David Rosenhan Schizophrenia Case Study

Between the years of 1962-1972, David Rosenhan and seven other sane people were admitted to 12 different psychiatric hospitals suffering from schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a widely known mental illness that is associated with hearing strange voices or the appearance of objects or individuals that aren’t real. Rosenhan wanted to know if the workers are able to distinguish if an individual was sane or insane. Rosenhan and the researchers that came from different professions were asked to take notes while acting as patient with a mental illness and for purposes for this research were called pseudopatients. The pseudopatients were asked to call the hospital for an appointment and after arriving, they explained how they felt symptoms of hearing voices that had said “empty” or “hollow” and explained a little about their real history. After actually being admitted into the hospital, they began taking notes and at first the notes were taken secretively but later on became more public because they felt the sense that nobody paid much

The staff made little to no interaction with the pseudopatients or even other patients for that matter. They just brush them off or changed the subject when patients asked when they would be discharged. They found that the patients were interacted with for little over six minutes per day. Nobody was able to realize that the pseudopatients were not mentally ill and almost felt as if they were actually diagnosed with the “illness” that they did not have. Rosenhan and the seven others were admitted into the hospital with schizophrenia and discharged with schizophrenia in remission. Remission and sane are not the same so the results of the study concluded that there were no way to distinguish if someone was insane or not. Rosenhan gives countless reasons why this