Summary and Background of the Rosenhan’s Study in 1973
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.
Student Misconceptions
Whilst the procedure in this study might seem straightforward, this is probably one of the few studies students will encounter, which is a field study. It also has elements of participant observation, as well as self-report. Rosenhan himself was one of the participants in the study and participated as a pseudo-patient. It must be stressed that the participants did not have, nor had, any mental illness previously. They changed their names, and some changed their profession (some were psychiatrists and psychologists). They all complained only once of hearing a voice saying ‘thud, empty, hollow’ but once admitted to the hospital behaved normally, apart from taking notes whilst in there.
Read the content above and the Rosenhan Study Article, then address the following questions.
Remember to provide at least 3 to 4 sentences in your responses to the questions.
Please remember that if you use a resource, use APA formatting.
What happened if the pseudo-patients were given medication?
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?
Sample Solution
Once admitted to the hospital, the pseudo-patients stopped showing any symptoms and took part in ward activities such as eating meals with other patients, playing board games, watching television and participating in occupational therapy. The average length of stay was 19 days. All participants had agreed to stay until they had convinced staff they were no longer ill. The pseudo-patients only revealed their true identity on the day of discharge (Rosenhan et al., 1973).
The other patients were not particularly suspicious of the pseudo-patients, who participated in ward activities without disrupting them or giving away their real identities. However, some members of staff suspected that one or two of them may have been pretending to be mentally ill due to certain behaviors such as taking notes during group therapy sessions (Rosenhan et al., 1973).
During their stay at the hospital, all eight pseudo-patients experienced various forms of institutionalization including depersonalization, powerlessness and segregation from others which are counter-therapeutic for people suffering from mental illness (Rosenhan et al., 1973). They also reported feeling like objects rather than human beings while being observed constantly by medical personnel and lacking privacy because everything about them was shared with others freely (Rosenhan et al., 1973).
On release from the hospital each patient was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia ‘in remission’ even though none had ever suffered from this condition nor presented any signs indicating mental illness before admission . This further demonstrated how unreliable psychiatric diagnoses can be based on flawed criteria which often leads to misdiagnosis or over diagnosis (Kogan & Widiger 2009).
