On Being Sane In Insane Places...Or Not...

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murmur
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On Being Sane In Insane Places...Or Not...

Post by murmur » 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?
It's so much more attractive inside the moral kiosk

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Re: On Being Sane In Insane Places...Or Not...

Post by Pucksoppet » Thu Jan 16, 2020 6:28 pm

Well, I still believe there is some truth in the (joke) idea that some people may not be insane enough to be admitted, but if admitted, are definitely insane enough not be let out. As Freud* said at length in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten jokes allow the expression of thoughts that society usually suppresses or forbids, which includes, I suspect, ideas that people don't want to be true.




*No, I'm not appealing to authority here. I'm citing Freud on jokes as a joke, as psychoanalysis is related to psychiatry. So I'm a poor comedian. Try the chicken.

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