When we see the title, are you not curious? In our view, the difference between mental illness and normal people is very clear, but why can’t normal people prove that they are “normal”? This feels like a paradox.
First, we need to understand what mental illness is. In academia, mental illness, also known as mental illness, refers to a disease that occurs with varying degrees of impairment in cognitive, emotional, volitional, and behavioral aspects of mental activities due to brain dysfunction under the influence of various biological, psychological, and social environmental factors.
Patients can only be forced to accept drug treatment and intermittent treatment to alleviate mental illness to a certain extent. Moreover, mentally ill people cannot engage in some stimulating activities or brain work.
So, how can people differentiate between pretending to be mentally ill? This article tells the story of these eight people who feigned illness, entered a mental hospital, and in the end, not a single person could prove that they were normal.
Pretending to be psychiatric patients
In the United States in the 1970s, during the Vietnam War, the US military was recruiting heavily for troops. The local American youth, in order to avoid military service and not go to the Vietnam battlefield, all dressed up as if they had mental illness, went to hospitals for diagnosis, forged a case that they were mentally ill to get through.
Such incidents were an open secret at the time. The psychologist Rosenhan was curious about this phenomenon. To confirm this, i.e., how feasible it is for normal people to pretend to be mentally ill, he recruited seven volunteers and together with them disguised themselves as mentally ill to infiltrate a mental hospital.
This later became known as the famous event – the Rosenhan experiment. This incident was later adapted into a movie by subsequent generations and presented on screen.
The incident occurred in 1973 when the psychologist Rosenhan, accompanied by seven like-minded volunteers who were interested in this unique experiment, formed a research team, including a pediatrician, a painter, a researcher, a housewife, three psychologists, and a scholar specializing in mental illness.
This lineup can be described as luxurious. Before sneaking into the mental hospital, they made very sufficient preparations, such as not showering for a week, not grooming their hair, not changing clothes, intending to appear extremely unkempt to gain the trust of the hospital doctors. They even engaged in self-suggestion, imagining that they had an auditory hallucination and could hear sounds similar to “bang, bang, bang.”
At the appointed time, they went to the mental hospital, narrated their condition to the doctor, pretended to follow the doctor’s advice for recovery treatment, but without exception, their condition all “worsened,” and thus, under their careful planning, this research team successfully infiltrated the mental hospital.
Unable to prove themselves normal
Life in mental hospitals at that time was not very comfortable, especially when normal people were mistaken for mentally ill and placed in hospitals, making them even more uncomfortable. Not only did they have to cooperate with nurses, pretend to “take medicine,” but also had to deal with all-round surveillance, examinations from medical staff, and sometimes, in unavoidable circumstances, mistakenly take “treatment” medication, leaving them mentally exhausted.
However, due to the variety of strange patients in the mental hospital, they could observe and not return empty-handed, making this strange journey worthwhile for the eight-person team. But soon they discovered a fatal problem.
When they returned to their normal state, none of the medical staff believed they were normal. Each person desperately tried to prove that they were not mentally ill, but each attempt backfired.
Even when they fully disclosed their plan and asked the hospital director to issue them discharge certificates, the director became even more vigilant, believing that their condition had worsened, and they showed a tendency to escape.
The eight-person team even presented well-written diaries documenting their daily activities in the mental hospital in a logical manner, but failed to convince the doctors. Dismayed, they had to endure an increase in their original 19-day detention period to three months, during which they were collectively given a total of 2,100 doses of medication for treating mental illness.
However, none of this discouraged the eight-person team. They continued to observe various occurrences in the mental hospital, unconditionally cooperated with medical staff in various treatments, and finally, after enduring over fifty days of strict custody, they were discharged.
However, what was ridiculous was that on their discharge papers, it did not state that they were cured but rather that they were still in recovery, without current aggressive behavior, with stable conditions, and could be discharged for recuperation.
“On Normal People in Psychiatric Hospitals”
After discharge, they compiled their observations during that time into a paper titled “On Normal People in Psychiatric Hospitals.” Upon successfully publishing the paper, it caused a stir in society.
The article also raised two shocking points: first, all psychiatric hospitals cannot accurately distinguish between normal people and mentally ill patients; second, once a person is deemed a mentally ill patient, all their subsequent words and actions will be viewed through colored glasses, and even their normal behavior classified as delusions.
This paper received widespread attention, and public opinion was in an uproar. In this heating moment, Rosenhan threw another spark into the fire by declaring that in the next three months, he would once again have a group of normal people impersonate psychiatric patients and infiltrate mental hospitals.
Many famous mental hospitals at the time responded to the challenge, each fully focused, afraid of missing any impostors, tarnishing their reputation, and tacitly acknowledging Rosenhan’s theory.
Over the next three months, the doctors at these mental hospitals viewed each incoming “patient” with suspicion. Once they saw everyone as abnormal, now they saw everyone as pretending to be abnormal.
Thus, when the three-month deadline arrived, these mental hospitals had found a total of 193 fake mentally-ill patients. As they nervously awaited the verdict, Rosenhan announced the ultimate answer: he had not sent anyone at all. Upon hearing the conclusion, everyone was dumbfounded, unable to believe it.
Conclusion:
Rosenhan’s experiment has tremendous value. Although the entire process was not rigorous and full of twists and turns, the pioneering spirit of this experiment is very worthy of our learning.
Moreover, the paper they published laid the foundation for future research in psychology and psychiatry, making every relevant medical staff more alert when diagnosing mentally ill patients.
