Read the Rosenhaun Article (article attached)  and answer the following questions:

1. What was the problem and purpose of this study?

2. What are major findings of this research?

3. Was the research ethical? Regardless of your answer to this question, where did these researchers test the limits of ethical conduct.

4. What are the implications of this research?

5. How might it have been done more ethically?

6. What might be a good follow-up to this research? Suggest both a qualitative and quantitative follow-up study in very general terms. 

On Being Sane In Insane Places Page 1 On Being Sane In Insane Places
David L. Rosenhan*
How do we know precisely what constitutes “normality” or mental illness? Conventional wisdom suggests
that specially trained professionals have the ability to make reasonably accurate diagnoses. In this
research, however, David Rosenhan provides evidence to challenge this assumption. What is -- or is not - “normal” may have much to do with the labels that are applied to people in particular settings.
If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?
The question is neither capricious nor itself insane. However much we may be personally
convinced that we can tell the normal from the abnormal, the evidence is simply not compelling. It is
commonplace, for example, to read about murder trials wherein eminent psychiatrists for the defense are
contradicted by equally eminent psychiatrists for the prosecution on the matter of the defendant’s sanity.
More generally, there are a great deal of conflicting data on the reliability, utility, and meaning of such
terms as “sanity,” “insanity,” “mental illness,” and “schizophrenia.” Finally, as early as 1934, {Ruth}
Benedict suggested that normality and abnormality are not universal.[1] What is viewed as normal in one
culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another. Thus, notions of normality and abnormality may not be
quite as accurate as people believe they are.
To raise questions regarding normality and abnormality is in no way to question the fact that some
behaviors are deviant or odd. Murder is deviant. So, too, are hallucinations. Nor does raising such
questions deny the existence of the personal anguish that is often associated with “mental illness.” Anxiety
and depression exist. Psychological suffering exists. But normality and abnormality, sanity and insanity,
and the diagnoses that flow from them may be less substantive than many believe them to be.
At its heart, the question of whether the sane can be distinguished from the insane (and whether
degrees of insanity can be distinguished from each other) is a simple matter: Do the salient characteristics
that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which
observers find them? From Bleuler, through Kretchmer, through the formulators of the recently revised
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the belief has been strong that
patients present symptoms, that those symptoms can be categorized, and, implicitly, that the sane are
distinguishable from the insane. More recently, however, this belief has been questioned. Based in part on
theoretical and anthropological considerations, but also on philosophical, legal, and therapeutic ones, the
view has grown that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless at best and downright
harmful, misleading, and pejorative at worst. Psychiatric diagnoses, in this view, are in the minds of
observers and are not valid summaries of characteristics displayed by the observed.
Gains can be made in deciding which of these is more nearly accurate by getting normal people
(that is, people who do not have, and have never suffered, symptoms of serious psychiatric disorders)
admitted to psychiatric hospitals and then determining whether they were discovered to be sane and, if so,
how. If the sanity of such pseudopatients were always detected, there would be prima facie evidence that a
sane individual can be distinguished from the insane context in which he is found. Normality (and
presumably abnormality) is distinct enough that it can be recognized wherever it occurs, for it is carried
within the person. If, on the other hand, the sanity of the pseudopatients were never discovered, serious
difficulties would arise for those who support traditional modes of psychiatric diagnosis. Given that the
http://web.cocc.edu/lminorevans/on_being_sane_in_insane_places.htm 01/08/2005 04:54:47 PM On Being Sane In Insane Places Page 2 hospital staff was not incompetent, that the pseudopatient had been behaving as sanely as he had been out
of the hospital, and that it had never been previously suggested that he belonged in a psychiatric hospital,
such an unlikely outcome would support the view that psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient
but much about the environment in which an observer finds him.
This article describes such an experiment. Eight sane people gained secret admission to 12 different
hospitals. Their dia

Attachments:

• 1506616103-ROSENHAN-BEINGSANE.pdf