David Rosenhan

This is the story of how a Stanford psychologist trolled the entire field of psychiatry.

The psychologist in question, David Rosenhan, had himself and eight other mentally healthy people pretend to be mentally ill to admit themselves into different psychiatric hospitals around the west coast of the United States.

They pretended to experience auditory hallucinations, telling staff that they were hearing voices.

All nine of them were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

Once they were in, they immediately dropped the act, returning to normal, and telling the staff they weren't hearing any voices.

After acting normal, it took an average of 19 days before staff would release them, and they were forced to admit that they were mentally ill and had to agree to take antipsychotics.

After this scandal came to light, a major hospital decided to give Rosenhan a challenge.

They asked him to send fake patients to their facility, and claimed that their staff would be able to figure out which patients were real and which were fake.

And it started with, well, an embarrassing experiment that made the whole profession look like it did not know what it was doing.

And in 1973, there was a psychologist, his name was David Rosenhan, and he published a study in the Journal of Science.

He and a group of volunteers went to psychiatric hospitals and they said they were hearing a voice.

So these healthy people, they were not hearing voices.

They went to a psychiatric hospital and said they were hearing voices.

That's it.

Once these folks were admitted, along with this David Rosenhan, once they were admitted, they acted completely normal.

Despite that fact, almost all of them were diagnosed with a serious mental illness and they were held for weeks.