In 1973, in the United States, a student of English psychiatrist Lang (leader of the international movement called "antipsychiatry") - psychologist David Rosenhan conducted an experiment called "Psychically healthy in the place of crazy". His research sparked a storm of indignation among psychiatrists, as it questioned the reliability of psychiatric diagnostics.
David Rosenhan was able to identify and prove that psychiatrists make their diagnoses by adjusting the symptoms of a patient for a particular disease.
The Rosenhan experiment was conducted in two phases.
At first, eight people from Rosenhan’s research group (three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, an artist, a housewife and Rosenhan himself) went to psychiatric hospitals in different states with complaints of hearing hallucinations. These people agreed to first simulate the disease and then, in order to get out of the clinic as soon as possible, tell the doctors that they were okay.
And here the strange things began.
After the experimenters were diagnosed and placed in clinics, they found themselves in a closed space where no one had heard of them. They told the doctors that they felt great, but they did not pay attention to them. The staff of the hospitals insisted that “patients,” despite their good condition, continue to take psychotropic drugs. The experimenters were released only after their treatment was completed.
After that, another group of participants in the study visited 12 other psychiatric clinics with the same complaints - hearing hallucinations. It must be said that the experimenters turned to both renowned private clinics and ordinary local hospitals. All participants in the experiment were identified as mentally unhealthy.
Simulants said they heard voices repeating words like “empty,” “fall,” and “disappear.” All these words were deliberately chosen by David Rosenhan, as they indicated the existence of an existential crisis in the person.
After seven participants were diagnosed with schizophrenia and one was diagnosed with depressive psychosis, they were all hospitalized.
As soon as they were brought to the clinics, the “patients” began to behave normally and convinced the staff that they no longer heard voices. However, it took an average of 19 days to convince doctors that they were no longer sick. One of the experimenters spent 52 days in the hospital.
All participants in the experiment were eventually discharged from clinics with a diagnosis of "schizophrenia" in their medical records. Thus, people were hung a label of madmen.
When Rosenhan published the results of the study, the world of psychiatry was shocked. The doctors of one of the clinics insisted on repeating the experiment and claimed that there was some annoying misunderstanding. They demanded that Rosenhan send them to the reception of his experimenters so that they could be identified. Rozenhan agreed to repeat the experiment. It was assumed that the doctors of the psychiatric clinic had to identify simulants from among all the patients who came to them for reception.
During the next three months, the administration of the clinic was able to identify 41 simulators out of 193 patients. What a surprise they had when they found out that Rosenhan had not sent anyone. He managed to circle the doctors around his finger.
What was the purpose of this experiment? It was formulated in the work of Dr. Rosenhan himself: “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that in psychiatric hospitals we cannot distinguish between healthy and unhealthy.”
But if the doctors were so simplistic, then this could not be said about the patients themselves – that is, about people with obscure reason, who were in the clinics next to the simulants and watched them.
From the very beginning of the experiment, real patients suspected that the researchers sent by Rosenhan were simulants, while the hospital staff did not notice it. Thirty-five real patients, mentally ill people, were able to accurately determine that the participants in the experiment were not sick, but only pretended.
The sick approached them and said, “You are not crazy. You’re probably a journalist or a professor sent here for inspection.” Patients who suspected the “instigation” approached the doctors, trying to tell them about it, but the doctors “do not hear them.” They were completely locked in their internal psychiatric hospital.