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Who's Crazy Here Anyway Analysis

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Who's Crazy Here Anyway Analysis
Who’s Crazy Here, Anyway?

David Rosenhan

The study has been carried out because David Rosenhan wants to validate psychiatric diagnosis.

Rosenhan wanted to see if psychologists needed these tests, shouldn’t they be able to tell who is insane and who isn’t. Is diagnosis tied to patient or situation? He proposed to find it by admitting "pseudopatients" to psychiatric facilities and see if they are found to be normal. If they are not, means that the diagnoses are tied more to the situation than the patients.

A pseudo patient is a researcher posing as a patient. Schizophrenia, according to psychiatrists, is a mental disorder in which contact with reality and vision is impaired. The pseudopatients consists of one graduate student, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter, and one wife. They sought admission to the 12 mental hospitals in five states both east and west coast of the US. They act and told the truth about themselves, except for their fake symptoms they heard voices that said "empty", "hollow" and "thud." Once admitted, they act as a model patient and shows no signs of psychological disorders.

The pseudopatients
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First, the bright minds can not be distinguished from "psycho" in the mental hospital setting. Secondly, Rosenhan proved the risk of diagnostic labels. When a person is labeled as having a certain psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness, etc, label affects people seriously. For example, the man went to the job interview and the first company sees schizophrenia, their resume, then they will not be able to get a job because the interviewee is schizophrenia. Therefore, mental health facilities, crisis intervention centers, and behavior therapy tend to avoid labeling the symptoms. This does not mean every mental health profession has eliminated the labeling. However, many psychiatric labels are now used carefully so that the patient does not shock and

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