Psychologists have long struggled with the division between “normal” and “abnormal.” There exists a blurry gray line between the effective functioning of a sane person and the abnormal functioning of a person with a mental illness. To help determine whether or not a person may be mentally ill, psychologists use a verity of criteria, including the bizarreness and persistence of the behavior, social deviance, subjective distress, psychological handicap and the effect on functioning. These symptoms and characteristics of mental illnesses all involve subjective judgements on the part of psychologists and psychiatrists. David Rosenhan wondered if mental health professionals were truly able to distinguish between the mentally healthy and the mentally …show more content…
Validating Rosenhan’s hypothesis, no pseudopatient was detected by the staff. Rather, once released, their mental health status was recorded as “schizophrenia in remission” However, while the doctors, nurses, and attendants failed to detect the subjects, 35 out of 118 real patients voiced suspicions that the subjects were not mentally ill. Contacts between the patients, both the pseudopatients and not were “minimal and bizarre.” When attempting to make verbal contact by asking common, normal questions (e.g., “When will I be allowed grounds privileges?”), 71% of psychiatrists and 88% of nurses and attendants moved on with their heads averted, while only 4% and .5%, respectively, sopped and talked with the patient. However, the patients received no shortage of medication, given 2,100 total pills. The results of this study all serve to conclude that in a hospital setting “normal people cannot be distinguished from the mentally ill.” The staff tended to ignore situational pressures on the patients and noticed only the behavior “relevant to the pathological traits assigned to the patients.” Rosenhan also concluded that the directors interpreted the pseudopatient’s innocuous life backgrounds in ways consistent with their diagnosis. Based on this and other subsequent studies, it appears that the “sane” could not be distinguished from the “insane” in mental hospital …show more content…
Fortunately, the issues addressed by his studied began to decline with the decrease in patients confined to mental hospitals. Although labels still exists today, mental health professionals now use psychiatric labels with the “respect their power demands.” Another recent application of this research is by Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist was has been a critic of the concept of mental illness since the early 1970s. He contends that mental illnesses are not diseases, but rather “problems in living” that have social and environmental causes. He claims that the nonsensical, “crazy talk” sometimes uttered by those with a mental illness is not a valid reason for concluding that the person is insane because this unusual use of language resembles a religious phenomenon “known as ‘gift of tongues.’” Another study sent four trained pseudopatients, all exhibiting the same symptoms, to four different physicians. Supporting Rosenhan’s findings, all four doctors proposed four different diagnoses and four different treatments, revealing that a diagnosis may rely more with the situation and with the varying backgrounds and attitudes of the physicians that the patient. As a test of Rosenhan’s theories over time, one study looked at the social stigma of the label “mental illness.” They