On Being Sane In Insane Places Summary

"Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects the other that doth pass" (Cooley 375).We all tend to believe that we are in control of our realities and perspectives. Charles Cooley argues that identities are formed and molded by the people around them. We are in a world in which realities are always interacting and developing as a result. Awareness of these interacting social perspectives is required if one expects to feel wanted. Every individual experience The Five Features of Reality which are described by Mehan and Wood as Reflexivity and secondary elaborations of beliefs, Coherence, Interactional, Fragility, Permeability. The case study by Rosenhan called, "On Being Sane in Insane Places" will be used to apply further this concept to elaborate

In Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places" he conducts an experiment in which eight healthy people attempt to be admitted to a mental institution, as pseudopatients by complaining of hearing voices and noises. To their surprise, seven out of the eight individuals are admitted to facilities where they are instructed by Rosenhan to immediate stop faking their symptoms and take notes of their experience. The reality of the staff of the mental facility will be described and applied to the five features of reality. The incorrigible proposition of medical personnel was that these pseudopatients were, in fact, insane and not normal. The staff's reality was reflexive and many times secondary elaborations of beliefs were used to maintain their reality. When doctors diagnosed patients as schizophrenic, it became their primary characteristic, and it affected all their behaviors. Being schizophrenic was so powerful that many of the pseudopatients' healthy behaviors were ignored or hugely misinterpreted. A pseudopatient discussed his family history that to most of us would seem as rather typical and standard. The director of the facility interpreted the story to maintain his reality that this patient was indeed mentally ill, "This white 39-year-old male manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships which begins in early childhood. A warm relationship with his mother cools during his adolescence. A distant relationship with his father is described as becoming very intense. Effective stability is absent. His attempts to control emotionality with his wife and children are punctuated by angry outbursts and, in case of the children, spankings. And while he says he has several good friends, one sense a considerable ambivalence embedded in those relationships also" (Rosenhan 115). The realities of the medical staff heavily rely on the belief that the individuals admitted to their facilities were indeed mentally ill. If