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On Sane In Insane Places By David Rosenhan

228 Words1 Pages

I think the most interesting thing about the article was that some of the patients in the mental institutions could detect that the pseudo-patients were sane. It’s really astonishing how doctors who are supposed to be experts couldn’t even tell the difference between their sane and insane patients.

However, even though the pseudo-patients acted as they normally would, the staff didn’t detect their sanity. The patients were diagnosed as schizophrenic in remission instead. Doctors, psychologists, and therapist, chalked all of their pseudo-patients’ normal behaviors to some sort of mental illness. David Rosenhan talks about this when he discusses his experiment in his essay. He states, “The facts of the case were unintentionally distorted by the staff to achieve consistency with a popular theory of the dynamics of a schizophrenic reaction.” What he means is that the staff tried to make a perfectly normal behavior fit into the mold of a schizophrenic behavior just because the pseudo-patient was diagnosed as being schizophrenic. …show more content…

As it was shown in Rosenhan’s article, “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, normality that was displayed in pseudo-patients was confused with abnormality simply because they were labeled as being mentally ill. Therefore, it shows that placing labels on people can actually blind people to the truth because they believe the characteristics behind the

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