Being Sane in Insane Places

In the early 1970s, a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan set out to answer a blunt question. What follows is the study as Rosenhan reported it. Decades later, as we'll see, much of it came into doubt. Could the professionals who ran psychiatric hospitals tell the sane from the insane? To test it, he and seven other healthy volunteers prepared to go undercover. Three were women and five were men, including a painter, a housewife and three psychologists. Each would ask to be admitted to a hospital and report a single symptom, a voice. It said only three words: thud, empty, hollow. Rosenhan picked them because they suggested an existential crisis but matched nothing in the psychiatric literature. After admission, the instruction was just as simple. Stop faking. Behave normally. To protect their careers, the volunteers gave false names and jobs, but told the truth about the rest of their lives.