Book Reading #13: Opening Skinner's Box

Opening Skinner's Box

Lauren Slater

Chapter 3: On Being Sane in Insane Places

Experimenting with Psychiatric Diagnosis

Summary: In this chapter, Slater talks about the experiment done by David Rosenhan during the early 1970s. He and eight of his friends went to different psychiatric facilities all across the country, and admitted to have heard a voice, then be honest about the rest of their "symptoms", be normal. Their objective was to see how many of them would be admitted to the hospital and given a diagnostic, even though they were perfectibility fine, sane. The results, all of them were admitted and stayed there up to fifty-two days. Slater discusses the reactions that this experiment had over the psychiatry field, and how much psychiatrists tried to refute Rosenhan's claims; he assured psychiatrists were giving diagnosis based on the context of the patient instead of an analysis of their symptoms.Slater repeated the experiment through out eight psychiatric facilities across the country herself, and even though she was not admitted, she was diagnosed and given pills. 

Discussion: I think it is incredible how such an experiment had so much affect over a complete field of medicine, as they categorize themselves. In my opinion, the examples that were given by psychiatrists trying to refute the results of the experiment cannot be compared to the simplicity of the experiment done by Rosenhan. And, I was also really surprised that Slater was not discovered in any of the hospitals she went to, I mean she was repeating exactly the same things that Rosenhan had said, how can it be possible that all those psychiatrist that talked to her did not recognize the sentence "I hear a voice that says thud," if this experiment really had such an impact on the field.