Being Sane In Insane Places Analysis

Insane or Sane?
After reading the article “Being Sane in Insane Places”, I was actually not surprised by the results. I believe it is difficult to diagnose mental disorders because physicians are not given direct results to interpret. It consists of a series of questions and speculating possible reasons based only on the patient’s answers. According to the article, some individuals act out for no reason, but does that mean they are suffering from a mental disorder? Of course not, but I believe that physicians struggle with this because there is no concrete answer. I believe that they are trying to link how a person feels to symptoms of a mental disorder to fix the issue. This is why I think physicians could accidentally diagnose a healthy individual …show more content…
It illustrates how an individual is quickly identified as a schizophrenic after stating he heard voices. This experiments shows that physician could easily misinterpret a healthy individual as sick within the psychiatric medical system. I have experienced this first hand after seeing multiple doctors for mental health. Each of them asked me similar questions, but struggled to pinpoint the exact reason for what I was feeling. This caused the physicians to contradict each other because one would diagnose me with one mental disorder, while the other would say the complete opposite. I believe that my experience and this experiment shows how the psychiatric medical system needs to improve. The system needs to find a more effective way to diagnose patients because taking medication for something they do not have could be harmful. For example, an individual with bipolar disorder could be mistaken for having depression. This results in that person taking anti-depressants and that increases the risk of a manic episode within bipolar …show more content…
This could cause some “odd” individuals to pursue into more deviant behaviors because they might believe that it is how they are supposed to act. This relates to the experiment because the labels caused a skew in results since the pseudopatients were viewed as insane. As mentioned in the article, the pseudopatients had their freedom limited by being stripped of personal privacy and trying to communicate with the staff. This stigmatization may have caused the individuals to think that maybe they are actually “crazy” and that idea may have been carried out into the real world. According to the textbook, this may have negatively affected their ability to function normally and efficiently. This may have resulted in others who knew about the experiment to think that they actually suffer from a mental disorder. This could create a confusion within family and friends of the individual to think that he or she is sick, but in reality he or she is