Rosenhan’s 1973 study aimed to investigate the reliability of staff in psychiatric hospitals to identify the sane from the insane. He wanted to see if people who posed as mentally ill would be identified by staff in psychiatric hospitals as sane rather than insane. The participants he used had never been diagnosed with a mental illness.
Rosenhan asked eight ‘sane’ people to telephone psychiatric hospitals for urgent appointments, complaining of hearing unclear voices saying ‘thud, hollow, empty’. All eight were admitted to the hospital; all but one was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the other with manic-depressive psychosis. Upon admission, all pseudo-patients stopped showing any symptoms and took part in ward activities.
The average length of stay was 19 days. All participants had agreed to stay until they had convinced staff they were no longer ill. On release, the pseudo-patients were given the diagnosis of schizophrenia ‘in remission’. In a second follow-up study, one hospital was told that sometime over the next three months, one or more pseudo-patients would try to be admitted, and hospital staff was asked to rate the patients who presented themselves on a scale of 1-10 on the likelihood of them being a pseudo-patient. 44% were judged by at least one member of staff to be a pseudo-patient. Rosenhan concluded that we cannot reliably distinguish the sane from the insane and that hospitalization and labelling can lead to depersonalization, powerlessness, and segregation, which are counter-therapeutic.
How did the pseudo-patients get out?
Were the other patients suspicious?
What happened during their stay in the hospital?
What happened to the pseudo-patients when they were released?
Could this happen today?
