On Being Sane in Insane Places
The Rosenhan Experiment
The year was 1973. A young professor of psychology at Stanford University was out to challenge the medical model underpinning the whole of psychiatry in the West. His name was David Rosenhan, and his experiment would rock the foundations of psychiatry, and echo down the years.
The counterculture was still an influence that had first emerged in the latter half of the previous decade. In the field of mental health this became known as anti-psychiatry. It challenged the notion of psychiatry as it replicated a paradigm drawn from physical medicine. That is, a series of physical symptoms, identified and analysed, so producing a diagnosis.
In physical medicine there is a built-in consistency, based on scientific evidence, that usually produces the same valid diagnosis. Based firmly on the diagnosis, a treatment regime is subsequently prescribed. Throughout its history, because psychiatrists were, and are, medical doctors, psychiatry relied heavily on the prescription of physical types of treatment, including various types of shock treatment and psycho-surgery.
And by the seventies, although Freud’s various schools of psychoanalysis were still influential, they were falling out of mainstream favour, largely due to their non-conclusive and protracted nature, as well as the long term…
