1975/10/01 by Robert L. Spitzer · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · #Mental Health and Psychiatry #Empathy and Medical Education #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
paper · doi:10.1037/h0077124
openalex publication_date 1975/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/11
Rosenhan's On Being Sane in Insane Places is pseudoscience presented as science. Just as his pseudopatients were diagnosed at discharge as schizophrenia in remission, so a careful examination of this study's methods, results, and conclusion leads to a diagnosis of logic in remission. Rosenhan's study proves that pseudopatients are not detected by psychiatrists as having simulated signs of mental illness. This rather unremarkable finding is not relevant to the real problems of the reliability and validity of psychiatric diagnosis and only serves to obscure them. A correct interpretation of these data contradicts the conclusions that were drawn. In the setting of a psychiatric hospital, psychiatrists seem remarkably able to distinguish the sane from the insane.