Being Sane In Insane Place Summary

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.

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.

In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan published “On Being Sane in Insane Places” which documents the results of studies he and his confederates conducted at 12 different psychiatric hospitals across the United States. The studies were an examination into the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis methods. Rosenhan’s research focused on testing the hypothesis of whether or not psychiatrists and medical staff can distinguish the sane from the insane and if the characteristics that lead to diagnoses relate more to the patient or to the environment and context in which they’re being assessed. (Rosenhan, 1973) The study was divided into two main parts. Participant observations and comparative information studies were noted as well as they gave valuable insight into the treatment of psychiatric patients, conditions in psychiatric hospitals, and the effect that diagnostic labels had on how patients were perceived by staff. Ultimately, the study discovered that psychiatrists could not reliably distinguish the sane from the insane and insight was gained into how diagnostic labels and environmental context play a strong role in the perception of behavior.

- 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.

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.

Mike writes about how some psychiatrists can’t determine whether a patient has a mental illness and is insane or whether they are sane. Mike says, “I recall a psychiatrist and philosopher telling me that the sanest people she met where those who believed themselves to be insane and that conversely, the most mentally unwell were the ones who insisted that they were

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.

The ambiguity of sanity or insanity is a prevalent theme in many literary works, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In a well-organized essay, discuss how Ken Kesey questions the definition of sanity in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Then discuss how this ambiguity contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the story follows several patients in a mental asylum.

The tale One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey is full of insanity, manipulation, freedom and the lack of, power, and rebellion. It starts off in an Oregon psychiatric hospital with the main character “Chief” Bromden, a schizophrenic Indian man that pretends to be deaf and dumb so as to be ‘safely’ ignored, detailing th arrival of a new man.

Rosenhan’s article emphasizes the frequency and the seriousness of an incorrect psychiatric diagnoses. In it, he explains two well planned experiments he conducted involving pseudopatients. Rosenhan and eight pseudopatients, all showing no sign of mental illness, went to 12 different mental hospitals, all except one were admitted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, with the only symptom being hearing a voice of the same sex saying “empty, hollow, and thug” (Rosenhan, 1973). In order to see if they would be detected as pseudopatients, as soon as they were admitted all of them returned to normal behavior.

not only on women, which were supported with popular literature such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s

The images about the conditions in Willowbrook are very disturbing to me. It is hard to look at how they treated people with disabilities so poorly and horribly. This treatment, however, reminds me of a research that I have read before. As psychologist Rosenhan conducted a research to see whether the asylum were able to distinguish the healthy people from those with mental illness, he found that the patients in the asylum were treated poorly by the staffs. In his paper On Being in Sane in Insane Places, Rosenhan recorded that there were very minimal interaction between the staffs and the patients, as if they were afraid of the patients.

In the article On Being Sane in Insane Places, the problem is trying to figure out if sane people can be distinguished from the insane and what is or is not normal. This article talks about an experiment that was done to see if sane people were detected from the insane or not and how it was conducted. It states that “normality is distinct enough that it can be recognized wherever it occurs, for it is carried within a person.” This article will prove if this theory is correct or not and how the information for the answer was gathered.

The sociological imagination is a perspective coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills that urges individuals to understand their life experiences and societal happenings by analyzing both past and present occurrences within society and within themselves. Mills describes the sociological imagination as, “A quality of mind that will help [people] use information and develop…lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves” (Mills 1959). The reasoning behind this perspective is that all our actions are influenced by social institutions, which in themselves are created by individuals and shaped by history. Therefore, Mills suggests, that only through looking both inwards and outwards will people be able

The article “On Being Sane in Insane Places” by D.L. Rosenhan was first published in Science in 1973. Rosenhan was a professor at Stanford University and this article is about one of his most famous experiments. The article is about the curiosities Rosenhan had in regards to sanity. He wanted to know if there was any valid way of determining if a person was actually “insane” and if sanity was real. The experiment he devised included himself as one of eight pseudopatients, as he puts it, who malingered themselves into different hospitals. All eight pseudopatients were admitted by feigning symptoms of auditory hallucinations. The pseudopatients wrote in journals of what they experienced and also what they observed. Once the pseudopatients were admitted they had to find their own way out by acting as if they no longer had a mental illness. While under a hospital’s care, regardless if a hospital had a high standard of care, all patients seemed to be dehumanized and were treated as if their mental illness was the one thing that defined their existence. Rosenhan concluded by these observations and experiences that once a person has been diagnosed with a mental illness, he or she is confined to that diagnosis for the rest of his or her life and the stigmas that go along with it.