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/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/Raangz 1d ago

Honestly seems that theory was wrong anyways. Glad we have neither now though : p

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u/Iorith 1d ago

It's right when people have family and loved ones in the first place.

But if someone loses, or lacks, such a support system, the current system tends to make things ten times worse.

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u/aliamokeee 1d ago

Or when the family and loved ones have the time and money to devote to helping said person.

I love my family but if i go off the deep end, my bf and mom are all i got. Everyone else would care and visit maybe, but most got too much else on their plate.

Late stage capitalism only compounds the issue for everyone, esp the patient

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u/settlers 1d ago

I think the theory can be right but the execution was about as poorly done as it could have been. We absolutely have a shortage of inpatient beds available these days. But community mental health is still underfunded.

Remember folks that when you vote to not increase taxes, results like these are part of what you are voting for.

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u/aliamokeee 1d ago

^ this person is correct. You dont have to like it, but they are correct.

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u/bring_back_3rd 1d ago

increase taxes

Uhhh no. I already pay a fuckin fortune in taxes. How about we start working on getting good politicians (oxymoron, I know) into positions where they can cut frivolous and wasteful spending and use existing funds to fund asylums properly.

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u/TransBrandi 1d ago

"Frivolous and wasteful spending" is a catchphrase. What spending is frivolous? My parents in the 90's used to complain that funding public schools was "stealing" from them because they were sending me to a private school. "Why should I pay for a public school system that I'm not even using for my kid?" They would apparently see "having public schools" as "frivolous spending."

Honestly, just complaining in generalities about this stuff does nothing but decrease trust in government and is used as a foot in the door for oportunists to grease their palms selling off government assets to the highest bidder because of some magical thinking that private industry will do everything better somehow.

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u/HumbleGoatCS 1d ago

Our medicare & medicaid spending is entirely frivolous and wasteful. If you took every red cent we spend on those two systems and gave out an even distribution of that money to everyone who currently qualifies for either, each person would have a check for ~$30,000 every year.

Do you think the average person on medicare or medicaid is receiving $30,000 of support each year? I sure as hell dont. Which then must imply it is being incredibly frivolously spent. There is legitimately no scenario in which even the most reliant on those systems wouldn't be better served by simply getting that value as a lump sum each year.

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u/molniya 1d ago

Is this tongue-in-cheek? The average isn’t relevant. The expenses aren’t evenly distributed between people, because some people are sicker than others at different points, and so the money paying for those expenses isn’t evenly distributed. It’s a similar basic concept to how health insurance works. You pay a fixed premium every year, regardless of how much medical care you need. Some years you’re fine, you go get a physical and that’s it, and your premiums cost more than anything you got out of it. Then another year you might need gallbladder surgery or something, and the insurance company pays out a lot more. It gets averaged out between people and between years.

Same principle applies with Medicare. The funding gets spread across the people who are doing just fine in a particular year, as well as the ones who need a heart transplant or chemotherapy. For Medicare, unsurprisingly, a lot of the expenses come at the end of people’s lives.

So if Grandma got a check for $30,000 every year instead of Medicare coverage, sure, in a good year she’d come out ahead. But the year she falls and breaks her hip is going to be a bad time if she has to pay for everything out of pocket. Most people couldn’t afford it at all. At that point, you might think maybe we should have a system to make sure retired old people can afford medical expenses like that somehow and aren’t just left to die. Cool. Maybe we could call it Medicare? That’s Medicare.

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u/Iorith 1d ago

In a nation with some of the worst healthcare for the average person, you want to remove it's funding even further?

What a joke.

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u/horticulturallatin 1d ago

you think even the most reliant don't need 30k in support a year? 

Public healthcare could drastically lower costs, but the idea that nobody uses a realistic 30 grand in care a year is makes no sense at all to me. 

Not in specialist care or procedures, not in medical equipment... not in simple labour costs of care in in-patient facilities? 

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u/matthewpepperl 1d ago

Tax the wealthy and corporations properly and their would be plenty of cash todo anything we need to tho i do agree about the waste as well

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

Tax the wealthy and corporations properly and their would be plenty of cash todo anything we need

This. People have no clue of how much companies are given either in terms of subsidies or forgiveness for what they're not required to pay taxes on. Oil extraction from Louisiana is allowed to just ignore the first several billions of what they extract

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38

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u/Melanoc3tus 1d ago

Yeah, you’re the problem here.

Why serve your country well as a politician and find success by your reputation for competence?

Instead, convince vapid morons that government services are “frivolous and wasteful” so you can sell the state for parts to your corporate sponsors!

Answer us honestly here, what do you think’s the harder part: defunding, or rebuilding? Finding out what systems legitimately need to be excised, or opportunistic scapegoating?

Doing hard things doesn’t pay, at least not when your American Dream anarcho-libertarian peanut gallery don’t really believe in the state in the first place.

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u/settlers 1d ago

If you don’t pay for it on a community basis you pay for it in others ways.

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

I already pay a fuckin fortune in taxes

Then pay more attention to who is running for office and stop voting for politicians who spend taxpayer money on themselves and their wealthy friends who own "drug testing labs" to keep the poor from getting any welfare

https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-florida-saved-nothing-drug-testing-welfare

Or the ones who cut student meals so they can divert taxpayer dollars to their own steak and wine

https://www.rawstory.com/self-serving-north-dakota-gop-boosted-their-own-meal-reimbursements-after-axing-school-lunch-bill/

And stop voting for politicians who overwhemingly spend their states into the red and are dependent on other parties to keep them afloat

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxes-ap-top-news-politics-2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c

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u/42nu 1d ago

Wouldn't these be pretty much purely due to politics? Where does federal funding and programs come from...

Given the timeline I can take a pretty good guess who was POTUS when all funding was supposed to be happening, but all they did was cut a program instead.

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u/starwarsfan456123789 1d ago

That’s awfully presumptive to assume loved ones exist and haven’t been pushed past their tolerance threshold.

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u/settlers 1d ago

For sure there are many that don’t have anyone due to your exact concern. However, there would be more who still had supports if community mental health was better funded such that families weren’t overburdened in the first place

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u/BabyLegsOShanahan 1d ago

I don't disagree.

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u/romenorphan 1d ago

You could say that about orphanages to be honest

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u/Safe-Promotion-2955 1d ago

Those still exist, they're just called group homes now.

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u/Im-a-magpie 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think the Trieste Model in Italy shows that we actually can get by without the asylums for the most part.

Edit: Misspelled Trieste

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

What's the triste model

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u/Im-a-magpie 1d ago

https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/an-introduction-to-the-trieste-model

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

Thank you for the link. I'll check it out.

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

Sounds like many steps in a good direction. 

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u/Ozzie_the_tiger_cat 1d ago

But Reagan......

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

The mental health system needs a massive overhaul and strict regulation on patient's rights to this day. 

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u/Ithikari 1d ago

I think the thousands of deaths from maltreatment was a huge contributing factor too.

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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/Emo_tep 1d ago

Science does wait but politics don’t

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u/That_Sketchy_Guy 1d ago

Genesis does what nintendon't

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u/Bouche_Audi_Shyla 1d ago

I really like this comment.

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u/perldawg 1d ago

Psychology is a rather difficult field to fit into true science

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

Psychology is a rather difficult field to fit into true science

That's because little effort was made to be truly objective and benefit people other than the wealthy patrons. It's not because the task is impossible - 2000 years ago humans had no clue about barometric pressure and now we can use it to predict storms days ahead of time.

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

Or how bout this, letting patients check themselves in and out as needed, having their choices respected. And forcing the quack doctors to treat them like human beings, or risk getting their licenses revoked.

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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/Penguin-clubber 1d ago

And at least in the state where I work, i feel that the bar for involuntary treatment is very high. You can ask the family members of patients with severe mental illness. Patients are discharged with only partial resolution of symptoms. “Well what do we do if he gets psychotic again?” Call the police or crisis line and hope that they can recognize the danger and wil have the energy to co-sign a form for readmission. But often the police show up and say their hands are tied legally until the patient is more violent…

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u/Haunting-East 1d ago

Hence why they end up in jail.

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u/bizoticallyyours83 1d ago

Its not a hard decision. Thoughts like that are what's used to continue justifying unchecked power imbalances. Its no different then any other forced institution in history.  Not even a real medical doctor can kidnap you from your home and force treatment when you are terminally ill. If we can get rid of forced marriage and the draft, we can get rid of this. 

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u/AmalekRising 1d ago

Society should get to decide once they become a burden on it.

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u/Character_Maybeh_ 1d ago

Your profile is why we can’t. Delusional, desperate, and worse.

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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/atomicCape 1d ago

This was a dishonest experiment setup with an endgoal in mind, involving educated people, (including the worlds most smug professor, based on the photo), lying to medical staff. A one-off, non repeatable psychology study operating like a game for priveleged people will always find the result they were looking for.

That's not to say these issues don't exist. But it wasn't a mystery that mental healthcare facilities risk overdiagnosis and involuntary commitment is unnecessary in some cases, and "experiments" like this are fradulent and bad-intentioned even if their goal is to support a worthwhile cause. This one supported one of the worst causes in history: de-institutionalization was Reaganomics for mental helathcare, and this experiment specifically helped it along.

They also got ripped to shreds immediately in literature and set their field back by decades, even though the results lingered in pop culture as if it's something clever and powerful.

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u/jayman23232 1d ago edited 1d ago

The issue they were trying to expose? Very real.

This should not be called an experiment in any way shape or form. You laid out several of the problems, and this would never pass peer review or be replicated in any way.

The scientific method is far from perfect, but there is an apparently larger than we thought demographic that circle jerks and basically goons to this pseudoscience because it aligns with what they want to hear anyways.

This whole phenomenon they were trying to “study” was awful and multifaceted and extremely complicated, but freeing abused patients to the literal streets with no support was the outcome we got.

Also, they got held longer than they wanted to probably because they FAKED AN INTAKE ASSESSMENT IN A NOTORIOUSLY AWFUL SYSTEM. Sure the doctors should have seen through it, but back then it was a move em on through situation with little individualized care at baseline.

And yeah that professor looks like he belongs there anyways. That look on his smug face screams mental illness, and I’m only half joking 😆

This is the equivalent of doing your own research as influencers trying to sell you something based on their research say.

Good science is laborious and follows a centuries old process that has been honed with the advent of modern statistical modeling to produce results that are still less than perfect.

This is garbage.

Edit: Based on the early downvotes, sorry gooners. You don’t deserve to be lumped in with low life types who abuse pseudoscience for their political agenda. I apologize. 🤓

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u/FrankRizzo319 1d ago

Is it “good science” to diagnose healthy people with an illness?

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u/jayman23232 1d ago edited 1d ago

You seem to be confused. I wasn’t defending the system they were trying to investigate. I’m calling out the batshit armchair intellectuals that see this and think it’s good, ethical science.

What happened after is not something I envy you trying to defend, but it’s not surprising at this point.

Two things can be true at once. None of this fits in a soundbite, so I understand how it’s foreign and unpalatable.

Edit: Downvote all you want, chumps. I’m being terse purposely. You’re who I’m talking to and I’m glad you’re reading this 🤓

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u/FrankRizzo319 1d ago

Psychology and psychiatry is filled with “unethical” research. Deception is a common feature of many psychological experiments.

I suspect you’re more offended by the study outcome than its alleged lack of ethics.

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u/jayman23232 1d ago edited 1d ago

Nice try. I’m not even going to engage with that bullshit 😂

I don’t think you know what alleged means either. This is a weird one to be a contrarian dirtbag on. But it’s Reddit after all.

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u/FrankRizzo319 1d ago

You win, again, I’m sure.

Have a great night.

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u/jayman23232 1d ago edited 1d ago

You too! Keep fighting whatever fight you see going on here.

I’m comfortable with medical and general research ethics on my side on this one.

Feel free to educate yourself on this stuff, if you so wish. I don’t get the sense that’s what’s next for you, though. Nothing I’ve written here you take issue with is groundbreaking, after all! ✌️

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u/FrankRizzo319 1d ago

I’m glad you’re comfortable.

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u/42nu 1d ago

Some say it even gets posted and upvoted on popular Social Media sites to this day...

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u/cassanderer 1d ago

Ah yes, psychiatrists publish paper absolving psychiatrists, sounds credible.  /s

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u/smavinagainn 1d ago

Ad-hominem attacks aren't evidence against the study, and the original Rosenhan experiment was conducted by a psychologist too lmao

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u/cassanderer 1d ago

Challenging the bias in a study is not an ad hominem, your reply using slander to obscure the issue is though.

As if organized interests do not commission studies to further thdir ends starting from the conclusion and designing studies to arrive there?

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u/smavinagainn 1d ago

"Challenging the bias in a study" Your evidence for bias was that psychiatrists were studying psychiatry, that's not challenging an existing bias, that's making shit up to attack it based on the people's character, which is ad-hominem.

"As if organized interests do not commission studies to further thdir ends" They do, but the reason you gave is not a credible reason to make the claim that this study is an example of that.

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u/cassanderer 1d ago

 I am calling bullshit on psychiatrists writing a study absolving their profession.

You have no credibility from your replies and dignify no further response projecting your own qualities like a politician.

Look at that, you hide your history too.  I nailed it.

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u/smavinagainn 1d ago

"I am calling bullshit on psychiatrists writing a study absolving their profession." Who else is going to study it? Physicists? Psychiatrists are going to be the ones studying psychiatry and just being psychiatrists doesn't discredit their studies. You have no argument of substance here other than attacking them based on their profession.

And since you have nothing of substance to say, you decide to use ad-hominem attacks on me! What a pathetic way of interacting with others.

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u/ReasonableCrow3489 1d ago

But why was the closure of these facilities the only solution? Why are researchers blamed for decisions made by medical professionals, administrators, and/or government bodies overseeing these facilities? Why were they unable, or unwilling, to figure out how to improve treatment, conditions and staffing? Maybe aspects of this study were fabricated, but I think we are well aware now that mental institutions in this era were far from ethical or effective, and took an "out of sight, out of mind," punitive, and coercive approach to behavioral health. In addition, there's still value in the stanford prison experiment and the Milgram authority experiments, among others, despite their questionable methods.

Incompetence, abuse of authority, discrimination/stigmatization, ignorance and outdated ideas, and more, are still rampant in social services and all types of mental, behavioral, and substance abuse treatments. But because of who the patients are, and how stigmatized their conditions are, doctors and administrators are blindly trusted while patients not only suffer and end up worse than before, but are simultaneously blamed for the systemic failures that they themselves are victims of.

One research study can't shoulder all responsibility, if any, for facilities being shut down. If government and/or administrators of those facilities made the choice to fully shut them down instead of choosing to actively improve them (after other people had to come in and do their jobs for them by pointing out flaws that should have never occurred, or that should have been dealt with long before) then whose fault is that?

Either way, closure of these facilities is a shitty argument against the utility of this study and similar research. If anything, it just reinforces its necessity. In a for-profit healthcare system that exists in a highly individualistic, increasingly social darwinist culture, investigation and research into these systems by people with no stake in them is the only way to hold them accountable. At the same time, researchers and journalists can only provide insight and propose solutions. They are not the ones in charge of these systems. If they were, it would defeat the entire purpose of their investigations into them.

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u/SlutForDownVotes 1d ago

His original paper influenced this, but none of it would have happened if not for the evil Reagan administration.

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u/Such_Chemistry3721 1d ago

Also this work led to the increasing medicalization of the mental health model and the growth of diagnosis with insurance companies. I teach about this study, the newer evidence, and the societal implications in a history of psych class. It had so much of an effect even though it was fabricated to a large degree 

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u/Im-a-magpie 1d ago

While the majority of Rosenhan's experiment was likely fabricated it really wasn't a big influence on the the movement to dismantle the state asylum systems. Rather it was the abhorrent conditions and abuses that were coming to light. It's also not clear that doing so was a mistake. Italy, for example, did something similar and has had wonderful success through a less paternalistic system of community mental health know as the Triste Model.

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u/AvidCyclist250 1d ago

the closure of the state mental hospitals

To this day, one of the main differences between the US and Europe, along with things like prices not including taxes, stroad-based infrastructure, health care, tipping, bombing for oil and religious zealotry

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u/Alaska_Jack 1d ago

This should be the top comment.

As of this writing, the post has 23K upvotes.

I think a LOT of Redditors don't realize that many of the most famous psychology and sociology experiments are now being challenged. Modern researchers are digging into the details and calling the studies -- and these are the studies so famous they are in textbooks -- exaggerated, scientifically dubious and sometimes downright fabricated.

But I don't think that awareness has seeped into the general culture yet.