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The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
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First Published:
Nov 2019, 400 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2020, 400 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Herschbach
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From "one of America's most courageous young journalists" (NPR) and the author of the blockbuster #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Brain on Fire comes a propulsive narrative history investigating the 50-year-old mystery behind a dramatic experiment that changed the course of modern medicine.
For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness--how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people--sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society--went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever.
But, as Cahalan's explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today?
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Psychiatry, as a distinct branch of medicine, has come far in its short life span. The field has rejected the shameful practices of the recent past—the lobotomies, forced sterilizations, human warehousing. Today's psychiatrists boast a varied arsenal of effective drugs and have largely dropped the unscientific trappings of psychoanalytic psychobabble, the "schizophrenogenic" or "refrigerator" mothers of yesteryear who had been blamed for triggering insanity in their offspring. Two decades into the twenty- first century, psychiatry now recognizes that serious mental illnesses are legitimate brain disorders.
Despite all these advancements, however, the field lags behind the rest of medicine. Most of our major innovations—better drugs, improved therapies—were in play around the time we first walked on the moon. Though the American Psychiatric Association reassures us that psychiatrists are uniquely qualified to "assess both the mental and physical aspects ...
Susannah Cahalan's The Great Pretender is a fascinating deep-dive into one of the most influential studies in the history of psychology, Stanford University professor David Rosenhan's 1973 paper "On Being Sane in Insane Places." But while the extent of Rosenhan's influence on the field is clear, it turns out that little else about his story is straightforward. As the book unfolds, it becomes evident that there is yet another layer of meaning to its title—neither Rosenhan nor the details of his study are quite what they appear to be...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
In The Great Pretender, former New York Post investigative reporter Susannah Cahalan uncovers evidence that Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan fabricated at least some of the details in his famous 1973 paper "On Being Sane in Insane Places."
If true, this certainly wouldn't have been the only time a high profile researcher's work has turned out to be flawed or even downright fraudulent. A particularly brazen example is that of repeat offender Diederik Stapel, a former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Stapel rose to prominence in his field with a series of studies that gained media attention around the world. One study purportedly showed that carnivores are more selfish than ...
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