Rosenhan And Schizophrenia Case Study

Abstract
Rosenhan and a team of researchers conducted a study with the aim to show that psychiatrists cannot reliably differentiate the insane from the sane. First, the researchers got themselves admitted in mental hospitals. In second part, they gave false information to hospitals that pseudo-patients will try to gain admission. The result was that the pseudo-patients were diagnosed as patients; where as genuine patients were suspected as being imposters in first and second experiments respectively. The advantage of the study is its variety of data, sampling and that the hospitals were observed in its natural state. However there were ethical issues regarding the method of study, consent of the hospital to participate and security of the observers.

No pseudo-patient was actually sent. So, in this case, the independent variable was the misinformation where as the dependent variable was if the hospitals were diagnose the patients correctly after being misinformed. The control of the first part of the experiment was that all the pseudo-patients used the same symptoms i.e. hearing sounds such as ‘thud, empty or hollow’ and behaved normally apart from them. There was no control group for second part

Results
In the first part of the experiment, all the pseudo-patients were admitted to the hospital. Except one which was diagnosed for manic depression, rest was diagnosed for schizophrenia. They were discharged as ‘in remission’ with the range of 7 to 52 days. In the second part, real patients were suspected of being pseudo-patients. Statistically speaking, out of the 193 genuine patients during that period, 41, 23 and 19 were suspected by at least one staff member, one psychiatrist, and one psychiatrist and one staff member respectively.

Conclusion of the

One of the main ethical issues of the experiment is that it utilizes deception. The observers pretend to be patients and give fake personal details. The doctors and nurses are deceived into believing that they are real. The problem is not only the personal levels speaking in regard to the hospital workers. The problem with false symptoms is that the diagnosis may be false as a whole but it aligns true with those false symptoms. For instance, in a criticism of Rosenhan's study psychiatrist Robert Spitzer (1975) quoted Kety saying that if a person drank blood and vomited it in the emergency unit, that person will be reasonably diagnosed with bleeding peptic ulcer. He added that he could also “argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.” So, in this case, similar to the pseudo-patients, this person is also giving false symptoms. Although we know that this person does not have bleeding ulcer and the diagnosis may be false, it still stands true with the symptoms. Therefore, the method of false symptoms in Rosenhan's experiment is subject-able to questions regarding its validity.
Another ethical issue is that for every research survey, it is mandatory to undergo vigorous screening through the IRB (Institutional Review Board) and requires the surveys to get signed informed consent forms prior to the survey. However, in Rosenhan's experiment the participants