Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places"
... to test his hypothesis. Among these eight pseudopatients was a psychology graduate student, a pediatrician, a housewife, a painter, a psychiatrist and moreover, there were three psychologists in the group. The 12 different hospitals were varied throughout the country, ranging anywhere from the West coast to the East coast. To gain admission, the 12 pseudopatients had to claim that they heard unclear voices that said words like “empty”, “hollow”, and “thud”. Nothing else was changed about the pseudopatient besides their occupations and names. Their family history remained the same, and so did all of the occurrences in his or her life. Then, the pseudopatients were admitted with cases of schizophrenia. Once the pseudopatient entered the ward, they were instructed by Rosenhan to act normally, as they would in everyday life. Also, the pseudopatients had to claim that all of their symptoms (i.e., the voices) had gone away. The pseudopatients had not been told when they would be released from the psychiatric ward. Therefore, Rosenhan explained that the pseudopatients had to be dismissed from the ward by acting sane. Mostly all of the pseudopatients wanted to get out of the ward almost as soon as they arrived, and thus began to behave as they normally would. Because the pseudopatients wanted to act sane and get out as soon as possible, they behaved normally without any reports of disruptiveness and the pseudopatients also were motivated to cooperate. Despite their attempts at trying to be dismissed from the ward as clinically sane, the pseudopatients were all dismissed with schizophrenia in remission. Rosenhan argued that the label “in remission” proved that only because they had been diagnosed that way in the first place, they were forever branded with schizophrenia. In the doctor’s eyes, the pseudopatient had never been, and would never be, clinically sane. The second part began when another hospital had heard of the study and claimed that if the same thing would be done there, the staff would be able to recognize the sane from the insane. The staff of the hospital was asked to make decisions on whether the patients were pseudopatients or real patients. Out of the one hundred ninety-three patients t...