In 1973, a psychologist David Rosenhan conducted an experiment to answer the following question: can professionals reliably tell the difference between mental health and mental illness?
To find out, Rosenhan recruited eight ordinary people. They walked into psychiatric hospitals across the United States, and they lied about only one thing - they said they hear voices saying three words - "empty", "hollow", "thud".
All eight were admitted. The moment they entered the hospitals, they stopped pretending. They behaved normally. They cooperated. They asked to be discharged, but it never worked.
Every normal action was reinterpreted as a symptom - writing notes became obsessive behavior, waiting quietly became pathological attention seeking etc. Politeness became controlled behavior consistent with illness. Seven people were diagnosed with schizophrenia, one with a manic depression.
Not a single staff member identified them as healthy. Only the patients did. Real patients approached them and whispered, "You’re not like the others. You don’t belong here."
Those considered ill saw what trained professionals could not.
The average length of stay was 19 days. One person remained hospitalized for 52 days. Each day reinforced the same truth. Once labeled, reality stopped mattering.
When Rosenhan published the results, the psychiatric world erupted. One hospital challenged him to send new pseudopatients, confident they would catch them. Rosenhan agreed. Over the next months, that hospital identified 41 supposed impostors. The problem was, that Rosenhan had sent no one.
Rosenhan experiment - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment