On Being Sane in Insane Places
Zehra Morgan 21737604
February 17, 2016
Introduction to Sociology 125

1. Immediately after admission, the pseudo patients acted normally (asymptomatic) while discreetly taking notes for the experiment. The pseudo patients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days. All but one was diagnosed with schizophrenia "in remission" before their release. The second part of his study involved an offended hospital administration challenging Rosenhan to send pseudo patients to its facility, which its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 193 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudo patients, with 19 of these receiving suspicions from at least one psychiatrist and one other staff member. 2. In 1973, psychiatrists were embarrassingly bad at distinguishing the mentally ill from the normal. Today, psychopathology is still very subjective and arguably as much of an art as it is a science, with questionable criteria as to what is considered a mental "illness" or not. Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudo patients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors. In the first three hospitalizations, 35 of the total of 118 patients expressed a suspicion that the pseudo patients were sane, with some suggesting that the patients were researchers or journalists investigating the hospital. Hospital notes indicated that staff interpreted much of the