In the 1970s, a psychologist named David Rosenhan worked with seven other people to check the effectiveness of diagnosing processes at mental health institutions.

All eight people, who had no history or diagnoses of mental illness, visited different psychiatric institutions and claimed to have experienced auditory hallucinations. Once they had been admitted, they proceeded to act entirely normally and told the staff that the hallucinations had stopped.

All of them were forced to admit to having a mental illness and prescribed antipsychotics (none of the staff reported noticing the participants flushing these down the toilet) before they were released with the diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission.” The average length of stay was 19 days, with the minimum at seven days and the maximum at 52.

While 35 of the 118 patients at the first three hospitalizations suspected the “pseudopatients” were not all they claimed to be, none of the staff members had any inkling. One even diagnosed the way a participant was taking notes on everything that happened as pathological “writing behavior.” The released study, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” also makes sure to emphasize the dehumanization and total lack of privacy experienced by patients.

The publication of the study prompted outcry from several members of the psychiatric community, including one teaching hospital that claimed the experiment wouldn’t have succeeded there. Rosenhan’s response was to arrange a second stage of the experiment, in which he would send one or more false patients to that hospital over a three-month period and the staff would have to try and identify them.

At the end of the three months, the hospital had taken in 193 patients, 41 of whom the staff considered imposters and another 42 that were suspected.

Rosenhan’s announcement at the conclusion of the trial period? He hadn’t sent anyone to the hospital. All those the staff thought were faking were in fact ordinary patients seeking treatment.

It’s not the first time an experiment has been run on the effectiveness of mental health institutions. Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, published a series of articles collectively titled ‘Ten Days in a Madhouse’ in 1887. Her methods of entry were similar; she feigned symptoms of illness long enough to be committed, whereupon she proceeded to act entirely normally. However, the staff of the institution continued to treat her as though she were mad. Just like the Rosenhan study almost a century later, her reports of the conditions within the Blackwell’s Island Asylum brought sweeping change to the field. You have to wonder whether those changes were enough.

Psychiatry and psychology are uncertain fields, and as prone as any other field of science to bias and misconception. The many stigmas around mental health probably don’t help much, either. Even now, for someone to simply admit they have depression or anxiety will all too frequently open a dialogue about how the illness is in some way their fault because they weren’t strong or capable enough to fight it off. Pressure to be normal can all too often discourage people from even looking for difficulties processing.

The Rosenhan experiment, looking at it now, can seem funny or just sad, and I suppose the deciding factor on whether we can afford to laugh would be how much diagnosis and treatment methods concerning mental health have changed between then and now.

Those methods are improving, slowly and steadily, especially now that visibility is rising, but that hardly makes conditions perfect. The human brain is immeasurably complex, and is in fact one of the organs in the human body that we understand the least. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out what methods of understanding it are based on real and tangible recent data, and what’s done from tradition, especially from the layperson’s point of view.

I’m not a psychologist, or a psychiatrist. I have no interest in becoming one. I’ve never taken a class in either field. My viewpoint on this comes as that of an entirely untrained observer.

All I know is that if I or anyone I knew, for any reason, needed to seek professional help, I really want to be sure that the people trying to help know what they’re doing and are willing to listen before making assumptions.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy.