Sunday, December 01, 2019

Book Excerpt for the Day


    David Rosenhan, a professor emeritus at Stanford, (…) in 1973 got himself and seven other completely healthy friends admitted to the mental wards of hospitals across the United States.  The point of his experiment was to question the validity of psychiatric diagnosis – but they hadn’t expected it to be so easy.  Rosenhan and his colleagues each phoned a hospital complaining of hearing voices.  The rest of their medical history and any other life stories were all true.  All eight were admitted – seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia, one with manic-depressive psychosis.  As soon as they entered the hospital they said their hallucinations had disappeared.  It was then up to each individual to convince the staff to discharge – a task that took between seven and fifty-two days.

    (from Unthinkable by Helen Thomson)

  9½*/10.  The complete review is here.
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