Rosenhan Study Summary

The Rosenhan Study showed how psychiatric hospitals could not differentiate between actually sick, insane patients from patients who were faking the symptoms and completely sane. Many people have been suspicious of the pharmaceutical industry and believe they will lie and manipulate the public. There are select minorities that believe that many diseases could be cured, but the treatment has not been made public due to the damage it would do to the pharmaceutical industry. In Rosenhan’s study, eight participants with no prior history with any mental disorder were going to try gain admission into twelve psychiatric hospitals. This resulted in all of the participants getting in and getting diagnosed with the following mental disorders: schizophrenia …show more content…
After this experiment, critics asked Rosenhan to administer a similar experiment, but he had to follow their guidelines this time. The psychiatric hospital staff expected to receive “fake” patients due to these guidelines, but there was a slight issue. Of the hundreds of patients he sent for this study, Rosenhan sent no actors who were “faking” this time. The hospital was not able to differentiate the sick patients with the ones that were acting as they accused some patients of being actors although there were none for this part of the study. It made people think if the industry was flawed and innocent people were unnecessarily being labeled and being forced to live with such extreme stigmatizations. Thomas Szasz says that mental disorder diagnoses have been over diagnosed and overblown. Many people who do not have any mental disorder are being forced to take medications and become burdened with the stigmatization of the disorder, he argues. He was anti-psychiatry as he rejected nearly all the ideas that were taught in the field of psychiatry. The study by Rosenhan was a significant study in the 1970s, as it showed how little evidence there was to be needed in order to be considered