as small as a world and as large as alone

3:35am July 18, 2014

santorumsoakedpikachu:

sixpenceee:

problemedic:

plightofthevalkyries:

sixpenceee:

deucelooselyproductions:

sixpenceee:

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that psychiatrists cannot reliably tell the difference between people who are mentally stable and those who are mentally unstable.

8 mentally stable people were granted admission into 12 different hospitals. They all told the same story of how they would hear a voice inside their head, it was unclear but often said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. 

Right after they were admitted, the patients stopped showing any signs of abnormality. They took part in activities and talked to faculty and other patients as they would normally. 

None of the psychiatrists ever stopped to say “I think they are getting better” or “they seem absolutely fine now” In fact, nurses and psychiatrists took normal activity such as walking or writing and attempted to represent it as a form of pathological behavior. 

For example, staff would point to patients waiting outside the lunchroom as a form of oral-acquisitive syndrome, when really they were just bored and were anticipating their meal. 

It’s interesting to note that even though staff didn’t recognize that these people were completely fine, patients recognized that they didn’t seem to have any problems.

This study highlights how powerful labels can be.

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EVIL EXPERIMENT

Wow…this also potentially bespeaks how the people who are charged with making these patients better are only trying to create terminology and atmosphere that keep them institutionalized.
That’s pretty disturbing.

To anyone saying “well they said they heard voices obviously the doctors are going to look at them with a weary eye”

You missed the point.

They were supposed to detect the patients getting better and instead of being able to tell that, they took any action that the patients performed and totally distorted it and blew it to epic proportions to make them seem completely and utterly abnormal to a point where the patients were institutionalized for months. 

Also, sixpenceee, you missed the second part to this experiment - equally chilling, in my opinion. One hospital’s administration was angered by Rosenhan’s experiment, and challenged him to send impostor patients - mentally stable people masquerading as mentally unstable people - to their facilities. Their staff would then turn those pseudopatients away. Long story short, Rosenhan OK’d this part of the experiment. 193 people went to that hospital in that experiment period looking for help. They flagged 41 people as impostors and had doubts about another 42.

Rosenhan sent no one.

The staff of this hospital flagged impostor patients where none had existed.

That’s really worrying…

This is terrifying 

I think some of the commentary here is spot on; other parts of it not so much.

The terrifying thing at the heart of this is that institutions exist at all and that it is considered okay to subject anyone to that treatment, not that a person without disabilities could mistakenly be put in an institution.

I think this experiment was important because it shows how psychiatric staff can and will pathologize anything that inmates do (and their treatment of the abled inmates in the experiment will not be written off as deserved), but it is terrible that institutionalization has to happen to an abled person before most people will pay attention.It also shows psychiatric labels and judgments as being based on pretty much nothing, which is important for people to understand. (Yes, there are mental health disabilities, and some of what the psychiatric system says about them is accurate - but the way the system is set up, anything can be called pathological, and “treated”/punished, just because the system says so. Case in point, Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Not everything labeled as a psychiatric disorder is actually a disability, and people with the conditions that are actually disabilities do not deserve the treatment that being psychiatrized gets them.)

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