"We're All Mad Here": Rosenhan in Wonderland

Question: If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?

Hypothesis: Do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environment and context in which observers find them?

Study: Participant Observation

Design: David Rosenhan and 7 associates mimicked the characteristics of schizophrenia in order to gain entry into several mental hospitals on the East and West coasts to observe the staff’s diagnosis, or the assumptions, on the behavior of the legitimate patients and the pseudopatients. Once the subjects gained entry into a sanatorium, they ceased all psychotic characteristics and began to act as they would on a normal basis to see if the staff would be able to recognize the person’s sanity.

Description: Rosenhan’s study concluded that the environment and context of a person’s questionable sanity plays a huge role in the perception of the observer (i.e. the Psychologist and Mental Hospital staff). The participants in this study never had their sanity questioned by a staff member even though they exhibited no symptoms of mental illness after induction; however, several of the legitimate mental patients were able to distinguish the falsified patients from the mentally ill.
Rosenhan also discovered that normal undisturbed human actions or behavior such as boredom were misconstrued as anxiety or other emotional or mental disruptions. Judging by the way that the hospitals psychologist would interpret the pseudopatients normal past (with no instance of mental illness or any plausible event that would cause any mental abnormality) into an out of proportion turbulent life that would trigger dormant schizophrenia, it was shown that by the observer having the preconceived (and falsified) notions of the individual, the observer would try to find reasons that would justify the pseudopatients supposed schizophrenia. The hospital staffs were self fulfilling their prophecies or conceptions concerning the pseudopatients because of the information they were fed and truly believed.

Author: Carly Malm