Madness
Rosenhan wanted to know, if psychiatrists were able to distinguish between sanity and insanity. So he started a study with eight normal people, who had to ask a mental hospital for appointment. These psychiatries were located in five different states of the east and west coast of America. The study considered also the difference between new and old mental hospitals. All of the persons said that they were hearing voices. They also falsified their names and their occupations, but all the significant events in each participant´s life actually happened. Almost every one of the participants was diagnosed as schizophrenic. As soon as they have been admitted, they stopped acting abnormal. In the psychiatric wards they said that they were fine and no longer hear any voices or experienced any symptoms. They also behaved in a friendly and cooperative way. The participants were taking notes while their abidance in the hospital. It took 7 to 52 days until the pseudo-patients were released. The average was released after 19 days. In most of the mental hospitals psychologists and psychiatrists are daily in contact with the patients for almost 7 minutes. That explains why it took them that long until they realized that the pseudo-patients were sane all the time. Some patients of the psychiatries realized that the pseudo-patients were not crazy. So it is hard to make a clear difference between sanity and insanity.
After that study Rosenhan wondered it an insane would be regarded as sane. The staff of the hospitals wanted to prove that they were not that gullible. So he told the staff of the hospital that pseudo-patients would want to gain admission in the following three months. From 193 patients, 41 were judged to be pseudo-patients. 19 patients were suspected as frauds by a psychiatrist. In fact no one of these 193 patients was pseudo-patients.
Rrosenhan´s conclusion indicates that we and even psychiatrists are not able to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In this study he also showed that psychiatrists are out of contact with their patients.
Topics to talk about:
· How would you define sanity and insanity?
· Do you believe that everyone is a bit crazy in his own way? Do you think that the study shows this guess?
· Are you surprised at the results of this experiment?
· Do you think that this experiment would afford the same results like in the USA? Why?
· Do you think that attitudes to psychiatry were different in America from Austria? If so, how? Why?
· Would you take part in such an experiment?
Keywords
hollow(adj)..........dull sound, as of a blow on something soft
fraud.........a person or a thing that deceives
shabby.........to be in bad repair or condition
bona-fide.......real or genuine
blurred........unclear and confused
to err........easily deceived or heated
| < Zurück | Weiter > |
|---|
