What happened was this; there were twelve students and there were two parts to the study. The first part of the experiment consisted of eight healthy students, three women and five men, who pretended that they were suffering from hallucinations and attempted to get admitted to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in over 5 states in the USA, they were ALL admitted with psychiatric disorders. AFTER admission they behaved normally and told the staff that they felt quite well and were no longer experiencing hallucinations. But in order to guarantee their release they were all forced to admit they were mentally ill and take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of being released. All except one were diagnosed with schizophrenia, even though there was nothing really wrong with them in the first place.
"These pseudo-patients telephoned the hospital for an appointment, and arrived at the admissions office complaining that they had been hearing voices. They said the voice, which was unfamiliar and the same sex as themselves, was often unclear but it said 'empty', 'hollow', 'thud'. These symptoms were partly chosen because they were similar to existential symptoms (Who am I? What is it all for?) which arise from concerns about how meaningless your life is."
"Each pseudo patient had been told they would have to get out by their own devices by convincing staff they were sane."
In the second part of the study, the hospital administration of one hospital who'd taken offence at Rosenhan's study challenged him to send more "normal" patients to their hospital to prove that they could identify them. Rosenhan agreed to this and in the next few weeks out of nearly 200 patients the hospital detected 41 as perfectly normal (referred to as "psuedopatients") and 19 were suspected by one of the hospital psychiatrists and another member of staff. However, Rosenhan had not sent ANYONE to the hospital.
The BBC did something like this again on the Horizon programme in 2008 called "How mad are you?" There were ten subjects, with five having previously diagnosed conditions, and five who'd never had anything wrong with them. Three experts were used to determine which five had mental health problems, two were identified correctly , one was misdiagnosed and two healthy patients were diagnosed with mental health problems.
It's enough to keep you away at night - isn't it? And that's always been one of my major fears; being misdiagnosed with a mental health problem and never being able to leave, until in the end you DO end up with a mental illness, like a self fulfilling prophecy, oh that and being locked up for a crime you haven't committed.
A copy of the study is here if you'd like some sleepless nights:-
http://www.holah.karoo.net/rosenhanstudy.htm
You'd like to think things have changed, however with the stigma faced by millions of people everyday suffering from mental health issues you wonder whether the actual diagnosis is the beginning of your problems not the end and although his study was conducted over thirty years ago, keeping in mind the 2008 BBC Horizon programme it makes you wonder whether anything's really changed.
Whatever you do, don't complain about how meaningless your life is in public.......
