Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

physiologicdeadspace:

The Rosenhan experiment is a notorious piece of research that was published in the journal Science in 1975. The experiment itself was designed to test the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, and was simple but effective in its design. The first part of the experiment involved 8 mentally healthy individuals (including the chief investigator, Rosenhan himself) attempting to gain admission to psychiatric institutions. They were instructed to do this simply by making an appointment with for an assessment, and reporting one psychotic symptoms - auditory hallucinations. They were instructed to inform the assessor that the hallucinations took the form of a voice that simply said one of three words, ‘empty’, ‘thud’ or ‘hollow’. No other symptoms were to be reported, and once admitted the ‘pseudopatients’ were to cease reporting these symptoms and behave normally. None of the staff in the institutions were aware of the experiment.
Every participant was admitted, and the experiment required that they get out of the hospital on their own. Once admitted they discovered that in order to be discharged they were expected to admit that they were mentally ill and agree to take antipsychotic medication. Seven of the participants were diagnosed with schizophrenia, one participant was diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis. The average admission length was 19 days, with a range of 9-52.

After the first part of the experiment was completed, a well known teaching hospital that was not involved in the initial experiment felt that they would be able to identify any pseudopatients if they were to receive them. Rosenhan arranged a 3 month period of time where pseudopatients would be sent for assessment and the staff would rate patients on their likelihood of being an impostor. Staff identified 41 patients out 193 as impostors.
Rosenhan had not sent any pseudopatients. All 41 ‘impostors’ had been genuine psychiatric patients.

This experiment challenged the idea of validity surrounding mental health diagnoses and highlighted the subjectivity involved in diagnosing mental health conditions. There are many criticisms of the experiment - such as the obvious use of deception. However, the experiment leant support to the push for community care and the effort to deinstitutionalise people with mental health conditions.