 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 re-diagnosed as something else? That's something that I've experienced and a lot of other people have experienced as well. So today we're going to be talking about the Rosenhan experiment as well as all the drama in the psychology community that goes on with the specific experiment. I 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 diagnoses or how people are diagnosed in general. So I've always been fascinated, absolutely fascinated by this one particular study called the Rosenhan experiment. All right and recently I can't remember if it was the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020 but anyways anyways and often by the name of Sarah Cahalan who some of you might know she just released a new book called The Great Pretender. All right and she's an investigative journalist and she did an 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 snap I need to read this ASAP. All right 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 what he did he originally did 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 there's 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 nuts. Well 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 embellished theirs and whatever it was to get admitted into the psych facility. So he had eight people go in and the hospitals admitted all of them and each one had different lengths of how long they were in there until they got discharged right and when they were discharged they were left with a diagnosis of I believe schizophrenia in remission okay. So anyways after 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 yo do this 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 like kind of crazy right. So anyways like I said like Sarah Cahalan she's a 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 Kickass you know who I'm talking about but anyways she was diagnosed as 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 and 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 dang book it'll be down in the description below but as the story goes on there are these little 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 Sarah Cahalan 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 Rosenhan's files provided no link to the real identity of the pseudo patients and the staff and colleagues closest to him could offer no help nor could the two people Cahalan had identified come up with any information about their alleged counterparts at various times Rosenhan had preferred sometimes contradictory biographical fragments about pseudo patients two through to eight 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 through that lens these people are reading this book by Sarah Cahalan they're like aha 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'm 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 all right 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 14,000 people went to rehab for benzodiazepines like Xanax in 2015 and according to the CDC in another study over 8,000 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 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 uh 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 2020 all right it's the year 2020 decades after the rosehand 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 all right 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 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 experiencing like the grief or loss of somebody right like if that lasts longer than two weeks again this is very subjective like think about that for a second if one of your parents died hell 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 just 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 that warrant a diagnosis of depression and something else the author of saving normal discusses is how the pharmaceutical industry capitalized on all of the diagnoses in this book all right like they use the language from the book to say hey here's our medication all right 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 phenomenal I love that woman so much my therapist she is amazing all right 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 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 is 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 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 all right 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 in the comments below all right but anyways that's all I got for this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on patreon everybody who buys my mental health books over at the rewired soul.com or buys our mental health merch you all support the channel and I appreciate you all right thanks again for watching I'll see you next time