The Psychology Book

328

WE CANNOT DISTINGUISH

T H E S A N E F R O M T H E I N S A N E

IN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS

D A V I D R O S E N H A N ( 1 9 3 2 – )

IN CONTEXT

APPROACH

Anti-psychiatry

BEFORE

1960 In The Divided Self:

An Existential Study in Sanity

and Madness, R.D. Laing

emphasizes the family as

a source of mental illness.

1961 Psychologists E. Zigler

and L. Phillips demonstrate

huge overlaps in the symptoms

of different categories of

psychiatric disorder.

1961 Hungarian-American

psychiatrist Thomas Szasz

publishes the controversial

The Myth of Mental Illness.

1967 British psychiatrist

David Cooper defines the

anti-psychiatry movement in

Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry.

AFTER

2008 Thomas Szasz publishes

Psychiatry: The Science of Lies.

A first experiment

showed that sane people

can be judged insane.

A second experiment

showed that people with

genuine mental health

disorders can be judged

to be faking them.

We cannot distinguish the sane from

the insane in psychiatric hospitals.

Psychiatric diagnoses are not objective, but

exist only in the minds of the observers.

Psychiatrists say that mental disorders can be

accurately diagnosed through symptoms

that can be categorized into diseases.

So they should be able to tell the difference

between the sane and the insane.