Being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]

It's unclear if this experiment actually happened the way Rosenhan claimed. A journalist went through Rosenhan's archives and tried to verify his story. She managed to track down one of the pseudopatients, who disputed some of Rosenhan's claims such as the amount of preparation, and whether Rosenhan had worked out a legal backup plan in case the institution refused to release the patient.[1] She also noted large discrepancies in various numbers. Apparently she wrote a book about the whole thing, but I haven't had the chance to read it.[2][3]

1. https://sci-hub.red/10.1038/d41586-019-03268-y

2. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/13/777172316/the-great-pretender...

3. https://www.susannahcahalan.com/the-great-pretender

If you've ever taken a depression screener at a wellness visit, that's a consequence of this work. This paper describes how unreliable psychiatric diagnosis used to be. There were standards, but they ultimately came down to physician judgment. This created demand for more objective standards, which resulted in the "checklist" approach that we have now.

This study was a fraud: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154x221150878

Reminds me of: Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

An experiment where they sent normal people to mental institutes to see if professionals would be able to identify them.

This is one of those "important research with unbelievably flawed methods" sort of situations. Psych research before IRBs was crazy.

This experiment is now widely debated, the author may have made up or exaggerated details.

This is from the seventies. I wonder if things would be different fifty years later.