Psychiatry In Opening Skinner's Box By David Rosenhan

When exploring the field of psychiatry, one may notice a lot of skepticism regarding the opinions psychiatrists offer. A lot of this uncertainty can be traced back to the early 70’s, when David Rosenhan, a psychologist, decided to test how well therapists could differentiate mentally stable people from those unstable (Slater 63). There are many questions that sprang up from Rosenhan’s experiment. Are psychiatrists’ opinions reliable? Do psychiatrists tend to diagnose patients with whatever condition is common in society at the time? Views on psychiatry and the diagnostic process vary from person to person. However, one thing that everyone can agree with is that we all hope that psychiatrists are doing everything they can to help their patients. In chapter three of Lauren Slater’s book, Opening Skinner’s Box, it explains how Rosenhan shook the field of psychiatry’s by conducting an experiment that forever changed psychiatrist’s reliability. In the early 70’s, Rosenhan led a group of eight, considerably normal people, to fake mental disorder symptoms, see if they would get admitted into psychiatric wards and then, if admitted, act completely normal inside the wards (Slater 63). Testing different psychiatrists’ judgment and knowledge was the goal of this experiment and the results lead to the extreme questionability of their expertise. All nine volunteers, including Rosenhan, were admitted into mental …show more content…
As Slater speaks to one of Rosenhan’s close friends, Florence Keller, he states that psychiatry is a lifeless field and is still experiencing negative effects due to Rosenhan’s grand experiment (77). I believe this to be true, only because I, personally, do not know nor heard of anybody wanting to join the psychiatric field. Psychiatry is a very intangible field, being that the human mind is one of the hardest things in nature to understand. There is so much going on in a