In The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan, the author explores the history of psychiatry and the controversial Rosenhan study. The goal of this study was to expose the flaws of the field of psychiatry by sending in eight pseudopatients and reporting their experiences in the hospital. David Rosenhan’s report shows how easy it was for a normal person to get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, it also showed how hard it was to get out once there. Cahalan’s book makes us question the mental health system with Rosenhan's study; however as the book progresses, she starts to shift tone and makes us question the validity of Rosenhan's experiment, now making us question what we know about the field of psychiatry overall. Cahalan begins the book by supporting the idea that …show more content…
From her experience with “madness,” she concluded that psychiatry was a naive field. Early in the book, she explains how society viewed mental illness in the past, saying it was demonic possession, where the treatment was to drill a hole in the patient’s skull. As the book advances, the author turns to David Rosenhan, a noted psychologist, and his study that included 8 normal people going undercover in different psychiatric facilities and claiming they heard empty, hollow voices in their heads, all of them were admitted, and most were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study showed how psychiatry did not know how to differentiate between the sane from the insane, it also uncovered the mistreatment that patients received when they were admitted and the conditions that the patients lived in. Rosenhan’s study created mistrust in the field of psychiatry with some people saying that patients are more likely to recover if they are not admitted to a facility. The author also explains other effects of Rosenhan’s study on psychiatry, there were reforms in the