“If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”

That haunting question opens Dr. David Rosenhan’s landmark 1973 study “On Being Sane in Insane Places”—a psychological experiment that shooketh the foundations and shattered the world’s faith in psychiatry

Rosenhan and seven other pseudopatients faked a single symptom to gain admission to psychiatric institutions, only to find out getting in was easy… but getting out was a different story. They were all diagnosed with serious mental illnesses and kept institutionalized for weeks

What happens when you pretend to be insane? What happens when the system can’t tell the difference? And who gets to decide what “sane” even means?

This experiment pulled back the curtain and exposed the flaws in psychiatric diagnosis, the power of labels, and the chilling reality of being trapped in a system that couldn’t tell sanity from insanity. Was it brilliant? Controversial? Ethically murky? All of the above. Tune in for details and a shocking plot twist when the results are published

Links:

https://online.csp.edu/resources/article/history-of-mental-illness-treatment/

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rosemary-kennedy-before-after-photos/

https://www.simplypsychology.org/rosenhan_experiment.html

https://www.canonsociaalwerk.eu/files/images/canon/1971_stigma/1973%20Rosenhan%20Being%20sane%20in%20insane%20places%20OCR.pdf

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