Friday, August 20, 2010

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment, article.
"After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release."

I could believe, say one in five were "just mistakes". But all of them? Wow, that is damning evidence.

Alex said:
That is a good observation for engineering/debugging too. How many times do you latch onto a symptom, and let the evidence fit? Probably is true in legal and crime fighting. Part of it is prejudice where you see a behaviour that looks familiar, the other is a subconscious tendency to deny you many have been wrong in your first diagnosis.

Yes, well said.
I think that probably we all suffer from this in one area or another, I suspect it's part of the "dark side" of being a Human.

5 comments:

Anna said...

Great !!! Thanks for sharing this !!!

I am really wondering why I NEVER heard about this. Ok, I didn't study specifically psychology, but still... should be more known than this. Thanks for spreading the word !

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yes, it should be much more known.

There is a subculture which is is continually working to expose the abuses of psychiatry, but it's not known about in the main population.

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

"Refusing to admit that you're mad is a classic sign in madness." The classic Catch-22. ):-P
Not just behing the Iron Curtain, my good friends...

But let me read that article before going on a blind rant. ;-)

Alex said...

And it was precisely this tendency to cling to a diagnosis — and interpreting all subsequent evidence in order to fit it — that lay at the heart of Rosenhan's criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.

That is a good observation for engineering/debugging too. How many times do you latch onto a symptom, and let the evidence fit? Probably is true in legal and crime fighting. Part of it is prejudice where you see a behaviour that looks familiar, the other is a subconscious tendency to deny you many have been wrong in your first diagnosis.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yes, well said.
I think that probably we all suffer from this in one area or another, I suspect it's part of the "dark side" of being a Human.