Article Review : ' On Being Sane ' Insane Places '

In the article ‘Who’s Crazy Here, Anyway?’, Rosenhan’s reason for research was because Rosenhan doubted whether the characteristics that lead to psychological diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the situations and contexts in which the observers find the patients. The hypothesis generated by Rosenhan was, that the staff will recognize the sanity of the patients, question their diagnosis and follow to release them. The objective was to observe whether personal or environmental factors dictate mental health diagnosis and professional treatment. Rosenhan recruited eight subjects which consisted of three women and five men, one graduate student, three psychologists, one pediatrician, one psychiatrist, one painter, and one homemaker.

Way back in 1887, a journalist named Elizabeth Cochran assumed the alias Nellie Bly and feigned a mental illness to report on the truly awful conditions inside psychiatric hospitals in the US--which were known as asylums at the time. She found rotten food, cold showers, prevalent rats, abusive nurses, and patients being tied down in her famous expose "Ten Days in a Mad House". What she documented had been pretty standard mental health treatment for centuries, but her work led the charge in mental health reform.

In Chapter 3 of Opening Skinner’s Box, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Lauren Slater discusses the contentious issue psychiatrists faced in 1972 after psychologist David Rosenhan conducted his most famous experiment, proving how psychiatrists already label patients when they walk through the door to be evaluated. The author, Slater is a psychologist herself in which her writing in this chapter is supportive to Rosenhan’s findings. This may limit supporting arguments on crediting psychiatric conceptualization. The meaning of behavior can easily be misunderstood, a patient can be diagnosed according to the doctor’s capacity of knowledge to specific behaviors.

Holden Caulfield is an insane person in a sane world. What is insanity? Insanity is when you’re in a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior or social interaction. This state is mental illness. Insanity is when you do things in deranged or outrageous ways that could frighten people, or make people feel uncomfortable when around you. It’s when you do things out of the ordinary; yet feel as if they are ordinary. Insanity could come about when you’re depressed, or after a traumatic event, and sometimes even by keeping all your feelings bottled up inside of yourself. Sane people are sensible, reliable, well-adjusted and practice sound judgment. It’s behavior that is expected in a society. By these

The dangerous and suicidal patients were tied together with ropes to help isolate them from the rest (ch. 14). The nurses were very obnoxious and abusive. For example, they would tell the patients to shut up and that they would beat them if they talked (Bly, ch. 12). Throughout Bly’s experience she talked with other patients, which convinced her that some were as sane as she was. Ultimately, society could not determine who was actually insane or sane due to their lack of knowledge on mental illnesses.

- The original question of the study was: ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?’ but Rosenhan narrowed it down in order to make it easier to answer and less of a philosophical debate. ‘Do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?’ The question was narrowed down to patients, referring to those declared unwell in mind by medical institutions, and wonders whether diagnoses are made based on the patients themselves or preconceived societal notions and the unique living situation within the hospital.

Entering the taboo world of mental illness, stigmatized as the crazy and psychotic by decades of

“ Earth is the insane asylum of the universe” Albert Einstein What comes to mind when you hear “insane asylum?” Do such terms as lunatic, scary, haunted or even the crazy house come to mind? More than likely this is the terminology that most of us would use to describe our perception of insane asylums. However, those in history that had a heart’s desired to treat the mentally ill compassionately and humanely had a different viewpoint. Insane asylums were known for their horrendous treatment of the mentally ill, but the ultimate purpose in the reformation of insane asylums in the nineteenth century was to improve the treatment for the mentally ill by providing a humane and caring environment for

An individual can psyche himself or herself on believing that a prescribed drug given from pharmaceutical doctors are making them feel better. Madness in today’s world can be covered up by those medications, unless everyone is brainwashed in believing that it can. In present society, medicine given to people to “treat” them for certain mental illnesses is normal to see. In the nineteenth century, people who suffered from mental madness had to deal with the insanity, such as depression or hearing voices, without any help. They had to go through the pain, while everyone else watched them, and those who had no problems judged them. In the past, a person was looked down on if someone else noticed problems with that individual. This created many people to try and hide their madness, so others would think they were normal. Those who believed they were safe from this psychological illness had not received any detrimental problem in their life to unleash it. Erik Larson’s novel, The Devil in the White City, foreshadows the characteristic of madness in many of the characters. Larson reveals in his novel that it does not matter what type of individual you are because everyone has some sort of madness inside of her or him, waiting to be revealed.

Amongst the buzz about Doctor Strange and Captain America 3, Marvel also announced the movie debut of a long-running but recently rebooted character by the name of Carol Danvers. Up until recently, Carol Danvers went by the name of Ms. Marvel and sported a skin-tight black leotard for a costume. However, in 2012 a writer named Kelly Sue DeConnick gave the character an updated look with a full body suit and a new name. Alex Abad-Santos uses Carol Danver’s history and her evolution into Captain Marvel in his essay “The Insane, Sexist History and Feminist Triumphs of Captain Marvel” to discuss the way women are portrayed in comics and how comic books reflect American society. Santos uses quotes from authors, provides panels from issues of Captain/Ms.

In the Article “On Being Sane In Insane Places,” Rosenhan describes an experiment were eight mentally sane individuals enter 12 different hospitals. The objective of the study was to see how

On Being Sane in Insane Places In the article “Mike’s Musings,” by Mike Smith he states, “Early on in my career I was told that psychiatric nurses detect and treat insanity, yet the true dilemma we face is that to detect and treat insanity we must first know what constitutes sanity.” Mike writes about how psychiatrists don’t know when people are actually sane and not insane, and when patients are diagnosed they aren’t treated correctly in or out of mental institutions. His article relates to Lauren Slaters book, Opening Skinner’s Box, and how psychiatrists don’t always know what they are looking for when diagnosing patients, that often leads to them misdiagnosing a patient, and not giving them the correct treatment.

For the past fifty years treatment of schizophrenia has been marked by its basis on the dopamine hypothesis for schizophrenia. However, this model for the disease and its subsequent treatment have left many patients without relief or help in dealing with this disease which has lead to a search for a better model. The dopamine model lacks the recognition of a whole range of symptoms associated with the disease and therefore can not be an accurate basis for treatment. More recently, there has been a shift to the glutamate hypothesis which has been shown to more accurately characterize the wide range of symptoms experienced by patients living with this disorder as well as the possibility in improvements for drug treatments.

In the story “On Being Sane in Insane Places” by David Rosenhan, an experiment was performed to distinguish the “sane” from the “insane”. Rosenhan’s experiment was “being sane in insane places”. In 1970 David Rosenhan a psychiatrist and eight perfectly healthy and sane “pseudo patients” fake their way in into psychiatric hospitals across the United States. Martin Seligman states “David just called me up and said, ‘are you busy next October?’ I said.

Unfortunately, asylum founders could only guess at the causes of insanity. Patient after patient was admitted into the state hospitals, but the cause of their disturbance was often a mystery. Many were inflicted with various organic diseases, like dementia, Huntington’s disease, brain tumors, and many were in the third stage of syphilis. With no treatments available, providing humane care was all that could be done. In the years following the civil war American cities boomed and the asylum began struggling to keep up. Soldiers, freed slaves, and immigrants were stranded in a strange land. The asylum became organized more like a factory or small town. There were upper and lower classman, bosses and workers, patients with nothing, and patients with privileges. Sarah Burrows, a schizophrenic and daughter of a wealthy doctor had a ten bedroom house that was built for her on the hospital grounds. Burrows home was just a stone’s throw away from the hospital’s west wing, where over sixty black women slept side by side. (Asylum: A History of the Mental Institution in America). The hospital began to rely on the free labor the patients provided. However, isolating the hospital from the community meant there was no way of knowing what was happening inside the asylum. The asylum became a world apart. In the 1870’s, Elizabeth Packard, a former patient of St. Elizabeth’s, wrote about her mistreatment and abuse