David Rosenhan On Being Sane In Insane Places
About the study
Question: With reference to alternative evidence, critically assess Rosenhan’s (1973) research ‘On being sane in insane places’.
David Rosenhan (1973) asked the now-famous question ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?’ Rosenhan did not suggest that there is no such thing as deviant or odd behaviour, nor that ‘mental illness’ is not associated with personal anguish. However he did raise an important question about whether the diagnosis of insanity is based on characteristics of patients themselves or merely the context in which patient is seen. Rosenhan aimed to investigate whether psychiatrists could distinguish between people who are generally insane/mentally ill and those who are seen as ‘sane/normal’. He argued that the question that weather the person is mentally ill or whether it is the specific context in which we see that person can be investigated by getting ‘normal’ people (people who have never had serious psychiatric symptoms) to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital and if the ‘pseudopatients’ …show more content…
student, housewife and painter) and including Rosenhan himself they attempted to gain admission to 12 different hospitals in five different states in the USA. They gained admission by claiming different symptoms that would link to mental illness for example hearing voices saying words such as ‘empty’ ‘hollow’ and ‘thud’. They gained admission and once admitted they were told to behave as normal the same as they would in everyday life. They spent their time talking to patients, making notes of their observations in the ward and they secretly did not take their medication but otherwise followed the ward routine. The pseudopatients did not know when they would be discharged, one of the conditions of the experiment was that they had to get out by their own
Question: With reference to alternative evidence, critically assess Rosenhan’s (1973) research ‘On being sane in insane places’.
David Rosenhan (1973) asked the now-famous question ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?’ Rosenhan did not suggest that there is no such thing as deviant or odd behaviour, nor that ‘mental illness’ is not associated with personal anguish. However he did raise an important question about whether the diagnosis of insanity is based on characteristics of patients themselves or merely the context in which patient is seen. Rosenhan aimed to investigate whether psychiatrists could distinguish between people who are generally insane/mentally ill and those who are seen as ‘sane/normal’. He argued that the question that weather the person is mentally ill or whether it is the specific context in which we see that person can be investigated by getting ‘normal’ people (people who have never had serious psychiatric symptoms) to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital and if the ‘pseudopatients’ …show more content…
student, housewife and painter) and including Rosenhan himself they attempted to gain admission to 12 different hospitals in five different states in the USA. They gained admission by claiming different symptoms that would link to mental illness for example hearing voices saying words such as ‘empty’ ‘hollow’ and ‘thud’. They gained admission and once admitted they were told to behave as normal the same as they would in everyday life. They spent their time talking to patients, making notes of their observations in the ward and they secretly did not take their medication but otherwise followed the ward routine. The pseudopatients did not know when they would be discharged, one of the conditions of the experiment was that they had to get out by their own