Committing a person to a mental health facility against their will is never an easy thing to do. But if they are really bad, so they need to get help. If it happens that they are not sick, then you can have faith that doctors will eventually understand and release them ... right?
Well, if the results of the 1973 experiment are to be believed, I would not count on it.
In 1973, Stanford professor Dr. David Rosenhan began to question the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. After some contemplation, he conducted an experiment to test his theory.
Wikipedia
For the first part of his study, Rosenhan assembled a small team of
[1945012"pseudopatients"] iStock
The team consisted of three women and five men (Rosenhan himself). They each tried to gain entry into different psychiatric hospitals in five states separated by pretending to hear voices. All of them were admitted.
However, once inside the center, they acted completely normal and continually told the doctors that they felt well .
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despite evidence to have sane people in front of them, each member of the team was forced to admit having a mental illness. They then had to agree to take anti-psychotic drugs as a condition of their release. Almost all of them were "diagnosed" with schizophrenia. The average duration of admission for each release pseudopatients was 19 days.
After the results of this study were published, an administrator of the hospital dissatisfied argued that these kinds of errors might never reach its hospital and challenged Rosenhan for testing.
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While did.
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he and his team chose a well known hospital whose staff was informed of the results of his latest experiment. Rosenhan told staff that over the next three months, one or more pseudopatients attempt to be admitted to hospital. During the experiment, only 41 staff identified 191 people who were supposedly pseudopatients. But here's the twist. Rosenhan never actually sent them all.
(via Wikipedia)
Of course, the results of Rosenhan stirred a bit of controversy. When he published the play he called for reforms to be in place, but not many of them actually all the way to implementation.
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