The guy on the left looks like Walter Bishop. Was it Peter and Olivia how got him out? Are there bald guys with a thing for raw meat and hot sauce? Is an Agent Broyles involved?
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I don’t have any experience in the field, but I’m told the experiment is well known amongst mental health professionals, and that it’s a matter of heated debate-- bringing it up might just anger those in charge.
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From the Wikipedia entry:
Since the publication of the experiment, questions have been raised about how accurately Rosenhan reported his results, and whether the experiment was actually carried out as claimed. An investigation by Susannah Cahalan was only able to find one other pseudopatient, whose recollection of the study was very different to the published form, and discovered that data in Rosenhan’s files didn’t match the results.
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If this mixup had happened a few decades ago the poor bastard probably would’ve been lobotomized.
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Try reality. Some years back we had a scam here, someone getting appointed as a guardian for people who were elderly and alone but not to the point of needing a guardian. The estates were drained in fees and they were cast aside.
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(Possibly unpopular) opinion: the way we report such terrible cases, as well as our reaction to it, is dangerous for people who actually need psychiatric help, and medication.
This is a crass case. The person in question needs all support they can get. But reading this and the comments here makes me sad for all the people who do not seek professional help. Stories like this discredit psychiatry by feeding a disgusted fascination.
Heard an interview this week. The head of a NGO helping people suffering from depression said that One flew over the coocoo’s nest is possibly one of the most harmful films for people with depression, because of the distorted image of psychiatry you get from it.
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That’s happened in Michigan. Cut off the family from having any contact, drain the bank accounts. One really bad case involved a suburban mayor who was in bed with the thieving scum’s business. He warned off a local news crew, which worked about as well as you’d think. The laws are being changed.
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His case has been taken up by the Hawaii Innocence Project, operated by people in my campus’s law school. I don’t know if they are planning a suit for damages, right now they are focused on getting his conviction cleared.
The prison/hospital he was in is notorious here for fights, inmates escaping, and staff being attacked and injured. It is a mess. I hope this case leads to some operational reforms, though I doubt it.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03268-y
a review of Susannah Cahalan’s 2019 book The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness
it seems to be paywall free.
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But what was he convicted of? It was a case of mistaken identity, the other dude was convicted, no?
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His arrest was never vacated, and his record never cleared. My use of the word “conviction” was sloppy.
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It sounds as if you believe it’s a functional system that might care about quality of care and compassion for their patients at the hospital. It goes without saying the police would only have checked if they thought it would make the situation worse for the suspect. I would expect his housing issues to be resolved and quite a bit better quality added in.
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Also obligatory: Rosenhan made everything up.
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The answer is easy. The hospital only cares about being able to bill the state. It’s not in their best interest to make sure they’re treating the right person, really. They get paid just as much for the wrong person, the agency paying them has another body in custody to justify their own budget, and there’s nobody actually advocating for the patient.
Kafka would have been proud.
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Here I was ready to pin it all on Dog The Bounty Hunter.
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Not happening. I had to adjust my meds some 4 years ago and it was obligatory to attend the hospital daily to get mandatory daily group counseling and weekly checkups to see if the treatment is working. Beware of free gifts.
The trouble is: I was well enough, with mild depression symptoms at the time, but most people there were bipolar or schizophrenic in crisis and the consensus and mindset of 100% of the professionals there was “patients lie and they will say anything to get out of the clinic”. It was a very kafkaesque experience. There was a point where I started to get MORE depressed because no one believed in me. And I had signed a document saying that I was there of my own free will so they had carte blanche to say that I “authorized it”.
The most terrifying thing is that they actually HAVE a point. You would start a conversation with someone that would make you question why the heck they were there, until you got to a point that triggered a paranoia or a loop or something that made you realize “oh. Yes, this person is sick”.
I survived by telling myself that it wasn’t personal and by people watching and exercising empathy and compassion. The human brain is amazing even when it’s malfunctioning.
So even if you were sane good luck convincing people that are trained to believe that you are sick that you shouldn’t be there. Their biases won’t let them.
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I feel you. It sucks how dehumanizing it is.
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Stephen Fry had the wardens be part of the conspiracy.
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For a science fictional/feminist take on it: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.
“In the 1970s, an impoverished and intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her also to lose custody of her daughter. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece’s pimp on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Dolly had sought protection from Connie because she was being forced by the pimp into having an (illegal) abortion.” From the Wikipedia page about the book.
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There’s also the possibility that the warden was cosplaying Number Two because of Spriestersbach’s passing resemblance to Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six:
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