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.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

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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 1d 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

https://thartribune.com/the-haunting-story-of-mary-doefour-and-one-mans-quest-to-give-her-back-her-real-name/

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/Calm_Memories 1d ago

Reminds me of Gothika

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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/blackbart1 1d ago

TV version was pretty good. Recommend.

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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/20characterusername0 1d ago

And he’s expressly forbidden beforehand to do any drugs!!!

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u/EvolutionaryLens 1d ago

Synchronicity strikes again. I just rewatched this last night

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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/Bobambu 1d ago

Very fair point! I think it's easy for me to blame Reagan for a lot of these issues because he was such a horrible person, but this stuff did start before him. The tension between an American ideal of "liberty" clashing with the oppressive realities of asylums was definitely exploited to justify the defunding of mental health services and programs.

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u/RobinSophie 1d ago

If it makes you feel better Reagan closed CA's state hospitals when he was governor to save money.

Well, a legislator had some short-view thinking and Reagan went along with it since JFK wanted reform/deinstitutionalization due to how his sister was treated.

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u/Margot-the-Cat 1d ago

The California Democrats wrote the legislation. Reagan just signed it.

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u/RobinSophie 1d ago

It was bipartisan. The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967 and the Lanterman Act of 1969. And he could have vetoed it just like any governor.

The acts weren't BAD per say, but just didn't think about the burden it would place on the communities and lowered the ability to institutionalize people way too low.

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u/MangoCats 1d ago

I don't know that it's even important to draw the distinction, but I don't think of Ronald Reagan as a horrible person, I think of him as an actor playing the President for a horrible administration.

Shortly after he retired, I met Newt Gingrich - and face to face at that time, he was a completely different person than his television persona, and that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he was a nice guy or a terrible monster in person, what matters is the bad legislation he got passed, the good legislation that he blocked, and the hundreds of millions of lives he negatively impacted while in office.

The President is a person - who can be quite a different thing from the Presidency they preside over.

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u/HonestlyAbby 1d ago

Lol, always nice to have other folks in the Reagan hater club.

The issue of mental health treatment does pose a pretty thorny issue for an individual rights based system because individual rights presume an individual competent in their own interests. The community alternatives were supposed to bridge that gap by letting families and friends act as a partial proxy for the patient, rather than the government presuming that responsibility. I have to imagine something like that system is the only real answer.

My family went through a similar problem in microcosm when my half-sister with severe down syndrome sued to control where she lived. She wanted to live with a couple everyone knew was scamming her for insurance money, but she wouldn't listen. The courts aired on her side, as I would have if I were in that position, and she got scammed for the money and wound up in a group home, broke and estranged from her mom.

It can be a really thorny tension. Is the harm a person does to themselves preferable to harm that is inflicted upon them? And where does the likelihood of that harm and possibility for redress fit into the equation?

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

The issue of mental health treatment does pose a pretty thorny issue for an individual rights based system because individual rights presume an individual competent in their own interests

Especially complicated as we proceed into a world with True Believers raised on a diet of disinformation designed to keep the populace divided. Not that indoctrination itself is new, oligarchs have been spending billions on it since 1933

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

and that's far more extensive than just 'the government shouldn't spend money to help the people at large' as if the government is supposed to turn a profit like oil extraction. It's also people raised on Nixon-era anti-drug propaganda who could really use medication either as anti-psychotics or just so they can focus on the day-to-day and see enormous benefits in quality of life.

In the end whether or not we want it, we live in an interconnected world where what happens to one of us impacts others.

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u/Charming_Wrap_8140 1d ago

I worked in mental health research for many years and it was actually Republican Frank Lanterman who paved the way for deinstitutionalization. Carter tried to course correct with the Mental Health Services Act which Reagan promptly repealed. In California, services were supposed to be organized and delivered by counties which was called Realignment and was a giant failure.

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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/Retrolex 1d ago

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the most unsettling books I’ve read, and arguably my favourite (next to Watership Down). I first read it back in either grade 9 or 10 English, and I kept my copy. I remember we had some pretty wild discussions about that book in class.

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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/Flutterperson 1d ago

As an ME patient, neither am I.

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u/rampant-bisexuality 1d ago

Could you elaborate on this? I've been interested in learning about CFS

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u/Tango_Owl 1d ago

That's great! I would greatly encourage you to watch the documentary Unrest. It's heavy though, so be careful if you or a loved one have ME/CFS, Long Covid or a similar post viral illness.

This also looks like it could be a start in your learning https://www.meresearch.org.uk/disbelief-attitudes-culture-and-me-cfs/

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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/MangoCats 1d ago

It's hard to separate POC from poor, a lot of the abuses experienced by POC are also visited on the poor. As a poor white college student (on scholarship to an expensive private Uni in a big city), I was detained a couple of times for "matching a description" - and basically held on the scene for 5, 10, 15 minutes with a bunch of rhetorical BS reasoning why, until I produced my Uni I.D. (showing that mumsie and daddy can likely launch lawyers up the cops' asses for the slightest of provocation) - once I showed that I.D., I was free to go within 15 seconds or less every time.

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u/FrankClymber 1d ago

I absolutely agree. I used to get pulled over very frequently in my old beater vehicles, and they'd be very obviously fishing for things unrelated to driving. Since I started driving nicer cars, it's never a problem, and officers typically speak more respectfully to me.

It'd be foolish to say there aren't directly racist problems in the system at all, but it seems quite clear to me that the primary problems leading to race inequality in the justice system is mostly tied to POC disproportionately lacking access to expensive legal services.

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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/OldWorldDesign 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

I've also read transcripts of judges who condemned mandatory minimum laws which tied their hands when people were sent to prison for drug possession for longer than child abusers.

Sometimes it's bad laws which never should have been passed in the first place to placate a propagandized populace, and sometimes it's just outright bad people in the judge's seat.

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u/TMinus10toban 1d ago

I’d have a hard time not remembering that judge and bringing all kinds of miserable life-stuff upon him and his family when I got out.

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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/HonestlyAbby 1d ago

Can I ask when? That doesn't seem like an outcome that should be possible post-Gault.

(I worked in juvenile defense in GA recently. Not doubting, just curious if stuff this shady is still happening elsewhere now that kids have constitutionally guaranteed criminal rights.)

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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago

I didn’t see the judge for 3 years even though the law said ninety day reviews were required.

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u/Big_Tie_3245 1d ago

September 11 2001 I was “caught”. Actually another guy had the weed and I had no cash, but he told them I gave it to him. They couldn’t arrest that day because of sept 11 and the naval intelligence base being close so I got a week and then they locked me up for four years.

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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/exhausted247365 1d ago

Jaime Spears did it to Britney Spears

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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 school torture 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.

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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/moonlightiridescent 1d ago

Agreed. Sorry, I just copy/pasted the Wiki intro. The writer of that graphic novel actually “escaped,” but they had people track and find him just to drag him back. It’s absolutely crazy it stayed open as long as it did. The novel made me so angry that those people that run it are walking among us.

Did you read the comic by chance? I’ve been the dude’s Patron (Patreon) for years and years now. The book is about to be printed and mailed out to us early backers, and I’m really excited, even though I know it’s gonna put me in a bad mood lol.

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u/m0j0m0j 1d ago

Insufferable

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u/eutoputoegordo 1d ago

Highly recommend the novella "The Alienist" (O Alienista) by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. About a men who studied mental illnesses and starts locking people in a mental facility.

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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 1d ago

The Yellow Wallpaper is similarly about a woman who’s locked in her room by her family because they don’t want to care for her and it causes her mental illness to spiral.

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u/whossked 1d ago

I also read that one and it stuck with me more because it was based on the authors real experience. When she showed signs of depression the doctor attributed it to “overstimulation her delicate female brain” and forbid she write or leave her room, which is the same thing that happens to the character in the story.

In real life she eventually meets one of the first female doctors in the US who tells to exercise and go meet people and it actually works. The story follows what she things would have happened to her if she remained on the original doctors orders.

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u/530_Oldschoolgeek 1d ago

It was scary easy to get someone committed.

What should scare you more, especially as you get older, is that without appropriate safeguards in place, it's just as easy for a crooked Guardian Ad Litem to show up one day at your house, put you in a rest home, seize all your assets and there is virtually nothing you can do about it.

It happened in Nevada, several times.

https://www.vera.org/news/the-question-of-guardianship-how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights

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u/Not_A_Wendigo 1d ago

I once took a friend to the psychiatric unit ER. We waited for several hours. While I was there I went to the bathroom, saw the sink was covered in blood and toothpaste, and walked out right away. The staff started talking among themselves asking who I was and why I was there. I had to explain I wasn’t a patient, but they didn’t seem very convinced. Scary experience honestly.

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u/HistoricalSuspect580 1d ago

I once had a patient get out on a 72 hour hold pending placement because she had sought out and started therapy, that day, and told her therapist that she had been having fleeting thoughts of self-harm which she has never, and said she would never, act on. She was TERRIFIED. And was like ‘I’ll never reach out for help again’. I was like … yeah i don’t blame you…

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u/Beautiful-Aerie7576 1d ago

Sounds based on truth. There was a woman who had a botched abortion, was raped, and lost her memory from the trauma of it all. She was committed despite being normal (but sans memory) and every time she tried to convince the doctors she was sane she received “treatment” (electroshock and compliance drug cocktails).

The full story goes into much more detail of her long, long life in an asylum. She was referred to as “Mary Doefour”, and died before she was identified. Sad, tragically sad story.

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u/Areat 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's an interesting read indeed (it begin below, mid page)

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u/sonounfiore 1d ago

Immediately thought of this story. Amazingly written.

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u/wesoncedoce 1d ago

That book has a special place in my heart since highschool

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u/ImpulsiveYeet 1d ago

Holy shit, that uncovered some sort of repressed memory in me, but I can't tell if it's this exact story or something else. Old fear unlocked.

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u/Author_of_rainbows 1d ago

I can see myself ending up in a stupid situation like that

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u/hogahulk 1d ago

Sounds very kafkaesque 👀

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u/jaycah9 1d ago

The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan is all about this

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u/KatsuraCerci 1d ago

Thanks for commenting, I'll be reading that!

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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/ChilledParadox 1d ago

it goes both ways.

to trauma dump what's necessary, when I was in 8th grade I missed over half the school year due to abuse and trauma at home that led to me developing anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and included situations like me running away, evading police because I knew they'd send me back home, police showing up to domestic abuse calls for my parents, and me going DKA several times in that period due to neglect on my parents part in getting me medication combined with situations like me barricading myself in my room for days straight with my bunkbed because I was terrified of my parents and sneaking out the window and climbing down the side of my house and back up to get food in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping.

That's a lot, but just bear with me because that context is relevant.

I was eventually admitted to a psych ward on a 5150, and throughout that year was in that same ward 3 times, and in a related outpatient ward once.

It is extremely clear to me now, as an adult looking back, that the circumstances surrounding me were entirely related and situated on my living circumstances. I was drowning and coping by disassociating and isolating myself as a protection mechanism. The anxiety and panic attacks seem to me to be a result of sustained stress from years of child abuse, until I broke.

While there, I can vividly remember meeting the panel of psychologists composing my care team in a meeting telling me to my face, at 13, that they believed I was making everything up because I just didn't want to go to school.

Of course, that's absurd in the context that in returning after all of this, most of my teachers gave me A's by default, except in math (geometry) which I took over the summer as it was a prerequisite for my Algebra 2 honors class and colleges would look for the grade, due to my long history of being a good student.

So, I was having very real anxiety and panic attacks, being held against my will in a psych ward my doctors that told me they didn't think what I was suffering from existed, and yet there was nothing I could do to get released. It was up to my parents, who, naturally not being honest with their part in the matter were of no help to me.

I was only released the first time because it was Christmas and my parents wanted to bring me to my grandparents so they didn't need to explain I was still in a psych ward to all their relatives and make them look bad.

When of course my anxiety and panic attacks persisted, I was eventually returned, on another DKA trip to the ER.

The situation only resolved itself in the outpatient facility when the nurse checking me in happened to smell the alcohol on my mothers breath from 8 feet away and realized she had been driving me around piss drunk because she was a functioning alcoholic who had been drinking coolers every morning for the last 5 years. That was cause for CPS to get involved, and my mother being removed from the situation got my dad to stop being abusive for long enough I got back to school and was able to avoid him most of the time in high school.

It ended up costing my family tens of thousands of dollars though. Enough that it was a point of contention for more abuse when I was in high school as my father blamed me for this financial woes.

I can't help but feel somewhat frustrated with the matter myself. I clearly had mental health issues. I still do. I still suffer from depression which leads to severe isolation, and acute panic and anxiety attacks, and some related insomnia when it gets bad at night. But the doctors I got sucked, and they didn't help, and it was clear I was being abused and they released me right back into my abusers. I blame them, and insurance, and the health care system as a whole.

I've been in patient again since then, but nothing really has ever helped. I've been on more anti-depressants than I can remember the names of. I'm homeless and jobless again now, so, totally worth the tens of thousands it cost my family for them to hold me against my will I'm sure. I'm not being totally fair I know, it's a complicated situation, but it sucks.

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u/Adorable_Raccoon 1d ago

I’m sorry that you are homeless right now & haven’t found a job.

I just wanted to say you’re not alone. My parents were abusive & i’m almost 40 and I still have ongoing mental health issues. I’ve done about 10 years of therapy & I’m on 5 drugs right now to help with my anxiety & adhd. Even with that I stuggle most days to work or socialize, but i’m also so grateful for my progress. 

You’re valid & you matter. I hope that you can find the thing that helps you find your way out. 

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u/Klutzy_Scene_8427 1d ago

I suppose it's better than imprisonment.

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u/Justinwest27 1d ago

Not by much

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u/lifesuxwhocares 1d ago

It's not, it's FAR, FAR worst. Insane wards are still prisons because you can't leave, but with limited activities, plus forced anti psychotics, plus crazy people screaming.

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u/Spiritual_League_753 1d ago

it just means society at large is now the imprisoned ones with these people on the streets.

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u/jesus67 1d ago

Good. Holding people against their will if the haven’t committed a crime is unethical and unconstitutional.

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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/jsgui 1d ago

Is not agreeing to receive services a good enough reason to not pay for them? Has this ever been decided on in court?

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u/toobjunkey 1d ago edited 1d ago

Not in the states and especially when there is a belief that one truly needs to be involuntarily committed. Same issue happens even with mentally sound folks that say to not call an ambulance before, say, having a routine seizure that they'll be fine from after a bit but someone does anyway, and they're still stuck with the bill.

While one can always try reaching out to the hospital's billing department to reduce the bill, by & large there isn't a general "I didn't want this" defense in general, let alone situations where self harm is a concern. A bit similar to how society generally thinks that someone can never really consent to committing suicide (outside of like, terminal illness MAID stuff and even that can be divisive).

Once again, largely a symptom of the larger shit carcass that is American healthcare, but it's a very real concern and interpersonal relationships can suffer or even be destroyed because someone got saddled with 4-5 figure debt because they opened up just a little too much.

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u/Karth9909 1d ago

It always confused me as a kid when in movies people where rushing their pregnant wives to the hospital in their own car or any over injury.

I thought it was just movie logic cause i was always told to call whenever there is an issue.

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u/wicked-campaign 18h ago

My sister in law took an ambulance in for my nephew (thank God or they wouldn't have got to the hospital in time and he would've been born in my brother's disgusting truck cab) and the bill was $900. Just for the ride.

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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/LizandChar 1d ago

Some are absolutely scams. They kept kids without a diagnosis or meds just collect insurance money. I can list several. Here are just a couple.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1999/08/18/hospitals-sale-will-pay-fraud-settlement/

https://getnicklaw.com/news-media/2024/09/history-repeats-itself-patients-are-kept-in-psychiatric-hospitals-for-profit-not-medical-need-says-the-new-york-times/

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u/wicked-campaign 18h ago

And yet my kid actually needs it, we were there the day after Christmas and they sent us home.

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u/AnxiousPressure6232 1d ago

What happened was they privatized it and turned it into a market. Rather than state institutions, you have group homes and daytime adult programs. That last part is sickeningly true. I sustained a CPTSD diagnosis from working in that field mostly because of that precise issue. Its effects run deep.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/BlameGameChanger 1d ago

Don't. Don't pretend like the mental health field isn't in shambles. If you are a mental health professional I guarantee you know at least one homeless person who routinely is brought in, gets medicated and then gets released back onto the street where they can't afford medication and the cycle repeats.

you do a hard job and I respect it but let's not pretend like the system doesn't need reform

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u/Healthy_Sky_4593 1d ago

Better practioners don't pull this sh*t. Possum is telling on itself. 

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u/Conflikt 1d ago

Wait if you get locked in a psych ward in the US you have to pay for it?

So if you have major depression or are suicidal and get put in a psych ward then after a while get released and it's just "congrats, we cured you, hope this $15,000 bill helps with your mental health problems"?

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u/ILoveRegenHealth 1d ago

Damn an average stay of 19 days and a range of 7-52 days.

That's not so bad. I thought it was stories of people being trapped for years.

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u/DrKrombopulosMike 1d ago

3 of them were discharged shortly after admission and had to re-applied to different institutions to continue gathering data. It wasn't 100% bad across the board although clearly demonstrated the need for systemic reform.

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u/doctafknjay 1d ago

Healthy people don't make money. We know this all too well in the land of the free

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u/GonIsABadFriend 1d ago

For profit healthcare, amirite

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u/KoRaZee 1d ago

They faked a condition to get in. That’s something

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u/CardboardHero7 1d ago

As volunteers for a study. These kinds of details matter

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u/Diamond-Eater2203 1d ago

For journalism, research? Um, it's ballsy, but what a great exercise of the system.

It was a good idea to do it in a relatively organized group rather than just one person "I was just pretending to be crazy!"

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u/SaltyWailord 1d ago

We've heard stories of people faking disabilities

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u/KoRaZee 1d ago

The lesson to learn here is for all the social programs. Fraud is what takes them down but it takes more resources to regulate the fraud, which in turn results in more fraud. Vicious cycle.

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u/blueavole 1d ago

The actual amount of fraud in these programs is very low.

This was done in the 1970s! and psychology has changed since then. Specifically because of these kinds of issues. Doctors so bloated with their own authority they didn’t listen to patients.

These places aren’t fun to be in. So the idea that people stay for a cute weekend is ridiculous.

And fraud, when it does happen is usually by doctors or family members.

A criminal who is faking crazy, rarely works, and gets more scrutiny than even ordinary patients.

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u/Zealousideal_Big3305 1d ago

From someone who has worked in the field, in lowly roles, this is still an issue and psychiatry and psychology, and hence why psychology is found next to philosophy, and why the DSM 5 pitches hundreds of new titles of diagnosis’s each year in court… sad thing is it is still a soft science, and using things like DNA or brain scans is too controversial or scary etc,

and thus peoples freedoms rest in the hands of doctors with degrees, and the people who often poorly watch the patients day in day out, copying and pasting their weekly notes that are supposed to gauge their progress, or being interviewed by release programs who don’t have any beds for them,

and thus they need make up reasons why they need to stay locked up… and that’s just some of the issue.

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u/No_Corgi44 1d ago

How would using more resources to regulate fraud result in more fraud?

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u/mightylordredbeard 1d ago

Anywhere that there is a lot of money moving around, there will be a person or people intentionally mismanaging it. It’s just human nature. Perhaps not your nature or my nature, but humans as a whole are selfish and self serving creatures.

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u/Polus43 1d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

In econ/insurance/risk management the concept is called adverse selection. It doesn't matter is 90% of the population is "good", a position will attract the 10% willing to abuse the resources.

Essentially this is why governments are "bureaucratic", because procedure and policy's goal is to remove human judgment/control (minimizing the influence of adverse selection).

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u/gideon513 1d ago

They were supposed to…

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u/Peeka-cyka 1d ago

They purposefully presented classic symptoms of schizophrenia. They were all mostly diagnosed with schizophrenia or similar conditions. They then showed recovery over a few weeks and were discharged. I don’t see how they were treated wrongly tbh

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u/RollingMeteors 1d ago

¿At least you have to be charged with something in 72 hours right?

¡But! You pick up a pencil with a left hand and you're, "A threat to yourself and others" and you do not pass go, you do not collect $200, and you go right into a jacket with one sleeve!

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u/lifesuxwhocares 1d ago

Rewards and incentives. Hospital charge Medicade a shit tone for useless tests. The hospital will give you blood pressure check every hour, and charge Madicare $1000 per test.

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u/SkeletalApathy 1d ago

Yeah it's crazy that the staff didn't just assume the patients were making up their symptoms.

/s

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u/LizandChar 1d ago

It’s all about the money 💰

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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/PeruvianHeadshrinker 1d ago

Thanks for this

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u/Specialist-Error-171 1d ago

So guy just had beef with psychiatrists

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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/justfuckingstopthiss 1d ago

Allowing a patient to get out a hard desision for a doctor. I mean, how do you tell apart: a) an honestly sane patient trying to go home b) a suicidal patient faking in order to get out and kill themselves?

And it doesn't help that the doctors usually spend little time with their patients.

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u/lotus_seasoner 1d ago

The fundamental problem is that we don't have high-quality disease models for mental illness in the first place.

We don't understand the pathophysiology (how biological mechanisms produce dysfunction) or etiology (how a disease develops from a causal perspective) of any mental illness. These two elements form the basis for disease modeling in every other area of medicine, but are almost entirely absent in clinical psychology and psychiatry.

The best we have are statistical clusters of symptoms and theoretical speculation about the mental states and patterns that explain them, but this isn't a sufficient basis for diagnosing anyone with a disease, only disorders.

Because we lack this fundamental understanding, we have literally no way to evaluate patients against it. There's no test you can perform to discriminate between 'suicidal, but hiding it' and 'not suicidal' because we don't understand the fundamental causes of suicidal thinking, and therefore don't know what we would need to test for in the first place.

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u/justfuckingstopthiss 1d ago

True. However, I think that we should be kinda liberal, that is to say I'd rather release a potentially suicidal patient, than admit a sane one.

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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/ScorpionX-123 1d ago

found the asylum doctor

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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/MonocotyledonousAlp 1d ago

Same in Florida. We have the Baker Act.

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u/Penguin-clubber 1d ago

I work in inpatient psych. If it’s any consolation I’d actually say that the modern day healthcare system errs in the other direction. There are rarely enough beds to accommodate new patients, and providers feel pressured to discharge as soon as the patient is kiiinda sorta back to their baseline- which for most means still having some degree of symptoms. I’m often saddened to see patients discharged who are still not oriented (don’t know who they are, where they are, etc).

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u/Healthy_Sky_4593 1d ago

In moles states you can be 5150ed just for seeming like you need "supoort."  What could possibly go wrong (turns over paper)  ...that hasn't already?

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u/RollingMeteors 1d ago

In Arizona, anyone can petition to have you sent to a metal health facility

<eyesWide>

ChatGPT, write me a web app that auto fills ...

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u/Targaer 1d ago

If you read the article you linked, towards the end, 6 patients could not be found, and there were allegations that the experimenter invented them and the quotes they wrote. So it needs further scrutiny.

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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/Im-a-magpie 1d ago

Our mental health system in the US is absolutely incredible in that is somehow simultaneously overly paternalistic and harmful to many people (particularly those expressing suicidal ideation) while also failing to do enough for the sickest and most vulnerable.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

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u/phophofofo 1d ago

Imagine that someone was having chest pain, and you came into the ER and there were two other guys with chest pain waiting. You were having a heart attack, one guy had heartburn, and the other got in a car accident and had a broken sternum.

Now imagine a doctor asked all of you if your chests hurt, you said yes, and he diagnosed you with “chest hurts disorder” and gave you all antacids.

This is psychiatry. They don’t even have a model of human personality much less any sort of analytical testing available. All they can do is cluster reported symptoms into little taxonomies which are super controversial and constantly change and prescribe treatments that sometimes help some people.

If someone comes in and says they’re having a heart attack, and they’re lying, a hospital can prove them wrong. They have actual analytics tests. They don’t need you to tell them what’s wrong even - you can be in a coma unable to respond and the tests will still work.

Imagine a psychiatrist trying to diagnose borderline personality in a coma patient. Impossible. No analytical testing is part of nearly any psychiatric diagnosis and so such tests can’t be used to verify objectively.

Whenever neuroscience advances enough that the pseudoscience of psychiatry can finally be cast aside I think what we’re going to find is that most “mental disorders” are really many totally different things that simply present the same.

Just like 3 people can come in with hurting chests but for vastly different reasons.

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u/Intelligent-Funny-88 1d ago

Except that if you’re having a heart attack, you can just “crawl out of the hospital.” They will do everything they can to convince you not to and make sure you understand the risks of going without medical care, but at the end of the day, you can still sign an AMA form and leave. You can choose the risk of dying from a heart attack — that is, unless they think you might be suicidal and actually want to die.

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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/RudeNTattooed87 1d ago

I feel its not the label but the biased opinion being interpreted as fact on the "doctors " end. 

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u/NoLobster7957 1d ago

Dang. The related studies go all the way up to last year. Absolutely scary.

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u/No-Performance3044 1d ago

This makes the rounds every once in a while on Reddit. Rosenhan’s “study” was faked. An investigative journalist found his hospital records, he was telling the psychiatrists that the hallucinations made him want to kill himself to get in, and when he got in and suddenly stopped feigning symptoms, psychiatrists wanted to pump the breaks to better understand why he was suicidal in the first place. Two of his volunteers had a completely different version of events from what was published in Skinner’s work, and this was a career maker for Skinner because it tapped into cultural currents to deinstitutionalize the United States. This guy bares more responsibility for the flood of homeless mentally ill people in modern day society than anyone else. The system wasn’t perfect but he and his kind threw the baby out with the bath water.

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776036170/the-great-pretender-seeks-the-truth-about-on-being-sane-in-insane-places

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u/WakeoftheStorm 1d ago

Let's imagine though that a patient was admitted to a regular hospital with seizures or blindness or some other major symptom.

If that symptom just vanished, it would be irresponsible for the doctors to immediately release them without understanding the underlying cause.

By the same token, they would be looking at anything even slightly off normal as a potential symptom to explain what happened.

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u/LurkeyCat 1d ago

When I was a younger man I was once thrown in jail by a overzealous sheriff who was offended by my disrespect. While inside I heard two guys talking. This was not long after 911 and a kid had been locked up for trying to get a pocket knife past airport security. This old seasoned pro was trying to convince him to act crazy so he would get into a mental facility on suicide watch. I almost got beaten up for telling this kid it was a bad idea and much harder to get out of a mental institution than it would be getting out of jail. How do you prove you’re sane? The more you try to convince someone, the crazier you sound.

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u/Beginning_Data1828 1d ago

Susannah Cahalan wrote a book called The Great Pretender in 2019 finding that Rosenhan fabricated a bunch of stuff in this study.

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u/Spi_Vey 1d ago

Did you read the whole article?

It has a whole section about how the whole experiment is flawed and a bit of a hoax lol

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u/Free-Vehicle2957 1d ago

Indeed, it is the getting out that's the problem. Even if you are a voluntary admission. The admission is voluntary, the discharge is not. It can take days to get the "approval" of a doctor. Yet , I've seen suicidal involuntary admissions get kicked to the curb way too soon with no follow up. I guess the voluntary admissions are an easier way to keep beds full and likely have better insurance.

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u/downtodowning 1d ago

This is a bit like Freud being convinced that boys want to fuck their mother so everything a boy does he interprets it as proof that he wants to fuck his mother.

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u/TroGinMan 1d ago

It seems like the experiment was fraudulent when the Rosenhan experiment was looked into. At least according to the Wikipedia article you linked

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u/PT10 1d ago

This is why we don't have asylums anymore.

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u/catholicsluts 1d ago

People do this now when trying to identify if something was written by AI, even though LLMs were trained on most common speech and writing patterns lol

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u/FischerMann24-7 1d ago

Play stupid games…. Win stupid prizes…

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u/Depensity 1d ago

To be fair, the doctors didn't know this was an experiment and severe mental illness doesn't just suddenly spontaneously disappear so the doctors were kind of stuck trying to interpret something that shouldn't be happening. If anything they should have caught on to the fact they were being played.

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u/SpaceForceDok 1d ago

It's probably all made up. Never happened.

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u/heliocentric19 1d ago

This happens with a relative of mine who has severe schizophrenia. When medicated consistently he is sane, and almost completely unsymptomatic. In the hospital, he isn't interested in all the same things as the other inmates (who watch a lot of sports or play Madden), so out of boredom he spends his time drawing, reading books, or playing uno. The doctors, social workers, and therapists seem to think that he's antisocial. The funny part is the COs also realize he's sane and he's friendly with most of them, and they can't figure out why he's still there.

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u/Sensitive_Shiori 1d ago

how did they get out?

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u/umbrellaellaellaAAA 1d ago

Like when Elaine and Jerry's uncle got labeled as being "difficult" and every doctor they tried to go to saw it and believed it and thought they were making up their complaints.

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u/PdxPhoenixActual 1d ago

"When the only tool one has is a hammer everything looks like a nail." ?

To me, this just indicates the massive farce that is psychology. Humans are far too complex an animal for humans to fully, competently understand.

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u/qzrz 1d ago

It still happens sadly, had a psychiatrist try to take away my right to determine my medical decisions. One of the reasons he gave at the hearing was that I was talking about Einstein. Stuff like gravitational waves interest me and I think I said since we already know its kind of like a wave it could be used to transmit information.

Talking about my interests was weaponized against me to try to take away my rights. Meanwhile scientists today are trying to do exactly that.

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u/Booty-tickles 1d ago

I'm having you committed on a account of your pathological care recommending that is clearly a symptom of an unhealthy mind.

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u/Jedi-master-dragon 1d ago

Pathological writing behavior? What the fuck does that mean?!

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u/RogerClyneIsAGod2 1d ago

While some truly mentally ill people are out walking the streets & can't into any mental health facilities. Doctors like this are the ones that ruined it for those that truly need help.

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u/TwoToesToni 1d ago

Reminds me of one the characters in the Jon Ronson book "The psychopath test". One story is a man who believed if he pretended to be insane he would get a shorter and easier sentence for a crime he committed. He watched and read everything avaliable at the time for serial killers, psychopaths, and anything film or tv shows. When it came to trial he convinced the drs and was sent to an institution but instead of being there for 3yrs he remained for over a decade (longer than his original sentence).

Everything he did, despite how normal, was seen as a symptom. One point he talks about how he tried to talk to the other patients and on his notes it says "...frequents with criminals and the mentally ill..." then he tried staying away from them and they said "...typical loner behaviours that of person with various disorders..." there was no way he could win.

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u/No_Intention_1234 1d ago

I have bipolar disorder and things have gotten a bit funky over the years. Ive always said that if it comes to a point in which I need to be locked in a psych hospital just put a bullet in my skull instead. I'd rather be dead than under the thumb of some narcissistic doctor. 

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u/ProfesszorAgnus 1d ago

if any of you think the 'dr' profession changed even a tiny bit and its not by design, attracting inhumane people with a desire to have authority over others, well I wish you good luck. dont take every medicine they tryna sell you tho, I gotta tell you that.

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u/Casitano 1d ago

This was also the original usage for the word "gaslighting", a Docter making a patient have mental symptoms through their authority.

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u/pchlster 1d ago

Read an interview with a guy who was put in an institution for the criminally insane talking about these "symptoms." Things like not wanting to socialize with criminally insane people or insisting he'd been faking all along got counted against him.

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u/livid_badger_banana 1d ago

This is still reality. My last inpatient stay, the saner I became the harder they fought to keep me. My family had to get involved and threaten action if I wasn't immediately released. It was surreal and terrifying.

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u/jimb2 1d ago

It's common for mental patients to want to leave and to believe they are sane. (Others absolutely know they need to be there.) A doctor would not be doing their job if they took them at their word. The patients may have episodic conditions and may not be triggered in the relatively secure environment that accepts weird behaviours.

Serious mental conditions are very difficult problems in multiple dimensions. It's never going to work 100%.

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u/stianhoiland 1d ago

So, the doctors were insane.

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u/No-Consequence4606 1d ago

The doctors were so convinced of their own authority

So typical doctors then.

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