On Being Sane In Insane Places Analysis

In the chapter “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” David Rosenhan decided to experiment how well psychiatrists were able to differentiate a “sane” individual versus an “insane” individual. Rosenhan recruited eight other individuals, and together the eight of them faked their way into various hospitals. Mental illness can easily be misdiagnosed or mistreated in an individual when psychiatrists do not take the time to fully identify the patients illness because, most often people who consider themselves “insane” are actually the “sane” ones, while the people who consider themselves to be “sane” are actually “insane.” In the book Opening Skinners Box, Lauren Slater writes about David Rosenhan a psychologist with a joint degree in law who decided to try something out after “He had observed how many men used mental illness as a way of avoiding the draft.” (p.64) Rosenhan recruited eight other individuals and

Insanity isn’t just about hearing voices or having multiple personalities, depression can also play a part in a person’s feelings of insanity. David L. Rosenhan writes in Pseudoempiricism: Who Owns the Right to Scientific Reality?, “The standard manipulation check for the experience of a particular emotion or mood is a 5- or 7- point Likert scale on which the question takes a form such as “How sad are you?” The technical experiment requirement from this simple operation is that those who are naturally experiencing the mood or who have experienced the mood through an experimental induction acknowledge a higher scale rating than those who are not experiencing the mood.” (p.362) By using the standard manipulation check a physician can rule out serious mental illnesses and suicide. This check will help determine if it’s just a bad day your experiencing or something