The Rosenhan experiment: crazy very sane

Can you imagine faking a dementia to enter a psychiatric and then not believe you when you stop simulating that madness? This is what happened in the Rosenhan experiment .And, as economist Paul Anthony Samuelson said:

“When everyone is crazy, being sane is crazy ”

In 1973, the prestigious journal Science published a study that called into question the validity of the psychiatric diagnosis It was the article "Be sane in insane places", which reflects the experiment that the psychologist David Rosenham had conducted between 1968 and 1972 in a dozen psychiatric centers in five states of the United States.

In Science Daily Online we tell you what this peculiar test consists of.

First phase: infiltrates

In the first stage of the trial, a dozen totally stringent people and without a history of mental illness pretended to suffer acoustic hallucinations, that is, they assured that they heard voices that did not exist , to enter psychiatrics throughout the country and all classes (old, modern, rural, urban, public, private...).

Needless to say, hospitals are unaware that they were being studied and that the volunteers in the experiment altered their names and, in some cases, their professions, keeping the rest of their lives true to reality.

The Rosenhan experiment: crazy very sane

Everyone was diagnosed as insane , despite not being there, and obtained their respective places in the centers.

Returning to sanity

Then the pseudo-crazy stopped simulating those hallucinations and began to behave normally, indicating it to the psychiatric staff.

No one believed them.Well, to be more exact, numerous mentally ill of the centers if perceier on the sanity of the impostors and commented that the fake patients were infiltrated and that they were journalists or investigators, since Rosenhan's volunteers went with a notebook and wrote notes on it during their internment.This practice, however, It was considered pathological for nurses and caregivers. Curious, isn't it?

Moreover, in no case did the experiment volunteers receive the discharge and, in fact, to leave the hospitals had to sign a acknowledgment of their mental illness and commit to medicating with antipsychotics.Some of the participants were two months in detention , despite their “improvement”, although the It was about three weeks.

“I said to my friends, to my family: 'I will leave there when I have to leave, that is all.I will be there a couple of days and then I will leave 'No one had any idea that I would spend two months there! The only way out was to accept that they were right.'They say that I am crazy, because I am, but I am improving.' It was an affirmation of the image they had of me, ”said Rosenhan himself about his project..

Second phase: the test, to the test

But the lesson was not there.A university hospital in the country, incredulous at the malpractice of his companions, asked Rosenham to send healthy incognito patients to discover them .

The Rosenhan experiment: crazy very sane

What was the surprise when the address of this center assured that he had detected 41 pseudopatients , 19 of them with the suspicion of minus two workers, among the almost 200 people who attended the center in the following three months.

The disappointment is that Rosenham had not sent anyone to the hospital.Didn't the suggestion allow them to do their job well? That seems.Those who are not and ropes that do not exist.Surely you are also interested in this article about five personalities with mental disorders.

The consequences

This behavior, for Rosenham, showed that mental illness is not conceived in psychiatry as a curable disease, but a stigma that persecutes patients for the rest of their lives.

The psychologist also criticized the dehumanized treatment offered to patients, with a few minutes of daily attention, and the lack of skepticism shown by the staff.

Obviously, their conclusions were like a bomb in the world of Psychiatry and, overcome the controversy, the Rosenham experiment allowed the change of the manuals of psychiatric diagnosis and the doctor-patient relationship, promoting the movement of the so-called antipsychiatry and the deinstitutionalization of the treatment of the mentally ill.

And if you have been wanting to continue the visit by the psychiatric , I recommend this article it.

And you? Have you been taken as crazy on occasion when you weren't?

Images: Nicolas Fuentes , zentolos, Ricardo Alguacil

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