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: 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. Bly’s work resulted in a grand jury investigation that attempted to make psychiatric examinations more thorough in an attempt to make sure that less “sane” people were institutionalized. Almost a century later, Rosenhan showed that the mental health profession still had a long way to go in being able to reliably and consistently distinguish the sane from the insane. After the results of the Rosenhan experiment were published, the American Psychiatric Association changed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The new version of the manual, published in 1980, presented a more thorough list of symptoms for every mental illness and stated that, in order to diagnose a patient with a certain disorder, multiple symptoms had to be present as opposed to just one. These changes in the manual survive to this day, although it has yet to be conclusively determined whether it has been successful in preventing false diagnoses.