Being Sane in Insane Places
Rosehan suggests that what is perceived as ordinary in one culture may be viewed as abnormal in another. In explaining the concept of being sane in insane places Rosehan argued that normal people can be admitted to psychiatric hospitals and they determine if they were discovered to be sane and how were they discovered. If the sanity of the pseudopatients were usually identified, then that would be evidence that a sane person can be distinguished from the insane location where he is. However, if the normality of the pseudopatients was never revealed, serious complications would rise for those who are in agreement with customary approaches of psychiatric diagnosis (Taylor, S., In Bujko, H., Worden, C, 2016).
This article designates an experiment where eight sane people were admitted secretly to 12 different psychiatric hospitals. Their diagnostic involvements and a description of their experiences constitute information in this article. The existence of the pseudopatients and the context of the research platform was not identified by the hospital employees. Beyond asserting the symptoms and forging name, ability, and occupation, no other adjustments of individual, history, or situations were made.
Just after admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatients stopped showing any sines of abnormality as they started acting normally in the wards. However, there were cases where they were anxious as they did not believe that they would be admitted so easily to the psychiatric institutions. The pseudopatient spent his time writing down his opinions about the area, its patients, and the employees.
Despite their open display of sanity, the pseudopatients were never identified. This cannot be attributed to the quality of hospitals, length of hospitalization, or because the patients were behaving sanely. This is because it was quite common for the patients to notice the pseudopatient’s insanity, as they voiced their suspicions for example they called them journalists for notetaking. This observation that patients often identified normality when the staff did not brings up vital queries. Failure to identify sanity during the hospitalization progress can be because physicians are more prone to a healthy individual dropping sick than a sick individual being well. But what is assured is that any diagnostic practice that imparts itself to enormous errors cannot be a dependable one.
Rosenhan also talked about the adhesiveness of psychodiagnostic tags which has a life and an impact of its own. Once the influence has been established that the patient is schizophrenic, the anticipation is that the patient will continue to be schizophrenic. This label sustains even after discharge, with the unverified anticipation that he will act schizophrenic once more. Ultimately, the patient himself assents the verdict and behaves consequently.
There is an enormous overlap in the behaviors of the sane and the insane. The sane at times lose their tempers for no good cause as they are sometimes unhappy and nervous. Likewise, the insane are not always abnormal, the peculiar behaviors upon which their analyses were allegedly anticipated created only a minor portion of their entire behavior. While medication has improved, people do not consider mental illness in the same way as they view physical illness. A broken leg, which is a physical illness is something one recovers from but mental illness supposedly sustains forever.
The mentally ill are perceived as the communities’ lepers as the attitudes comprise of panic, enmity, detachment, distrust, and dread.such attitudes blight the universal population is imaginably not surprising, only disappointing. Considering the arrangement of the classic psychiatric hospital. Staff and patients are sternly separated. The staff has a living room. Those with high authority are not so much involved with the patients compared to those with less authority. Attendants spend more time with patients and as they learn the superior’s behavior, they start spending a short time with the patients.
Staff response to patient-initiated contact is also seen as limited. powerlessness is also seen everywhere in the psychiatric hospital as the patient is destitute of his legal rights.his freedom of association is limited. He cannot initiate interaction with staff and also individual privacy is minimal. The sources of depersonalization include attitudes held by us towards the mentally ill, the hierarchical structure of the psychiatric hospital as those who are at high authority interact less with the patients, and through this, they influence the junior staff.
Another source is the shortage of staff due to financial constraints by the hospital and full dependence on psychotropic treatment as staff are convinced that patient attachment is not mandatory. it is hard to trust that these procedures of socialization to a mental hospital provide useful approaches or lifestyles of reaction for living in the actual world.
Spritzer, however, criticizes Rosenhan’s study as he says that the findings are inappropriate to the actual glitches of the reliability and legitimacy of psychiatric analysis and only work to vague them. In his critic, spritzer criticizes that Rosenhan is aware that no psychiatrists analyze the word sanity or insanity as the real definition of these terms is the incapability to distinguish the correct from the incorrect and this does not apply to the study (Spitzer, R. L, 1975).
Rosehnam fails to give information concerning situations where normal hospital behavior was considered as pathological.rosenham claimed that the nursing records concerning how pseudopatient took notes, showed that writing was viewed as a pathological attitude. The only data he provided was the daily nursing comments that the patient engages in writing behavior. Nursing notes often comment on nonpathological activities of how the patient utilizes his time, this nursing note, therefore, does not support Rosenhan’s opinion.
Rosenhan never reflects the probability that the undesirable attitude to patients with psychiatric analytical tags could at least have something to do with the approach of individuals toward the very conducts that might be the foundation for the diagnostic tags. For example, he mentions that The stigmatizing impacts of psychiatric tags are so well recognized empirically and practically that it is tough to comprehend how or why those impacts could be repudiated.
This debate is relevant to the mental field as It advocated that the usage of community intellectual health amenities which focused on precise problems and conducts reasonably than psychiatric tags might be a way out and commended learning to make psychiatric staffs more conscious of the communal psychology of their amenities. The debate is argued to have enhanced the drive to developmental organizations and to deinstitutionalize as many conceptual patients as probable
I agree with Rosenhan’s study that it is difficult to distinguish the sane from the insane because doctors in a hospital setting cannot always do that because once you are in the hospital, you are lumped with everyone else and it becomes very difficult to escape the label. Rosenhan further goes and gives the solution to this by proliferating community mental health facilities which tend to avoid psychiatric tags as it is concerned about individual problems and behaviors. The other matter that could ascertain promising talks about the importance of increasing the understanding of mental health workers.
References
Taylor, S., In Bujko, H., Worden, C., Short Cuts (Firm), Video Education America. Films Media Group. & Films for the Humanities & Sciences (Firm). (2016). Rosenhan’s experiment: Being sane in insane places.
Spitzer, R. L. (October 01, 1975). On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84, 5, 442-52.