On being sane in insane places by D.L. Rosenhan

Okay, so this is a course reading, but it's so incredible I thought I'd do a wee rant about it here. It's the report on a study where a sociologist - Rosenhan - and eight others gained admission to different psychiatric hospitals by claiming that they were hearing voices. After they'd been admitted, they dropped any pretense of madness and started acting totally normal. The idea was to see how long it would take before they were considered 'cured', and discharged.

The results were truly alarming. One of Rosenhan's first conclusions is that there is no way to distinguish between sanity and insanity - or if there is, that the psychiatric profession certainly is not in possession of it. Any and all behaviour exhibited by the 'pseudopatients' was interpreted by the hospital staff as being symptomatic of their supposed 'disorders'. In many cases the other patients could tell that the pseudopatients were sane, but the staff seemed unable to reach the same conclusion. The taking of notes about their experiences was consistently recorded on the pseudopatients' files as 'compulsive writing behaviour'. One man's description of his completely normal relationships with his parents during adolescence was reinterpreted as evidence of chronic emotional instability. And so on, and so forth.

The major thing to come out of this study for sociologists is that labels are sticky - once the pseudopatients had been diagnosed as 'schizophrenic', the label wouldn't go away, to the extent that they were finally declared to be, not 'cured' or 'healthy' or 'normal', but merely 'in remission'. Further, all prior or new knowledge the staff had about the pseudopatients was reinterpreted in the light of the schizophrenic label, in much the same way predicted by a sociological theory known as 'the labeling perspective'. This is all very exciting stuff for the labeling theorists themselves.

For the common person, there is a much more worrying and practical implication to this study. Have you been feeling down? Do you think you could use some antidepressant treatment? Are you worried about the possible psychiatric consequences of your experimentation with illicit drugs? To put it bluntly, do you think you're going crazy?

Please don't tell the medical profession. If you're not going crazy, they will quickly see to it that you do so.

There's a good Wikipedia article on the study, or you could try the full text.