Many years ago, the now-defunct magazine “National Lampoon” carried a piece that I found interesting. It concerned an experiment carried out by some psychology grad students. These students disguised themselves as mental patients, and got themselves checked in to a local mental hospital. The experiment was to see if the staff doctors could identify a patient who was actually normal.
In their interviews by the doctors, the “patients” told the doctors that their symptoms included hearing voices…all saying the same words (“empty, dull, thud”).
Curiously all were diagnosed as severely mentally ill.
The other patients knew that these people were not crazy…but the doctors kept writing them up as crazy.I know that the experiemnt ended, but anyone know how? How did the doctors involved defend their (obviously) faulty judgements?:smack:
I’m unfamiliar with this story, but I’m skeptical that the patients could spot them *if they were staying in character *all the time.
As far as the docs go, it’s your basic garbage in, garbage out. Mental health is heavy on self reported symptoms and subjective interpretations, but light on objective signs. I don’t think it’s remarkable that students educated in mental illness could present a convincing case to doctors who aren’t on the lookout for someone trying to bluff their way into a mental hospital.
You have a few details wrong but essentially this happened.
The second part is the funniest or saddest part, depending on how you look at it.
“The second part involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent “fake” patients. The staff falsely identified large numbers of ordinary patients as impostors.”
Otara
From the wiki Otara linked to, it looks like they only claimed to be hearing the voices until they were admitted and then acted normally once they were in:
I was and am more horrified by the first part, than the second, but only a little more so.
I remember being horrified about this when I first learned of it. I was in my late teens when I first read of it and it scared the bejeezus out of me to think that if I were somehow mistakenly put into a mental health facility I might have difficulty proving that I was sane enough to be released.
I’m not going to take the time to read the study, but I think you need to realize that most people, especially on an involuntary committal, do not have an affirmative desire to be institutionalized. So you go in with the assumption that a “patient” is disturbed and proceed from there. There is no good reason for the shrinks to even consider the possibility that a patient is NOT disturbed.
Also, I don’t think it means much that someone has schizoid features upon admission and then doesn’t demonstrate them later since it is my understanding that such symptoms can be transient - just like people with Alzheimer’s can be lucid at one point in the day and completely out of it at some other point. To the extent that’s true, you would have to observe them over an extended period of time before you would have enough evidence to conclude that the initial assessment was incorrect, or in this case, completely bogus.
The experiment is one of many documented in Opening Skinner’s Box, which is well worth a read. IIRC correctly the author attempted to duplicate the study, with some success.
Via wikipedia, it appears that the author could not substantiate her claims. Spitzer, who was editor of DSM-III and has been an important figure in the evolution and refinement of psychiatric diagnoses, said he requested to see evidence of Slater’s experiment—including files from her visits to the ERs or names of psychiatrists or hospitals—but that she has not produced them. And he told Psychiatric News he is highly skeptical about the medications Slater reported she was prescribed.
Spitzer is not alone in his reactions. “It would be nice if she could assuage my concerns about her study by providing us with objective evidence that she did it,” psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, Ph.D., told Psychiatric News. “It would be comforting if she could provide us with files from her visits to the ER, the name of one attending psychiatrist she saw, or the name of hospital she visited. She hasn’t done any of that… I don’t know what happened. But I don’t think we should take it seriously until she can provide us with documentation.” This wouldn’t be the first example of a memoir with objectively false claims. It’s a shame, since it would be interesting to repeat the 1973 experiment.
You might be interested in a segment that was on This American Life last year (skip ahead to the 4:15 point): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/385/pro-se
It’s the story of a guy in the UK who pretended to be insane when he was arrested for an assault when he was young. He’s spent the last decade (far more than he would have served in jail) trying to convince them he’s not insane.
It’s a really good piece in that it starts out approaching it from the Kafka-esque angle, but at the end it presents the point of view of the doctors which really makes the story a lot less clear-cut.
Tell 'em you have no medical insurance, and that you are unemployed and have no money. They’ll have you de-admitted and out of the hospital within 48 hours!