what is up everybody this is Chris from the rewired soul where we talk about the
problem but focus on the solution and I have a quick question for you have you
ever been misdiagnosed with a mental illness only to be really agnostic
that's something that I've experienced and a lot of other people have
experienced as well so today we're gonna be talking about the rosenhan experiment
as well as all the drama in the psychology community that goes on with
this specific experiment y'all thought drama was limited to the beauty
youtubers and people within the YouTube community but it actually happens quite
a bit in the community of psychologists right and I think it's important that we
discuss this because sometimes we see the field of psychology very
black-and-white we think that there are these concrete rules and examples and
everything is agreed upon by the entire psychological community but at the end
of the day people like you and me we're the ones who are struggling with mental
health issues and we're the ones who need to get treatment so I personally
believe that all of us should be a little bit more aware about what's going
on in different realms whether it's you know specific diagnosis or how people
are diagnosed in general so I've always been fascinated absolutely fascinated by
this one particular study called the rosenhan experiment alright and recently
I can't remember if it was the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020 but anyways
anyways and also by the name of susannah cahalan who some of you might know she
just released a new book called the great Pretender alright and she's an
investigative journalist and she did a excellent excellent job with this book
and like I said it's one of my favorite studies of all time and then when I was
walking through the bookstore I saw this I'm like oh I need to read this ASAP
so first let's discuss what is the rosenhan experiment all right to just
kind of give you a summary of this so rosenhan he is a or he was he recently
passed away he was a social psychologist all right
so what he wanted to do is he wanted to test how well like mental health
facilities asylums psych wards all those places could properly diagnose a mental
illness all right so way did he originally did
it just by himself he wanted to see if he could get admitted into a psych ward
with symptoms of schizophrenia all right so he said he heard like you know a thud
and you know these other things and yeah he got admitted and then the goal was to
see if he could get out right symptoms totally gone how hard is it to get out
after you've been misdiagnosed so after he did it himself I think he was in
there for a week or two but anyways he goes back and he finds some students who
are willing to participate as well all right and there was a lot of a lot of
details that went into this and he like taught him what to do and everything
like that but also he knew that it could mess a person up by doing these like a
lot of psychological experiments are absolutely not
anyways he got eight pseudo patients who went in there with fake identities and
stories and everything like that and he trained them on you know use this part
of your like real story but then embellish this and whatever was to get
admitted into the psych facility so he had eight people go in and the
hospital's admitted all of them and each one had different lengths of how long
they were in there until they got discharged right and when there were
discharge they were left with the diagnosis of I believe schizophrenia in
remission okay so anyways Epirus he publishes his study I think it was
called on being sane in insane places a lot of psychologists and mental health
facilities were really upset about this like y'all do
again I bet you can't do it again right so he said okay so over the next month
I'm gonna be sending out more pseudo patients and you see which ones you
think are really schizophrenic and which ones aren't right and over the next
month or whatever they the psych hospital said that they caught like I
think like over 40 people who faked their mental illness but here's the
kicker rosenhan never sent anybody back in there my kind of crazy right so
anyway it's like I said like silica Halen she's an investigative journalist
but she was actually the perfect person to write this book
okay here's why some of you might recognize her name because she wrote the
best-selling book brain on fire which actually got turned into a movie
with Chloe what's her name Chloe she's from the movie kick-ass you know what
I'm talking about anyways she was diagnosed as schizophrenic schizophrenic
because of all the symptoms that she had and like she was you know having
hallucinations she was suicidal and all these other things and it turned out
that she actually had this rare autoimmune disease and it was messing
with her brain so she discovered this study that she really wanted to learn
more about it because now she goes around and speaks to psychologists and
people who work in the field about like yo it might not always be this mental
illness based on the symptoms that you're seeing so in the book in the book
like she dives deep in there it's like just complete investigation and as the
book goes on I won't spoil it like go get this damn book it'll be down in the
description below but as the story goes on there are these little diesel
instances where you kind of see like rosenhan lied about certain things when
interviewing people who knew rosenhan he was kind of shady and he was a
storyteller and a lot of people never knew where he was like he was hard to
track down and one of the other issues was like
people could not track down these pseudo patients the ones that he sent in all
right so we also need to realize that when this study came out psychologists
were pissed right like he was you know showing this huge flaw this massive flaw
within the psychological community so they were really upset so earlier this
morning I read a an article by a psychologist who circa Halon actually
interviewed for her book and it was over at The Spectator all right and here's
just a little snippet I'll also link this down in the description below so it
says Rosen hands files provided no link to the real identity of the psuedo
patients and the staff and call these closest to him could offer no help nor
could the two people Kailen had identified come up with any information
about their alleged counterparts at various times rosenhan had preferred
sometimes contradictory biographical fragments about pseudo patient to
through to aid but even with the assistance of a private detective these
leads led nowhere so the reality is is by the time you finish the great
Pretender there are still a lot of unanswered questions like the book
doesn't end and by the way this isn't really a spoiler like just go read the
book but the way the book ends like you don't have this like this this answer of
whether or not this experiment really took place right or how accurate the
details were you don't know whether or not it was true but we also need to
realize like the psychologist who wrote this article at The Spectator like all
of us are subject to our own bias but from the perspective of a psychologist
who feels that this study or this experiment tainted the entire
psychological community like lenz these people are reading this book
by sarah kaelin they're like I knew it was right this experiment was completely
bogus now I'm not here to say whether the rosenhan experiment was real or how
many of the details might have been false
or fabricated but I will tell you this I am extremely glad that it got a
conversation going like I want you to just take a moment I want you to take a
moment and ask yourself how far-fetched is this entire idea all right like take
a second and ask yourself let's use anxiety as an example do you think that
you could go see a mental health professional or even a doctor and fake
the symptoms of anxiety how hard do you think it would be to tell a story about
the anxious feelings that you're feeling alright because currently we hand out
over 49 million xanax prescriptions in the United States according to a study
by the substance abuse and mental health services administration over fourteen
thousand people went to rehab for benzodiazepines like xanax in 2015 and
according to the CDC in another study over eight thousand people died in
overdoses involving xanax in 2016 so again like I want you to ask yourself
how hard it would be to fake the symptoms of anxiety right like with the
addiction epidemic that we have in the United States we we have to kind of
believe that there are many people out there faking symptoms just to get high
so we're trained to believe that this book right here the DSM the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual right this is what mental health professionals use to
diagnose us and we're we're made to believe that this thing is 1000%
accurate okay and this is a great tool it's a great tool to help doctors
psychologists mental mental health professionals like therapists and
everything like that kind of figure out what diagnosis you have but it's still
very subjective like think about it it's 20/20 all right it's the year 2020
decades after the rosenhan experiment and you could first get diagnosed with
depression then you can get diagnosed with bipolar disorder then you can get
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and then that diagnosis can
turn into complex post-traumatic stress disorder
one of the the reasons that this happens is because diagnosing mental illness is
extremely subjective it is 1000% based on what you are telling a mental health
professional based on your experience alright like currently there are no
blood tests there are no brain scans that they can hook you up to to say I
definitively know that this person has this mental illness it is all completely
based on what you are telling a mental health professional all right and in
this book there are hundreds and hundreds of different diagnoses so if
this is a topic that you are interested in learning more about I highly suggest
that you check out the book saving normal all right this was written by the
man who headed the team of the DSM for the one that came out right before this
he headed that whole team and he looks back on it and he thinks about how they
could have done it better right because through his book he argues that we have
a major issue currently with over diagnosing people right like for example
one of the examples he brings up is with depression something that's been removed
from the DSM is if your depression is based on experience thing like the grief
or loss of somebody right like that wall lasts longer than two weeks again this
is very subjective think about that for a second if one of
your parents died he'll if you have a pet that died or a friend that died
right if if you are sad about that for more than two weeks let's say 15 days
right at the cusp does that mean that you are clinically depressed you know
what I mean what if you were to stop feeling depressed on day 17 does not
warrant a diagnosis of depression and something else the author of saving
normal discusses is how the pharmaceutical industry capitalized on
all the diagnosis in this book all right like they use the language from the book
to say hey here's our medication alright so to kind of wrap all this up
like again like I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a therapist I'm
somebody who struggles with mental illness myself and if you do as well I
think it's important to kind of know what's going on in the psychological
community and the different debates that are going on with different things
because at the end of the day us the patients we have to trust these people
we absolutely have to trust these people we don't have any other options and
there are amazing amazing doctors and therapists and psychologists out there
like my doctor like my primary care doctor look phenomenal I love that woman
so much my therapist she is amazing alright but I think we have to do our
due diligence and kind of whenever we receive a diagnosis kind of just sit
back and think about it for a little bit like are we looking to slap a label on
ourselves like as a as a species we are just addicted to being labeled as
something right like we we have this diagnosis and we're either an introvert
or an extrovert like that's why people love the myers-briggs test right but in
my personal opinion and this is something that I work on with my
therapist all the time as we work on managing specific symptoms
all right so she's not sitting there you know like
oh here we'll do this because you have been diagnosed with depression or doing
this because you've been diagnosed with anxiety no we look at certain specific
symptoms like you know uh about a month ago I was dealing with symptoms of just
numbness like apathy right and we worked on that specific symptom right if I'm
feeling a lack of motivation or if I'm dealing with a lot of negative self-talk
if I'm struggling with my anxiety or symptoms of anxiety we focus on those
specific symptoms alright so this is these are just things that I want to
have all of us just think about just a little bit more because like I mentioned
our diagnoses are extremely subjective so I think it's better to work on these
specific symptoms but I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions down in
the comments below I would love to know if you've ever been diagnosed like if
you're an example of someone who's received multiple diagnoses or if you
have any suggestions on what we all can do as the patients to kind of make this
a little bit better for us so we receive the right treatment like I would love to
know your thoughts down on the comments below
all right anyways that's all I got for this video if you like this video please
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and I appreciate you all right thanks again for watching I'll see you next
time