Revisiting the Rosenhan Hoax

Rosenhan Experiment

In light of society’s recent focus – one might even say hyper focus – on mental health issues, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the concept in question. What is healthy in a psychological sense? What’s the difference between sanity and insanity. Where is the line drawn, and most importantly, who draws it?

Those were some of the questions that Dr. David Rosenhan claimed to investigate in his famous clandestine experiment.

How did he do it? Back in the early 70s, Rosenhan enlisted the aid of nine experimental subjects tasked with infiltrating mental hospitals on the East and West coasts. Acting under assumed identities and faking schizophrenia symptoms, they ventured into a place where no sane person wants to go.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Once on the inside, the pseudopatients as Rosenhan called them stopped displaying their fake symptoms and resumed acting normally. It was then that the test of the mental health system itself began. How long would it take the hospital staff to notice that the psuedopatients were actually sane?

According to Rosenhan’s paper, the answer was “never.”

Instead of noticing that the fake patients were sane, it was reported that hospital staff viewed all of the pseudopatients’ behavior through the lens of their false disorders. Even the most ordinary activities were seen as outgrowths of the pseudopatients’ “insanity.” The paper notoriously recounted one staff member labeling a pseudopatient’s experiment-related note taking as pathological “writing behavior.”

And one observation the pseudopatients noted was that hospital staff, including doctors, only spent about seven minutes a day interacting with patients in their care. Which probably didn’t help their diagnoses.

Upon publication, Rosenhan’s paper sent shockwaves through the mental health profession. It made his career and made experts in the field rethink longstanding diagnostic and treatment practices.

Then in 2019 it came out that several key elements of the experiment were manipulated; even fabricated. To the extent that the whole study has been condemned as a hoax.

Catholic apologist and high strangeness investigator Jimmy Akin details the whole sordid affair in his video on the Rosenhan Experiments.

Watch now:

Just a few of the irregularities that cast serious doubt on Rosenhan’s methods and results include:

  • Striking the report of one pseudopatient from the study for disagreeing with the desired findings
  • Rosenhan breaking his own stated experimental parameters by presenting multiple schizophrenia symptoms instead of just one
  • Outright fabricated quotes.

The point of Revisiting the Rosenhan hoax goes beyond the base thrill of seeing a con job revealed. Remember that this study shook up the mental health field and led to major changes industrywide.

Those changes included revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the main reference for diagnosing mental health problems. The authors of the manual’s third edition set out to rewrite the diagnostic criteria for severe disorders like schizophrenia. And they made their revisions in response to the false symptoms Rosenhan’s test subjects presented. It’s even said that the head of the DSM III editorial committee would ask the editors, “Could a Rosenhan pseudopatient fake this?”

Medical experts’ credibility has suffered in general these past few years. So it’s extra chilling to think that tens of thousands of mental disorder diagnoses may have been influenced by a hoaxed psychological experiment.

Remember that the next time someone tells you to “Trust the experts.”

 

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16 Comments

  1. D. Cal

    Jimmy Akin mentions the “replication crisis” that plagues modern science. It reminds me of an old article that I read by one of the scientists on the website Science-Based Medicine.

    The gist was that even before the media popularized the “crisis,” students and scientists were unable to replicate the findings of other experiments—even the elementary ones that got assigned in university classrooms—with surprising frequency. The word “crisis” implied an acute phenomena, however, so the term “replication crisis” was a misnomer.

    Science-Based Medicine has since published more articles that reveal more to the issue than, “It’s nothing but fraud!” and I myself have heard an anecdote about some high school classmates who defied the laws of physics in their chemistry class despite all of their peers obtaining the expected outcome. Even so, credentialed atheists must have taken us for imbeciles if they thought that “It’s always been like this” would have quelled our concerns.

    • I like Akin. If he has one intellectual blind spot, though, it’s overeagerness to get a pat on the head from scidolaters by accepting their frame.

      In particular he has a bad habit of discounting venerable teachings from Church doctors as “just theological speculation,” but oddly, I’ve never heard him refer to macro-evolution by natural selection as “just a theory.”

      An occupational hazard of apologists, perhaps.

      • Eugine Nier

        I stopped watching Akin when I realized he was basically treating the scientific consensus as if it was another Magisterium.

        • His biblical exegesis is quite good, and he’s a first-rate researcher. That said, I’ve recently heard him say something to the effect of “People have complained of societal degeneration at various points in the past. Therefore, things have never been better. Steven Pinker says so.”

          I couldn’t help but shout at the screen “Bro, have you looked outside lately? Or at drug abuse, fertility, and suicide rates?”

          • “Suicides are down across the entire world, so there is no Western specific problem.” That’s the sort of arguing Pinker does.

            I can’t take anyone who makes light of such a problem seriously.

          • Wiffle

            It’s hard to accept the cycle of degeneration of societies when everyone around you believes “Obviously, evolution”. Rome was an eternal empire…until it wasn’t and nobody had any real idea how the Romans made the concrete that built the Pantheon. Or the concrete that sets under seawater.

            We have fancy toys right now. It’s quite possible and even probable that anyone digging up a computer a 1000 years from now will be in wonder of what it did.

            • The Romans – even the ancient Egyptians – will be better remembered than us. Because they carved their stories in stone while we wrote ours in 1s and 0s that will disappear forever when the lights go out.

    • Randel

      If there’s something I’d suggest reading, it’s “Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty” by Gerd Gigerenzer. Beyond just showing Rationality is a lot more complicated than most folks think, the section titled “Mindless Statistics” explains a large part of why Science is basically worthless these days.

  2. Dandelion

    Yeah, it was a hoax.

    Grain of truth in it though. My parents, back in the 70s, worked at a halfway house. It was the era of deinstitutionalization, and they were among the legions of bright naive young idealists who were gonna make the world a better place etc etc. So the deal was, this place was taking institutionalized people, and trying to get them ready to live independently or semi-independently out in the world. Because, you know, hippie flower sunshine ideas about how unjust it was to lock them up when they’d committed no crime.

    The vast majority of them were never going to make that transition. They really were crazy, retarded, brain damaged, whatever– probably ended up as homeless vagrants. But there was this one lady, middle-aged then… nothing wrong with her. During WWII she’d married a guy right before he shipped off to France and got himself machine-gunned or something. Her family didn’t approve and had her committed. Nobody even told her that her husband had died. She’d spent 25 years or so doing crossword puzzles at the state hospital. So even though she was otherwise normal, she had no idea how to live out in the regular world– my parents did manage to track down her husband’s military records and get the lady her widow’s pension, teach her how to pay bills and buy groceries and stuff– their one success, such as it was.

    There were abuses. Just… not nearly as common as the activists would have you believe. And it’s a shame that the dishonesty out there makes the real cases disappear in the noise.

    • A perfect illustration of why lying, even in the service of good, is plain evil.

    • Wiffle

      I am sure she had at least some idea of how to live in the real world. Crossword puzzles are a very civilized activity. The will to is another thing entirely. In so much that the late 70’s-90’s was all about wiping out mental institutions, she might have seen the writing the wall about the 3 free squares a day. In that she might have only be relearning what she already knew.
      My family ran a small group home in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I saw of mental illness as a child/lay person. The line between control of behavior and not is a strangely fuzzy one, even in the worst of cases. Most people in institutions however were there because there was no other way to deal with them. Indeed modern drugs and enough wealth to assign individual guardians are the only thing preventing us from having crazy houses of some form again. It’s first world luxury item.

  3. As far as I can tell, very few people ever face up to the problem that over 90% of what we “know,” we only know because someone else told us.

    That has very real problems & implications, but the vast majority of people don’t seem to catch onto this at all,

    • Rudolph Harrier

      One of the things I find fascinating about the generational discussion on this blog is how much push back it gets. We all “know” that millennials means those born in the 80’s or 90’s, so Gen Y and Millennial must be identical. But why do we “know” this? Who told you? How did they decide? Few people know, but that doesn’t prevent most people from refusing to allow any other definition to even be considered (not even if it is useful and has a good historical precedent for the usage.)

      It’s a good entry point to see just how set this mindset is. That in turn helps explain how people can go from “I heard there was some goofy protest at the capitol” to “January 6th was an insurrection and everyone involved should be jailed forever” in the course of just a few days and without showing any sign of reasoning into the new position (or even admitting that they ever thought anything else.)

      • Good catch. Even more insidious is another trend we’ve documented:

        2001: “Everybody knows Millennials are those born from 1990 to now.”

        2015: “Everybody’s always known Millennials are those born from 1985-2000.”

        2020: “Everybody’s always known Millennials are those born from 1983-1997.”

        2023: “Everybody’s always known Millennials are those born from 1980-2000.”

        And nobody notices.

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