Key Research

• Rosenhan aimed to investigate the validity and reliability of diagnosis in psychiatric hospitals . In part 1 Rosenman tested whether a psychiatric hospital would recognise sanity and how they treat their patients overall. In part 2 he looked at how many patients hospitals would label as pseudo patients if they knew some were coming.
• Rosenhan investigated 12 psychiatric hospitals across 5 states in America through opportunity sampling. Rosenhan gathered 8 pseudo patients (included Rosenhan himself) that was composed of women & men. They were to collect data (via participant observation) of how patients were treated.
• In Rosenhan's study: each pseudo patient told the local psychiatric hospital that they heard an unfamiliar same sex voice that said words such as empty, hollow and thud. All pseudo patients were admitted to the hospital and given the diagnosis of schizophrenia - except 1 who was said to have bipolar. While in hospital the pseudo patients acted completely sane and took notes alongside trying to convince staff they did not belong.
• In Rosenhan's research he found that doctors tend to err on the side of caution as they believe it is better to treat a healthy person than to risk sending away an actually insane person. All pseudo patients in Rosenhan's research disliked the experience and wished to be discharged immediately but the range of length of stay was from 7 days to 52 days.
• Pseudo patients noted that ward staff spent ~90% of their time in their offices and that patients had under 7 minutes per day with an actual psychiatrist/psychologist. No staff suspected they were sane but the other patients claimed they must be journalists or professors. Once released, pseudo patients were diagnosed with "schizophrenia in remission".
• Rosenhan compared how a female university students asking a question to a professor would be treated compared to one of the pseudo patients asking hospital staff when they would be discharged. He found that 100% of the time the students had their question answered whereas the patient had their question acknowledged 4/75 times (~5%).
• In part 2 of his experiment, Rosenhan found that the hospital that had been warned claimed that 19 pseudo patients had been sent - this was agreed by a psychiatrist and 1 other staff member. Despite no pseudo patients actually being sent.
• Rosenhan concluded that psychiatrists cannot reliably tell the difference between the sane and insane. Rosenhan refers to the ‘stickiness of psychiatric labels’ everything a patient does is interpreted in accordance of these labels. Instead of labelling a person as insane we should treat them on their individual specific needs.
• Rosenhan looked at stickiness of labels where all of the pseudo patients had their behaviour labelled as a symptom of their "disorder" even when it was perfectly sane. For example when taking notes it was described as "writing behaviour" and showing excitement for meals was labelled as "oral-acquisitive syndrome".