On Being Sane In Insane Places...Or Not...
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2020 5:56 pm
For those of us of a certain age and background we had Rosenhan's On Being Sane In Insane Places paper hammered into us for a whole host of reasons. I'd also had a side order of exposure to Ronnie Laing and Thomas Szasz before I started my training.
While this was in many ways reassonable in encouraging a questioning approach (well, that's part of what I got from all that) and not accepting authority at face value (me? With my reputation and background?), I did always wonder WTAF had been going on in those places described in the paper.
But then during our training, various of us came across things like a baby doctor dismissing one patient's description of playing the piano at some major venue as a sign of grandiosity and delusion, without checking back in his notes to see that yer man was a pianist by trade and training, and a host of similar daftnesses, so mebbe Rosenhan and his crew had a point?
But what if they didn't? What if it had been a load of old bollocks all along? What if it had all been driven by a combination of ideology and a sense of authorial self-aggrandisement?
The paper has never been replicated (social science's major bete noir), but it, IME, has generally been accepted as having some validity.
Now, is this a bad thing? As that review points out, some of the anti-psychiatry movement did inspire more attention to an attempt at scientific grounding, attention to the nature of psychiatry and its problematic history, and things such as those I mentioned above, all of which are beneficial. Do we forgive or overlook such flaws if the outcome is a good one?
While this was in many ways reassonable in encouraging a questioning approach (well, that's part of what I got from all that) and not accepting authority at face value (me? With my reputation and background?), I did always wonder WTAF had been going on in those places described in the paper.
But then during our training, various of us came across things like a baby doctor dismissing one patient's description of playing the piano at some major venue as a sign of grandiosity and delusion, without checking back in his notes to see that yer man was a pianist by trade and training, and a host of similar daftnesses, so mebbe Rosenhan and his crew had a point?
But what if they didn't? What if it had been a load of old bollocks all along? What if it had all been driven by a combination of ideology and a sense of authorial self-aggrandisement?
The paper has never been replicated (social science's major bete noir), but it, IME, has generally been accepted as having some validity.
Now, is this a bad thing? As that review points out, some of the anti-psychiatry movement did inspire more attention to an attempt at scientific grounding, attention to the nature of psychiatry and its problematic history, and things such as those I mentioned above, all of which are beneficial. Do we forgive or overlook such flaws if the outcome is a good one?