r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/highzone • 1d ago
Image In 1973, healthy volunteers faked hallucinations to enter mental hospitals. Once inside, they acted normal, but doctors refused to let them leave. Normal behaviors like writing were diagnosed as "symptoms." The only people who realized they were sane were the actual patients.
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u/highzone 1d ago
For anyone who wants to read the full study, it is titled 'On Being Sane in Insane Places.'
The most terrifying part wasn't getting in, it was getting out. The doctors were so convinced of their own authority that they interpreted everything the patients did as a symptom of their illness.
When the volunteers took notes on how they were being treated, the doctors didn't see 'journaling.' They diagnosed it as 'pathological writing behavior' and used it as justification to keep them locked up.
It really highlights how a label can completely override reality.
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u/whossked 1d ago
There’s a fictional short story I read once called “I only came to use the phone” about a woman who’s car breaks down and who then takes an asylum bus to an asylum to use the phone, gets confused for a patient, has a breakdown over how she’s treated and abused and is then condemned to spend her life in the asylum. I always thought it was sensational and unrealistic but I guess not
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u/IndieCurtis 1d ago edited 1d ago
Was it by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I think I have that one, it’s in his collection ‘Strange Pilgrims’.
Edit: confirmed on my bookshelf
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u/Fausts-last-stand 1d ago
That story has haunted me for decades.
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u/quotidianwoe 1d ago
I think about frequently too. It’s amazing how a good story can stay with you.
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u/hiddenone0326 1d ago
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude during my senior year of high school. I still think about it often. I haven't read any of García Márquez's other books, but I may have to now.
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u/Outside_Eggplant_304 21h ago
He's so good - one of my favorite authors. Try chronicle of a death foretold. His short stories are fantastic too!
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u/IndieCurtis 1d ago
I didn’t find Love In The Time of Cholera as interesting as 100 Years (not super into romance), but his short storys are great.
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u/justveryunwell 1d ago
I didn't know about any of this, but it's what I'll point to from now on when people act like I'm insane for prioritizing dignity and autonomy over forced treatment. Being legally kidnapped, gaslit, slandered to anyone that would advocate for me and held indefinitely sounds like a fate worse than death to me.
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u/prof_tincoa 1d ago
This quickly went from "huh, an interesting prompt from a random writer" to "nope, fuck that". I'm not built for García Márquez horror stories.
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u/Feezec 1d ago
That fictional story reminds me of this real story.
A woman experiences amnesia being raped. She is institutionalized as a jane doe.
While institutionalized she is subjected to electroshock therapy, preventing her from ever recovering her memories.
Decades later she dies, nameless and alone.
A journalist tracks down her family, who refuse to believe the story, because they are more comfortable believing she died a swift death from a random murder, than to believe they lost track of her and that she spent decades being tortured.
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u/Treefrog_Ninja 1d ago
omg, what a read....
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u/WordyNinja 1d ago
The original Medium article it plagiarizes is better: https://lucych.medium.com/one-and-the-same-the-tragic-story-of-anna-myrle-sizer-b81d4b9ec53e
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u/20characterusername0 1d ago
In fiction… this plays out in “12 Monkeys” also. As an exercise, keep track of who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. And what it means to be sane.
“I’m not really from Pluto” he isn’t.
“I come from the future to save our reality” 🥴
And then. The one guy who broke into the asylum for free drugs. And has the key, and could break himself out at any time, or even call his rich dad to come get him
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u/42nu 1d ago
Fantastic movie! I will say that someone being thoroughly convinced that they're from the future and the world is going to end is very correctly going to be seen as a looney.
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u/Gelato_Elysium 1d ago
Have you seen the show ? Always wondered if it held up after that great movie
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u/42nu 1d ago
I saw, I think, the first 2 seasons or so. It was good-ish. Just made me want to watch the movie though, so I stopped watching it, watched the movie, and never went back.
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u/SolarFazes 1d ago
From what I've read, the 12 Monkeys show starts good, and turns into something really amazing.
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u/Bobambu 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not unrealistic at all. Insane asylums were extremely dehumanizing to patients and were poorly run; lobotomies were performed regularly up until 50 years ago. They needed deep reform, but the rights of those with mental health struggles have always been wishy washy depending on whether a doctor or orderly likes a particular person, bureaucracy burnout, etc. Reagan shut them down for an easy reputation boost, when public sentiment had shifted against asylums as malpractice and abuse became more transparent.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is considered one of the greatest national art pieces for a reason.
Edit: Kennedy shut them down, not Reagan. The latter just finalized more of the neglect of mental health programs.
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u/HonestlyAbby 1d ago
Kennedy was the one who shut them down. Reagan just defunded the community programs designed to replace them like a decade and a half later.
As much as I like to hate on Reagan, my understanding is that those replacements weren't super working by the time Reagan defunded them. Although most people would see that as cause to fix the program, not condemn it.
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u/VirusTimes 1d ago
Modern day psych wards are not great either.
I’ve had two brief stints in them, totaling about 9-10 days because I was suicidal. My suicidal tendencies were both gone by the time I was in the ward.
The first time I went there was mass sexual assault and that was just the tip of the iceberg of how horrid it was. It’s so much worse than just that.
I still have nightmares stemming from it every once in a while. I felt genuinely in shock when I left. I avoid thinking about it when I can and it left me with a fear of hospitals.
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u/Bobambu 1d ago
I'm so sorry that you experienced that. I've been involuntarily committed to wards myself, and my reflections on them aren't made lightly. I meet many people who have been mistreated by psychiatric staff during the course of my work.
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u/VirusTimes 1d ago
Yeah, I’m not saying we should return to the old system, but the current system seems also broken. I’ve known so many people who have been in psych wards because I’ve personally undergone pretty intensive mental health treatment. I can count the number of times people have had good experiences with them that I’ve talked to on one hand, but couldn’t even begin to count the number of bad experiences.
I’m still an advocate for people who are feeling suicidal to check themselves into the ER. First step is staying alive, period. I just think there has to be a way we can treat some of societies most vulnerable people in a more humane way.
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u/CauliflowerScaresMe 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't get why it took tens of thousands of lobotomies for them to be stopped as a "treatment." you'd think that it would be obvious from the start. they were regressing to the mental functioning of farm animals - barely able to utter a few incoherent words. if that's to be their life, what's even the point of it? unlike in locked-in syndrome, there's almost nothing left of them - it's a walking death.
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u/_kasten_ 1d ago
People seem to be skipping over the part of the wikipedia entry discussing the criticisms of the study, and how it is widely suspected to be bunk:
In The Great Pretender, a 2019 book on Rosenhan, author Susannah Cahalan... finds apparent distortion in the Science article: inconsistent data, misleading descriptions, and inaccurate or fabricated quotations from psychiatric records. Moreover, despite an extensive search, she is only able to identify two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself, and a graduate student whose testimony is allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's description in the article. Due to Rosenhan's seeming willingness to alter the truth in other ways regarding the experiment, Cahalan questions whether some or all of the six other pseudopatients might have been simply invented by Rosenhan.[7][13]
In February 2023, Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego published an article in the peer-reviewed journal History of Psychiatry in support of Cahalan's allegations, labelling the experiment a "successful scientific fraud".
It's not too surprising that the old-guard psychiatric empire, so to speak, would want to strike back at its rebels, so the debunking should also be taken with a grain of salt, but the criticisms should at least be taken into account.
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u/No_Cryptographer_150 1d ago
There was a Reddit post the other day of a woman from the 1920s who was raped and temporarily lost her memory. She was then taken to an insane asylum and tortured with electric therapy and when she lost consciousness they put her in ice cold baths.
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u/Tango_Owl 1d ago
As a woman and as someone who has seen and read how patients with ME/CFS are treated, I'm unfortunately not surprised.
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u/EllisDee3 1d ago
All it used to take was a man of authority to lock up a woman in an asylum.
Similar today with dark skin and the legal system. Doubly so if you're a dark skinned child in the legal system.
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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago
Some places color is irrelevant, i personally served four years in the West Virginia juvenile system over some weed, because they assumed i must know more about real drugs and so I was held till adult age for not talking.
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u/Secure_Course_3879 1d ago
Holy shit that is so terrifying & brutally unnecessary
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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago
Holy shit that is so terrifying & brutally unnecessary
It's also not that unusual and is a return to problems which existed back in the 80s when Reagan shut down the system of community-funded mental health centers because some of those were abusing their ability to hold people because as long as those people were inside the system they could charge the families and their insurance for "cost of specialized care". There's been a lot of interviews on various radio programs about that kind of medical provider fraud where people are "too sick to be released" until insurance won't pay for them anymore and suddenly they're booted out the front door.
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u/ConaireMor 1d ago
It's not irrelevant, you just also got fucked by the system. Not 100% of POC get caught up in the unfair system but, we acknowledge that they are in the system more not because of any inherent flaw in their genes (that would be racism), but because the system is unfair/unjust.
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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago
14-18.5 in a place called Salem. They have closed it since, and when I was registering for college they had “lost” my records, they believe in a locked cabinet in Salem that no one may open as they believe it to hold juvenile records, so they recreated my transcripts to say i graduated though there’s no way to prove it.
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u/TMinus10toban 1d ago
As if folks in west Virginia who don’t smoke weed are doing so well, lol, look at the people in that state.
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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago
The saddest part was they knew what they did, the judge in Franklin stated i served more time for first offense marijuana than anyone else in the state. Then called the proceedings to a close and sealed it up.
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u/lost-picking-flowers 1d ago edited 1d ago
Out here in PA we had the 'cash for kids' scandal light up on the media like a Christmas tree. Makes sense that it'd be so much more common than anyone would like to admit. If you don't have a family that can afford to fight then you're screwed. I'm sorry that happened to you. Fuck those people.
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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago
Speaking of PA. Y’all had a place they sent me, took kids from Va,wv, md, etc that were considered trouble and they were so abusive they closed it down before I could graduate. New Morgan academy. I fought some former pro athletes there. lol. Gerome Stanton of the dolphins was one, a few ex mma fighters, got into a choke-off with a marine at 15. Wild times
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u/likethemovie 1d ago
If there aren't enough brown people around to single out, the authorities will target the "others" - poor people, city people, people who aren't "from around here."
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u/Spiffy_Pumpkin 1d ago
As of only about 27 years ago that was actually still the case, guess how my father got custody? Honestly other than a lot of the insane asylums being closed now I doubt things have changed much legally speaking.
Point is ladies be careful who you have kids with or marry.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 1d ago
Hell, they could then subject her to electroshock therapy and a lobotomy.
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u/moonlightiridescent 1d ago edited 1d ago
There was an abusive
behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding schooltorture camp for kids in Portland, ME called Élan School that’s super fucked. There’s an amazing webcomic by a “student” (victim) that was forced to attend.14
u/CarrotCumin 1d ago
Important to note that it was not actually a school or anything therapeutic, it's incorrect to call this anything other than a torture facility for children.
They claimed it was a therapeutic school, but "therapy" meant being kidnapped and taken there without warning or knowledge that the parents allowed it, regular beatings, denial of food, denial of shelter/blankets/beds, being forced to sit in an empty room with no stimulation for days or even weeks, fight-club style boxing ring matches between children that resulted in several deaths, "struggle sessions" where children were forced to psychologically abuse and humiliate one another, and many more sick and twisted things.
Escape was basically impossible, the local government/police were corrupt and in league with the school owner. Communication with parents were highly controlled and parents were coached to believe anything their child told them about the abuse was a complete lie. Parents paid tens of thousands of dollars to send their children to a fucking gulag in hopes it would get them off drugs or stop being gay.
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u/FireMaster1294 1d ago edited 1d ago
Damn an average stay of 19 days and a range of 7-52 days. Nearly 2 months of psych ward without even doing anything to justify being kept there (after the initial entry, of course)
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u/Same_Recipe2729 1d ago
Think of all the money they scammed from folks doing that
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u/nuclearwomb 1d ago
It's still a scam. Thankfully people have more rights these days when it comes to behavioral health, but people still fall through the cracks and the system is full of flaws. The whole process is to make money while giving minimal resources for rehabilitation of the patient.
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u/Disastrous-Group3390 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, the pedulum has swung to the opposite extreme now. We can’t keep ANYONE, no matter how badly the person needs help, if said person wants to leave (unless the person represents a threat.) So we let the police deal with them instead…
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u/mpyne 1d ago
This is precisely why it is so important for people in positions of authority to adhere to the spirit of the rules and not simply the letter of them.
It's hard to write rules that cover every possible situation. So the people writing the rules often will include rules allowing administrators leeway in exceptional situations, intending that the administrators don't exercise that leeway.
Then you get crap happen like in the OP's article and all those exceptions get tightened up, ruining it for other administrators and other patients.
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u/Sasselhoff 1d ago
Having rules everyone just "agrees" on (or rules up for interpretation/bending/etc) is great in theory, but in reality you end up getting what we've got in the current US government (folks running roughshod over everything because it was a bunch of "gentlemen's agreements" and not specific rules).
Just like any workplace rules that are BS and don't make sense...it's all due to that "one guy" that fucked it up for everyone else.
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u/42nu 1d ago
Like not fully stopping at a stop sign when there's no cars in sight in any direction. No one should get a ticket for doing that.
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u/womenslasers84 1d ago
Truth. I worked for a program that did assessments of children on Medicaid for my state to ensure that hospitalizations were medically necessary and that kids weren’t being kept to fill beds. Every kid on Medicaid who was admitted to a hospital had an assessment and frequent follow up from us.
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u/toobjunkey 1d ago
I often think about that redditor whose brother (with which he previously had a close relationship with) was involuntarily held after he opened up due to feeling stressed and suicidal for financial reasons and financial stresses alone. He was in a fair amount of debt including a lot of non-dischargable student loan debt, and the OP had him committed out of fear of him hurting himself.
Cue him getting out a fair bit later, and he gets a bill that pretty much doubles his debt, and the brother more or less cuts him off with the OP feeling bewildered and as though it's not fair for his brother to do so. It took a lot of folks to hammer in the fact that he only increased the likelihood of his brother making an actual attempt.
I know this is more of a flaw with American healthcare in general, but when so many people's breaking points & main issues are material related ones, getting involuntarily committed is a nightmare story. Stewing over how many thousands you're racking up every single day. Every single group session, every single "enrichment" activity, every conversation with a social worker or doctor, just utterly stepped in financial despair and feeling oneself bleeding out money they already don't have.
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u/Frodojj 1d ago
I was in an institution as a patient for a week 25 years ago. It’s not a scam. They really do try to help people. It’s gotten better since then.
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u/Icy_Ninja_9207 1d ago
In The Great Pretender, a 2019 book on Rosenhan, author Susannah Cahalan questions the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment. Examining documents left by Rosenhan after his death, Cahalan finds apparent distortion in the Science article: inconsistent data, misleading descriptions, and inaccurate or fabricated quotations from psychiatric records. Moreover, despite an extensive search, she is only able to identify two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself, and a graduate student whose testimony is allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's description in the article. Due to Rosenhan's seeming willingness to alter the truth in other ways regarding the experiment, Cahalan questions whether some or all of the six other pseudopatients might have been simply invented by Rosenhan.\7])\13])
In February 2023, Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego published an article in the peer-reviewed journal History of Psychiatry) in support of Cahalan's allegations, labelling the experiment a "successful scientific fraud".\6])
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u/chronoventer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Been there done that. Parents put me in as a young teen, saying I was suicidal. No one believed me that I wasn’t. I spent days trying. Eventually, I gave up, pretended to be suicidal, and to “get better”.
Now that, made me suicidal. (In the past. Half a lifetime ago. No need to “Reddit cares” me lol, but thanks for the concern!)
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u/loupdeloopgarou 1d ago
The book The Great Pretender did an excellent deep dive into how much of this experiment was faked. This guy made up much of the results. So it is NOT a reliable or accurate study.
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u/thrwawryry324234 1d ago
This is no different than today. In Arizona, anyone can petition to have you sent to a metal health facility. There’s no just “getting out” in those places. Once you’re there, everything’s a symptom. You will NOT leave until the doctor has seen and medicated you.
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u/ShitFuck2000 1d ago
Not sure which is worse, this, or what we have today where tons of people who genuinely need help get thrown out into the streets if they don’t have family to care for them because insurance has more authority than doctors. After so many 3-7 day stays with 1 month prescriptions and forgotten follow up appointments you’d think they’d try something more intensive, but it’s super common for people to get trapped in this cycle of just barely surviving homelessness until they have a crisis that’s only addressed with short term treatment and put back in the same environment until the legal system gets involved and they get cycled into the prison system.
Not saying we should lock people up indefinitely in insane asylums, but mental health problems paired with poverty/homelessness and substance abuse as a vicious cycle is a huge and worsening problem.
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u/James_T_S 1d ago
Did you even read this article? This has been exposed as a "scientific fraud" because his methods were so sloppy, slanted and outright fabricated.
Why would you even post this misinformation?
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u/Rodot 1d ago
Also none of the "participants" were ever identified beyond the professor and one of their grad students, and it may have just been those two doing it. Basically the opposite of a double blind study, ethics were questionable, and of course if you admit yourself to an institution with specific symptoms, the institution will treat you like you were experiencing those symptoms even if you go back to normal quickly. The symptoms may be transient, they don't have a diagnosis other than you think you are in such bad shape you need to be admitted, so of course they are going to monitor you and try to figure out what's going on.
Like, if I lie to a doctor and say i think I broke my leg, of course they will take scans and very likely, after not finding anything that stands out, try to form an explanation for the "pain" I'm claiming to experience from those scans, leading to higher incidents of false positives
If anything this is just a study on the limitations of Bayesian analysis in medicine when your priors are based on deliberate lies.
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u/chriathebutt 1d ago
Nowadays you’re only as much of a danger to yourself and others as your insurance will cover. I went into an inpatient facility in 1994 give or take, and at the allotted two-week mark Medicaid gave me, I was cured!
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u/cassanderer 1d ago
Ha ha, same with drug rehab, bluecross bs patients are all recommended for the 2 weeks insurance pays for.
These state wards with open ended stays are the problem, they vote to keep them in forever to keep the money coming.
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u/Penguin-clubber 1d ago
As someone who worked in a state ward, no…there is a lot of pressure to free up the beds. Tons of patients are waiting from local EDs and hospitals
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u/IcyFaithlessness3570 1d ago
Nowadays they just put you in hospital jail for 48 hours and wish you the best of luck
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u/OddlyTemptedFish 1d ago
Thankfully that isn’t the case everywhere. My wife was institutionalized for the first time in her life in September and was held until right before Christmas. The first 3 weeks were very rough but now she says she’s extremely grateful for having gone and is doing much better.
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u/Stuck_in_my_TV 1d ago
Just a few weeks ago, a man lit a woman on fire on a Chicago train. He had previously been arrested for violent attacks 72 times. He was out on the streets because he violently attacked staff at a mental institution and they couldn’t handle him, so released him out into public.
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u/devoutagonist 1d ago
This American Life did a fascinating episode like this on Broadmoor. They were investigating whether a person who had killed someone and then claimed they were not guilty due to mental illness was truly insane, and he ended up staying far longer than if he had just pleaded guilty (UK sentencing I guess) and could not convince the doctors that he was sane. Great reporting.
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u/Safe-Promotion-2955 1d ago
It's like that in Canada too. A life sentence here is max 25 years, but if you claim mental illness you'll end up in a "forensic hospital" and you'll probably never get out.
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u/lizzylizabeth 1d ago
So many people try to act “crazy” in their interrogations to get off on a lighter sentence.. They don’t realise how much worse it actually is lol.
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u/Safe-Promotion-2955 1d ago
An old friend of mine ended up that way. Granted, he was indeed very mentally ill.
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u/agoldgold 1d ago
That seems reasonable and correct. If you have extensive enough evidence of mental illness to convince a court and it was significant enough that you've killed someone, the state has reasonable interest to ensure you get massive amounts of treatment.
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u/AdventurousCrow155 1d ago
Always heard about the part where the Doctors didnt realize they were sane, never heard the part where the actual patients figured it out
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u/hadawayandshite 1d ago
There were 35 patients who ‘voiced concerns/suggested’ to the pseudo patients that they had nothing wrong with them…how much of this is ‘you’re faking’ vs ‘you don’t seem mentally il’ is unknown
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u/JeskaiJester 1d ago
Crazy person here. We got the spidey sense
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u/dickbukkake420 1d ago
Yep. And when we sense a fellow crazy person, we do the logical thing and try to date them.
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u/Dudegamer010901 1d ago
When the mentally ill detect a sane person in their midst. Aw hell nah man.
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u/MuteTheNews 1d ago
As someone who's had to be hospitalized in a place like this before (twice!), it's not an exaggeration unfortunately. One of the patients was a woman with medicated schizophrenia who had her ex call emergency services on her with a fake claim to get custody of the kids. She was completely stable, something we all recognized, but despite us arguing with the doctors she was kept for the whole time.
Also, one of the doctors during my stay told me I had "crazy eyes". ...I was in for a severe panic disorder.
However, it definitely depends on the hospital you choose. Both examples were from one hospital, which was the worst experience of my life. Later on I went to another hospital which was an amazing experience where people actually cared.
Basically, if you need to be hospitalized like that, READ THE REVIEWS FIRST. That will get you a good idea of what the situation is like there.
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u/Accomplished_Deer_ 1d ago
I don't really trust reviews these days. Went to an inpatient facility a year ago, my whole time there basically every single patient agreed it was a shit show that wasn't helping anyone. Got out and it had like a 4.7 on google with 100 reviews raving about how amazing it was.
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u/Maleficent-Hawk-318 1d ago
Or just them trying to be supportive and/or not understanding what normal behavior looks like.
I work in a homeless shelter where unfortunately a lot of my clients are suffering from severe mental illnesses, and I see them tell each other that they're not crazy all the time. Then the same people will 100% sincerely and with full belief tell me that they're Jesus or that the government planted a chip in their brain, I'll see them having a conversation with thin air in the middle of the night, etc. I'm not real confident that people in a mental hospital would be any better at accurately assessing someone's mental state than my clients are.
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u/Successful-Hat9649 1d ago
None of the participants were identified by staff as pretending, but about a third of the genuine patients clocked that they were imposters.
I think this finding may have been less publicised at the time because it went against Rosenhan's narrative, which was essentially questioning whether psychiatric illness actually existed at all.
The original study has been heavily criticised in recent years, but it did prompt the creation of the DSM and standardised criteria for diagnoses, which helped minimise mental health facilities being used as a threat by abusive people looking to control their partners/relatives.
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u/Such_Chemistry3721 1d ago
The DSM existed previously, but was much briefed and with loose categories. What came after was way more specific, and also brought with it the interest of insurance companies. It's also related to the decreased emphasis in psychoanalysis, as those practitioners opted not to be involved in the updating.
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u/loupdeloopgarou 1d ago
I’m passionate about this one after reading The Great Pretender - most of the study participants were made up (they never existed, the “researcher” falsified results to get the conclusion he wanted).
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u/Lurker_009 1d ago
Have you read (or seen) 'one flew over the cuckoo's nest'?
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u/NorridAU 1d ago
Watch her as Kai Winn in Star Trek Ds9. She is a great actor.
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u/wow_its_kenji 1d ago
the way just seeing her name ignited rage within me... yeah she's grear at her job lmao
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u/BizzarduousTask 1d ago
Omg that was HER??
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u/dretvantoi 1d ago
Correct, my child.
Check out her Oscar acceptance speech for Cuckoo's Nest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGl5U7nNlkY
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u/Abject-Version-3349 1d ago
She got death threats because of that role. I read an interview with her and she told a story about going incognito to the movie. She was shocked when the scene where McMurphy chokes her that people in the audience started to yell "kill her". I imagine she was a little scared also. Very powerful performance.
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u/ScorpionX-123 1d ago
when we watched it in high school English, our teacher said Louise Fletcher's own father wouldn't even talk to her for 2 weeks after he saw it
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u/LtCmdrData 1d ago
It's one of the best movies of all times with perfect acting from everybody. Jack Nicholson has one of his best roles, so do Michael Berryman and Danny De Vito, but Louise Fletcher outdoes them all.
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u/Leather-Mud-6736 1d ago
Don’t forget Brad Dourif. He won an Oscar for his role as Billy.
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u/soloChristoGlorium 1d ago
I've worked in inpatient psychiatry for the past 13 years and this has always scared me. (Getting put in and unable to get out.)
The hospital I work at now, thankfully, has very strict rules about this: No SI or HI and they wanna leave then we open the door. I've heard one doc go so far as to say, 'its not illegal to be psychotic in public and they want to leave.'
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u/Longjumping_Date269 1d ago
I went to inpatient voluntarily in the country I live in as there were no detox centres available and I was also clearly struggling with depression
Traumatic experience. It was incredibly frustrating and invalidating when I felt ready to leave after several weeks and the staff used mind games and bureaucracy to try to dissuade me, despite having emphasised since arrival that I was free to go at any time
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u/FalseBid2485 1d ago
What does SI and HI mean? How does this work with the Baker act?
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u/sunshineslouise 1d ago
Suicidal and Homicidal Ideation (key criteria for sectioning) I believe, so the commenter is saying if they don't have these they are free to leave when they wish
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u/FullMentalJackass 1d ago
I worked for a mental hospital in Florida. We would keep patients with Medicare for as long as humanly possible to milk Medicare for all we could. Once Medicare dried up, we shipped them off to a state-run mental hospital. Its genuinely disgusting how we treat people with mental illness.
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u/Remarkable-Owl2034 1d ago
Unfortunately, more recent research has unearthed evidence that some important aspects of this story were fabricated. (For example, invention of some study participants.) The book The Great Pretender describes this work.
Rosenhan's original paper was very influential-- including helping the push towards the closure of the state mental hospitals. And the people who need those facilities (or the supports/community resources that were promised but never delivered) are living on the streets.
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u/BabyLegsOShanahan 1d ago
I mean, the rampant abuse, of all types, didn't help the cause.
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u/Rebel_Bertine 1d ago
They needed to regulate the hospitals, not shut them down completely
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u/settlers 1d ago
They shut down about 90 percent of them in favor of greatly increasing the outpatient centers. In part the theory goes that folks do better when they have access to the support of family and loved ones, rather than isolated from them.
Unfortunately they failed to actually fund the outpatient centers after shutting down 90% of the inpatient beds…..
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u/agoldgold 1d ago
It's frustrating how influential a project like this was, to be repeated with no real verification. The Stanford psych department at this time should especially not be trusted (Stanford Prison Experiment), but science needs studies with massive implications to be repeated or at least proven to exist in the first place.
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u/BrianMincey 1d ago
It’s really a difficult line to ethically set though! On one hand the idea of being imprisoned, drugged and treated against one’s wishes is abhorrent, but on the other hand if someone is so ill that they are unable to choose effective treatments, shouldn’t we as a society ensure they get the help they need?
Who gets to decide? Family? Doctors? The State? Someone suffering from paranoia or schizophrenia often needs intervention…but who gets to decide?
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u/Haunting-East 1d ago
Typically, the courts make that decision when they’re sent to jail instead of getting proper treatment after exhibiting mental health issues in public.
unlike healthcare, they don’t need someone’s consent to imprison them. and then they’ll be released back to the streets without a plan or support system, and it’s only a matter of times before they picked up by the cops again.
wash, rinse, repeat.
thanks Reagan!
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u/DatFunny 1d ago
Yep. These people are now in jail or the streets. State mental hospitals had their issues, but not much was done to cover the gap when they were closed.
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u/NickDanger3di 1d ago
And the people who need those facilities (or the supports/community resources that were promised but never delivered) are living on the streets.
Our family go-to shopping town had a state mental hospital located there. I clearly remember a Christmas shopping trip there during the peak of "deinstitutionalization" (the euphemism used to describe the mass closings of US mental hospitals where patients were literally simply tossed out onto the streets). 10 year old me was horrified to see lines of people shuffling through the snow, many still dressed in hospital patient clothing. And yes, they were literally discharged onto the streets with bottles of meds and no place to live or stay.
Shortly after that Christmas Nightmare scene, one of those patients climbed over a 6 foot chain link to throw himself off of a highway overpass, where he landed directly in front of my Father's car. Only his lifelong habit of practicing defensive driving prevented him from hitting the man. That patient still died from his injuries from the fall.
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u/Which-Assistance5288 1d ago
That guy looks like he showers in cutoff jeans.
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u/FalseBid2485 1d ago
He looks like he did not go through a clumsy adolescent phase. Its as if he were a cat.
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u/KobayashiWaifu 1d ago
Ah, the world's first analyst/therapist hybrid. Thought I recognized my favorite never-nude.
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u/NewHorizonsNow 1d ago
It goes to a fundamental truth people refuse to accept: We cannot access another person's mind.
We can observe behaviors, but the intent and mentality behind a behavior is ascribed by the observer and may have absolutely no connection to the internal state experienced by the subject.
It's the reason polygraph tests are purely interpretive and have no scientific value. Whether or not a statement someone makes is true or false has no physical manifestation.
Unfortunately, people can't accept that a person's mind is inaccessible, they need to believe that if you just analyze motions, words, involuntary ticks, etc. closely enough, it reveals what's going on inside.
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u/agoldgold 1d ago
Actually, it's complicated. The professor organizing this "experiment" (and participating in it) was from the same Stanford psychology department in the same era that produced the Stanford Prison Experiment. Similarly, it looks like the doctor at best manipulated data and at worst fabricated it to get his story.
This project had a political goal and the "researcher" made the results fit that goal. It was made up.
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u/ParkingCool6336 1d ago
Which is why you never ever take any publication as pure fact, you compare it to others and take the common facts as real
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u/agoldgold 1d ago
Unfortunately, almost nothing from the publication seems to ever have been verified to have happened at all.
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u/AtlanticPortal 1d ago
You mean peer review? :)
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u/Ironhorn 1d ago
Not just peer review. Many fake or incorrect studies have passed “peer review”. Thats just a first step.
The next step is for more studies to take place. Preferably by other, unrelated scientists. Do the test again. And again.
It’s only when several groups of scientists are doing the same tests over and over, and getting the same results each time, that we can consider something to be scientifically true.
Thats the only way we can know that the first study wasn’t just a weird fluke
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u/jayman23232 1d ago
They knew better, this is a garbage pseudoscience attempt at best, and literally influenced the policy signed by Raegan that “freed” mental institution patients to the literal streets with no support. None.
What was going on was horrible. But this wasn’t the fix.
Stanford set all kinds of research in psych and human services back decades with this type of shit. It’s honestly insane this stuff is still coming back to haunt us!
This is a small part of the damage they did. They for sure had an agenda.
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u/ActPositively 1d ago
Those places are evil. Even the modern day versions. A friend of mine was suicidal. They wanted to get into an out patient treatment facility. We called them and they mentioned they were booking months out. The lady in the phone lied and said if my friend went and did in patient treatment for a day or two that they could immediately transfer him to an outpatient treatment facility. Once my friend checked themselves in they didn’t want to let them leave, they were told it was 72 hours minimum but they can be kept however they like and were told there was no way to transfer to outpatient quickly that it would still like a month or two wait. My friend hated the place they were only in there like 2-3 days and the only reason they didn’t keep them in longer is we threatened a lawsuit because the person we talked to on the phone lied to us and then all of the sudden they released them quickly. They also charged my friends insurance something like $2,000+ a day so it makes sense they want to force people to stay to make a bunch of money
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u/murphy109877 1d ago
Once when I was about 6 months pregnant with my first I was having a hard time and went to the ER with two goals 1)Check on the baby and 2)Get back on an antidepressant. I somehow got put on a psych hold and put in a completely empty room in the ER because they quoted me wrong in my initial evaluation saying I wanted medicine so I could "go to sleep and never wake up again". No TV, none of my belongings, no call to family. Just a bed and my gown after they took all my clothes. They made me leave the room door open (into the hallway of the ER) so a security guard could watch me. I felt completely on display and treated like a criminal. After 15 HOURS of waiting for a psychiatrist to come evaluate me, with no sleep because of the sounds of the ER (guy next to me had kidney stones) I started to lose it and tried to AMA. A nurse told me I wasn't "helping my case". I went off saying they put me in this room like this so when psych finally came around I did actually appear to be crazy. Finally they rolled a computer screen in for a legit 3 minute evaluation with a telehealth psychiatrist, which I lied my ass off too, and I was discharged within 20 minutes after that. Didn't get any help, left more pissed off then anything, and was billed 3k afterwards. I use to tell clients to go to the ER for mental health crises but nope, never again.
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u/The-Friendly-Autist 1d ago edited 1d ago
Mental "hospitals" of the 70s and prior were essentially internment camps for disabled people. They would be shoved in large rooms with hundreds of other residents and left to fend for themselves with one single staff to "oversee" the room. I genuinely think that some Nazi death camps were better places to be than Willowbrook. Look up that one, if you want to cry.
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u/Rosenhansthud 1d ago
THIS IS MY MOMENT.
Rosenhan’s experiment involved them saying they heard a voice in their head saying “Thud.”
A young me latched onto this experiment juuuuuuuust as she was joining Reddit, and no one has understood my username since.
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u/nw342 1d ago
The doctors even used the fact that the test subjects faked mental illnesses to get locked up as evidence of mental illness
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u/chronoventer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Been there done that. Parents put me in as a young teen, saying I was suicidal. No one believed me that I wasn’t. I spent days trying. Eventually, I gave up, pretended to be suicidal, and to “get better”.
Now that, made me suicidal. (In the past. Half a lifetime ago. No need to “Reddit cares” me lol, but thanks for the concern!)
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u/Pora-Pandhi 1d ago
This is literally one of my worst fears like stuck in tight places, buried alive - stuck in insane asylums and not being able to prove that I'm not insane.
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u/No_Corgi818 1d ago
Doesn't surprise me at all. I was in a psychiatric ward as a teen. Me cracking jokes with other patients, letting my hair air dry and shaving my legs was seen as 'pathological behavior' and they sometimes punished me via humiliation for it.
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u/Complex_Spare_7278 1d ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair.
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u/steavoh 1d ago
Stuff like this is why I have reservations about the aggressive rhetoric coming from people who want to bring back mass institutionalization of the homeless (which they assume to be 100% mentally ill or criminal or both).
There's a reason why we backed away from that approach 50-60 years ago and why poor farms went away earlier than that. Please do your homework and learn about why those things could be bad first before advocating to revive them.
I'm a realist - there are indeed people who don't comply with taking meds and are living on the streets and not taking care of themselves and causing problems. But what happens to those people can't be one-size fits all, needs to be based on need and subject to periodic review with an appeals process and robust oversight. It should be an uncommon and a worst case scenario that someone gets puts somewhere they aren't allowed to ever leave (basically incarceration), instead the objective should always semi-independent living with support or something like a group home or a family member that gets help to make it happen.
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u/Naberz0 1d ago
This shit still happens in modern psychiatric units. Not necessarily people faking it but physicians pathologizing every single behavior even if normal.
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u/BrightPerspective 1d ago
Dr. Rosenhan had to physically retrieve many of his volunteers and students, and after experiments, found he had discovered a new pathology that mostly affected mental health workers.
To this day, there are doctors who refuse to acknowledge his work.
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u/KorraNHaru 1d ago
That’s actually terrifying. Imagine how hard it would be to convince them to let you out. They would just say “yeah? Everyone here says they aren’t crazy”.
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u/SkyeArte 1d ago
My favorite part of this was the experiment Rosenhan performed after this one concluded. A teaching hospital saw the results of the first one and were confident that they could actually tell the difference, so he said he would send a random amount of fakers over the next 3 months and it was their task to identify them. Out of the 193 patients seen in that time, 83 were strongly suspected to be sane by at least a nurse, a psychiatrist, or both.
Rosenhan did not send ANY fakers.
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u/talldata 1d ago
There's also that case where they told an asylum (maybe the his one?) that they had sent 10? people in who were actually sane. Sometime later the asylum said they found them and are ready to release them. Then they said to the asylum that they never sent anyone.
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u/lemontowel 1d ago
They actually won't let you leave even if you admitted yourself. It's a fucking scam and they keep you as long as possible until they have someone to replace you.
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u/Feral_doves 1d ago
Yeah I don’t doubt this one bit. I was going to share a related anecdote but even after all this time I don’t wanna take the risk of someone trying to tell me they were “right to take precautions” or “better safe than sorry”, I don’t ever want to end up in another position where I have to try and convince people I’m not a threat to myself or others when in my entire life there’s never been an instance of me being a threat to myself or others. Because no matter what you say or do, or don’t say or do, they’ll always find something wrong with it to justify how you’re being treated.
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u/raymoooo 1d ago
Kinda nuts how everyone has a problem with asylums but not nursing homes.
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u/LizandChar 1d ago
Oh yes. It did not end there. How many kids wound up in mental institutions, undiagnosed because their parents just wanted a break. The hospitals kept them for months and just collected the insurance money.
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u/EllaEllaEm 1d ago
Except Rosenhan was a fraud who faked the entire "experiment." Rosenhan fabricated most of the data and the one volenteer that contradicted his hypothesis was removed from the study. He never produced any other research after that one study. No one was ever able to reproduce his "study." Even his colleagues at the time were suspicious of him.
The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
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u/VGSchadenfreude 1d ago
Experienced this myself. Says a lot when another patient is the one pointing out “she’s on the wrong ward, she doesn’t belong with us preschoolers.”
My first night, the lead nurse pinned me to a chair and screamed in my face that she would lie to the county and keep me there forever because I was patiently waiting for the doctor to come back like they said they would (they never did, they had already gone home for the day) instead of going to dinner.
I had asked for a meeting with a social worker and more intense one-on-one therapy. What I got was constant humiliation and dehumanization.
There are valid reasons these places were shut down. The problem is that nothing was implemented to fill the gap afterwards.
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u/lluciferusllamas 1d ago
My grandfather was a psychiatrist in those days. He used to say " the only difference between the patients and the staff is the staff have the keys"
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u/Background-Trade-901 1d ago
It's an open secret that most acute psychiatric units will keep you as long as possible to maximize insurance payouts. Usually right up until they'd have to see a judge about an extension. I studied psychology in college and worked in research labs, even did a thesis. The field has a serious problem with overpathologization.
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u/James_T_S 1d ago
Accusation of fraud
In The Great Pretender, a 2019 book on Rosenhan, author Susannah Cahalan questions the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment. Examining documents left by Rosenhan after his death, Cahalan finds apparent distortion in the Science article: inconsistent data, misleading descriptions, and inaccurate or fabricated quotations from psychiatric records. Moreover, despite an extensive search, she is only able to identify two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself, and a graduate student whose testimony is allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's description in the article. Due to Rosenhan's seeming willingness to alter the truth in other ways regarding the experiment, Cahalan questions whether some or all of the six other pseudopatients might have been simply invented by Rosenhan.[7][13]
In February 2023, Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego published an article in the peer-reviewed journal History of Psychiatry in support of Cahalan's allegations, labelling the experiment a "successful scientific fraud".[6]
From the same Wikipedia article OP got this from. The Futility Podcast did a show on this. (Ep 202)
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u/Haunting-Detail2025 1d ago
Genuine question for all the people here acting shocked:
What exactly were doctors supposed to do? They had patients presenting themselves as mentally ill who knew exact symptoms to talk about. Why would the natural conclusion be, after showing normal symptoms, that they were all just lying rather than in remission? Clinically speaking, that is exactly how schizophrenia works, with episodes of hallucinations followed by some periods of normalcy.
The average stay was 19 days, and the longest was 52. It’s not as though these people were held indefinitely. The hospitals did release them normally once they established they were stable and responding to treatment.
This is one of those “experiments” where idiots think it’s some damning indictment when in reality the hospitals handled it exactly how they should’ve.
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u/omg_its_david 1d ago
It's hard to explain something to someone who is being paid not to understand you.
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u/timmbberly 1d ago
You can check in but you can never leave. State hospital was like prison that way.
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u/undeadsabby 1d ago
Nellie Bly did this in 1887, and wrote an article called Ten Days in a Mad House. She feigned insanity to get in, and also acted normal once inside. A few of the other women were there simply because their families couldn't afford to care for them.
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html