Slater begins the chapter talking about David Rosenhan’s personal experience being a diagnostic question himself after he lost his mind, legs, arms, torso, lungs and his family. He was working on dismantling psychiatric diagnosis. He did an experiment where he had asked eight of his friends if they would be willing to walk into a mental hospital and pretend to be real mental patients. They were instructed to say that they were hearing voices; and the voice was to say “thud”. Once they were admitted, they were instructed to say that they were feeling much better and that the voices had passed. Rosenhan also did this experiment with them. He faked his way into a mental hospital and said that there were voices, and that they were saying “thud”, like the rest of the pseudopatients around the country that …show more content…
There they tested him for physical abnormities such as abnormal heart rate, high blood pressure, things like that. They noticed that he was physically fine; he asked them if he could leave and the doctor said that he could leave when he was well. They diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and he had to stay there for quite a while. This was very interesting how even though he seemed normal physically, and he said that the voices were gone, he still was not released due to the fact that there were supposedly voices at one point. While Rosenhan was there, he was a trooper about the whole thing, and cooperated with the nurses. Every day, three times a day, they would give him pills; all of which he took, and then he eluded actually swallowing them by making a quick pass to the restroom, where he spat them out. He noted that many of the other patients also did this. It is very likely that a lot of the other patients were in fact normal also, but because of the previous diagnosis that the doctors gave them, they were unable to