Rosenhan's Experiment To Determine To Diagnose Patients In A Hospital

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This chapter focuses on David Rosenhan and his experiment on determining if psychologists can correctly diagnose patients in a hospital setting(sane vs insane). Rosenhan was inspired to embark on this experiment after hearing from his friend that many soldiers tried to avoid the Vietnam War draft by faking mental illnesses. This experiment was centered around Rosenhan and how he recruited eight of his friends as pseudopatients to take part in this experiment in where the pseudopatients faked their way into a hospital during the month of October. Before the experiment, the pseudopatients practiced faking symptoms and pretending to consume medications. Furthermore, all of the pseudopatients possessed the same symptom of pretending to hear a voice in their head making a “thud” sound, but once they enter the hospital, the voice disappears. The voice for each of the pseudopatients matches the sex of the patients themselves. When Rosenhan went to the …show more content…

Many severe critics went after the weaknesses in Rosenhan’s experiment, such as Robert Spitzer. Spitzer argued that when a patient comes to the hospital with a set of symptoms, based on medical and diagnostic procedures, a doctor would most likely diagnose the patients based on those set of symptoms. One hospital attempted an experiment reversal and asked Rosenhan to send as many pseudopatients as he wanted to and the hospital believed that they could tell who was faking their symptoms. The hospital supposedly identified 41 pseudopatients, but Rosenhan did not end up sending any. The rest of the chapter was the author’s attempt at Rosenhan’s experiment. She conducted the experiment with all of the same symptoms that Rosenhan and the other pseudopatients “experienced”. When she went to the hospital, the doctor thought that Slater was suffering from PTSD or a form of psychosis based on her

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