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Question by nativearchdoc: Are you mentally ill for hearing voices? : ) hey, yea, u, huh?
From Austin Cline,
Your Guide to Agnosticism / Atheism.
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Are You Mentally Ill?
If you presented yourself to a psychiatric institution and told people there that you were hearing voices, even if you were perfectly sane and had no other symptoms, would they conclude that you were suffering from a mental illness? Yes, evidently – and in 1972, they would actually lock you up for a couple of months, even if you protested that you were feeling better.

An extract from Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century appears in the Guardian, where she describes an experiment performed by David Rosenhan: he sent healthy people to institutions, claiming that they heard the word “Thud.” Aside from not washing, shaving, or brushing their teeth for five days, there was nothing else odd about them.

Rosenhan cooperated absolutely. He “took” the pills three times a day and then rushed to the bathroom to spit them back out. He comments on how all the other patients were doing this, too, and how no one much cared so long as they were well behaved. Psychiatric patients are “invisible … unworthy of account”, Rosenhan writes. He describes a nurse coming into the dayroom, unbuttoning her shirt and fixing her bra. “One did not have the sense that she was being seductive,” Rosenhan reports. “Rather, she didn’t notice us.”

Rosenhan and his confederates were given some therapy, and when they told of the joys, satisfactions and disappointments of an ordinary life – remember, they were making nothing up save the original complaint – all found that their pasts were reconfigured to fit the diagnosis: “This white 39-year-old male … manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships … affective stability is absent … and while he says he has several good friends, one senses considerable ambivalence in those relationships.”

In 1973, Rosenhan wrote in Science, one of the field’s most prestigious journals, “Clearly, the meaning ascribed to his verbalisations … was determined by the diagnosis, schizophrenia. An entirely different meaning would have been ascribed if it were known that the man was ‘normal’.” The strange thing was, the other patients seemed to know that Rosenhan was normal, even while the doctors did not. One young man, coming up to Rosenhan in the dayroom, said “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor.” Another said, “You’re checking up on the hospital.”

Psychiatrists were outraged when Rosenhan revealed his results – not at the nurses and doctors who misdiagnosed healthy people, but at Rosenhan for revealing what could happen.

“So how is David Rosenhan?” [Robert Spitzer, one of the 20th century’s most prominent psychiatrists and a severe critic of Rosenhan] finally asks. “Actually, not so good,” I say. “He’s lost his wife to cancer, his daughter Nina in a car crash. He’s had several strokes and is now suffering from a disease they can’t quite diagnose. He’s paralysed.” That Spitzer doesn’t say, or much sound, sorry when he hears this reveals the depths to which Rosenhan’s study is still hated in the field, even after 30 years. “That’s what you get,” he says, “for conducting such an inquiry.”

Such hatred. Such anger. Slater recreated the experiment on her own recently and found that not much had changed. She wasn’t admitted to a hospital, but she was consistently given anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. When told, Spitzer wasn’t happy – but at first he was more unhappy with Slater and only later acknowledged, sort of, that the problem might be with the doctors. I’ll bet he still won’t apologize to Rosenhan, though.

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