopatient’s experiment-related note taking as pathological “writing behavior.”
And one observation the pseudopatients noted was that hospital staff, including doctors, only spent about seven minutes a day interacting with patients in their care. Which probably didn’t help their diagnoses.
Upon publication, Rosenhan’s paper sent shockwaves through the mental health profession. It made his career and made experts in the field rethink longstanding diagnostic and treatment practices.
Then in 2019 it came out that several key elements of the experiment were manipulated; even fabricated. To the extent that the whole study has been condemned as a hoax.
Catholic apologist and high strangeness investigator Jimmy Akin details the whole sordid affair in his video on the Rosenhan Experiments.
Watch now:
Just a few of the irregularities that cast serious doubt on Rosenhan’s methods and results include:
- Striking the report of one pseudopatient from the study for disagreeing with the desired findings
- Rosenhan breaking his own stated experimental parameters by presenting multiple schizophrenia symptoms instead of just one
- Outright fabricated quotes.
The point of Revisiting the Rosenhan hoax goes beyond the base thrill of seeing a con job revealed. Remember that this study shook up the mental health field and led to major changes industrywide.
Those changes included revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the main reference for diagnosing mental health problems. The authors of the manual’s third edition set out to rewrite the diagnostic criteria for severe disorders like schizophrenia. And they made their revisions in response to the false symptoms Rosenhan’s test subjects presented. It’s even said that the head of the DSM III editorial committee would ask the editors, “Could a Rosenhan pseudopatient fake this?”
Medical experts’ credibility has suffered in general these past few years. So it’s extra chilling to think that tens of thousands of mental disorder diagnoses may have been influenced by a hoaxed psychological experiment.
Remember that the next time someone tells you to “Trust the experts.”
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