Title: Rosenhan Experiment: When Fake Mental Patients Fooled Doctors
Headings: The Rosenhan Experiment: When Fake Mental Patients Fooled Psychiatrists
The Rosenhan Experiment: When Fake Mental Patients Fooled Psychiatrists
How the Rosenhan experiment showed that "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals."
How The Rosenhan Experiment Was Carried Out
The Disturbing Results
The Legacy Of The Rosenhan Experiment
New Research Casts Doubt

Content: This kind of thinking is understandable to a point: failing to diagnose a sick person usually has more severe consequences than misdiagnosing a healthy one. However, the consequences of the latter can be dire. Either way, the results of the Rosenhan experiment caused a sensation. People were astonished about the unreliability of psychiatric diagnoses and the ease with which hospital staff had been duped. However, some researchers criticized the Rosenhan experiment, stating that the pseudopatients’ dishonest reporting of their symptoms made the experiment invalid because patients’ self-reports are one of the cornerstones on which psychiatric diagnoses are built. But other researchers have affirmed Rosenhan’s methods and results, with some even partially replicating his experiment and coming up with similar conclusions. Of course, even Rosenhan was not the first American to bring the darker side of the mental health system to light in this way. Wikimedia Commons Nellie Bly
In 1887, journalist Nellie Bly went undercover in an insane asylum and published her findings as Ten Days in a Mad-House. Bly too concluded that many of the other patients were just as “sane” as she and had been sent to the asylum unfairly.