(11-18-19) In 1973, Dr. David L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, announced that he and seven others had pretended to have a serious mental illnesses and were subsequently hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia even though they were faking.
His report, On Being Sane In Insane Places, published in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shocked the country and deeply weakened the public’s faith in psychiatrists, state mental hospitals, and psychiatry itself.
The article has been embraced for decades by the anti-psychiatry movement as proof mental illnesses are a “social construct” and do not exist. His study “plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered,” the New York Times recently noted. “It made Rosenhan an academic celebrity. Nearly 50 years later, it remains one of the most cited papers in social science.”
Dr. Rosenhan, who died in 2012, claimed that three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife, joined him in posing as patients. None of the other pseudo-patients was identified in his article, which he intended to publish as a book, nor were the doctors and hospitals that were bamboozled named.
It now appears his study might have been a hoax.
