David Rosenhan Case Summary
Summary
In his study, David L. Rosenhan investigates whether or not sanity is a detectable condition that may be identified reliably by mental institution staff and doctors. Additionally, does the decision reached by the staff and doctors depend more on their evaluation of the individual patient or the environment in which the evaluation occurs? Rosenhan gathered together eight people who agreed to feign a mental disorder (“pseudopatients”) in order to gain admittance as a patient in various psychiatric institutions across the country. The pseudopatients pretended to have symptoms of schizophrenia upon initial examination, but once admitted, resumed behaving as they normally would and insisted that they felt fine and no longer experienced any …show more content…
Rosenhan observed that the staff and patients were segregated and patients were strongly discouraged from initiating contact with the hospital staff. The patients had virtually no privacy, even the showers and toilet were monitored, and were sometimes abused. All of this added up to what Rosenhan described as “depersonalization” (Rosenhan, 1973), the effect of which made many patients feel invisible, or not worth consideration.
In another part of the study, Rosenhan notified a psychiatric hospital that he would be attempting to admit one or more pseudopatients into their hospital and he would evaluate whether or not the hospital was able to identify the pseudopatients. As a result, the hospital doctors and staff were much more careful about labeling incoming patients with disorders. They wound up suspecting the 23 out of 193 incoming patients were the pseudopatients when, actually, there were no pseudopatients at all.
Both of these experiments seem to indicate that sanity is not reliably detectable and that the diagnosis of a mental disorder appears to based more on the circumstances around which an evaluation of a person is performed rather than whether or not the person is actually behaving as if they have a
In his study, David L. Rosenhan investigates whether or not sanity is a detectable condition that may be identified reliably by mental institution staff and doctors. Additionally, does the decision reached by the staff and doctors depend more on their evaluation of the individual patient or the environment in which the evaluation occurs? Rosenhan gathered together eight people who agreed to feign a mental disorder (“pseudopatients”) in order to gain admittance as a patient in various psychiatric institutions across the country. The pseudopatients pretended to have symptoms of schizophrenia upon initial examination, but once admitted, resumed behaving as they normally would and insisted that they felt fine and no longer experienced any …show more content…
Rosenhan observed that the staff and patients were segregated and patients were strongly discouraged from initiating contact with the hospital staff. The patients had virtually no privacy, even the showers and toilet were monitored, and were sometimes abused. All of this added up to what Rosenhan described as “depersonalization” (Rosenhan, 1973), the effect of which made many patients feel invisible, or not worth consideration.
In another part of the study, Rosenhan notified a psychiatric hospital that he would be attempting to admit one or more pseudopatients into their hospital and he would evaluate whether or not the hospital was able to identify the pseudopatients. As a result, the hospital doctors and staff were much more careful about labeling incoming patients with disorders. They wound up suspecting the 23 out of 193 incoming patients were the pseudopatients when, actually, there were no pseudopatients at all.
Both of these experiments seem to indicate that sanity is not reliably detectable and that the diagnosis of a mental disorder appears to based more on the circumstances around which an evaluation of a person is performed rather than whether or not the person is actually behaving as if they have a