The Rosenhan Experiments – Still Valid Today

In 1972, Stanford psychologist David L. Rosenhan conducted his classic experiments into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis.

 

Eight people with no prior mental health issues were admitted to 12 different psychiatric hospitals around the country, each manifesting the same faked mental symptoms. All eight pseudopatients were diagnosed, admitted and treated – 7 for schizophrenia and 1 for bipolar disorder.

 

In a follow-up study, Rosenhan told the staff at one hospital that he would be sending random pseudopatients for evaluation during a particular three-month period, and they were to spot the imposters. Out of 193 patients, the staff considered 41 to be imposters. In fact, Rosenhan had sent them no pseudopatients at all.

 

Rosenhan concluded that, “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals,” and “any diagnostic process that lends itself too readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one.”

 

These experiments and results were hotly debated over the following years, with various members of the psychiatric community supporting or criticizing the experiments and the results. Similar studies were conducted with similar problematic diagnostic results.

 

Multiple studies have found that up to 90% of patients with mental symptoms had real, undiagnosed and untreated physical illnesses that were causing the so-called mental symptoms. When the physical illnesses were treated, the mental symptoms were alleviated.

 

While psychiatrists continue to discount these results as merely “anecdotal,” psychiatric assertions of “chemical imbalances” and “treatable brain disorders” are themselves no more than anecdotal reports.

 

Diagnostic confusion also led to the proliferation of psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM “is an unreliable, pseudoscientific document with enormous power to damage lives, while being used to rake in $76 billion a year in international psychiatric drug sales,” according to CCHR’s national U.S. president Bruce Wiseman. For more information on the DSM hoax, go to http://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/6509.

 

Dr. Lisa Cosgrove, a psychologist from the University of Massachusetts, also raises crucial points about the lack of science behind the DSM, stating, “No blood tests exist for the disorders in the DSM. It relies on judgments from practitioners who rely on the manual.”

 

Back to square one – psychiatric diagnosis itself continues to be “anecdotal.” At best it is arbitrary; at worst, harmful.

 

The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, according to an article in the New York Times (September 4, 2007). The article states, “Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased.”

 

A contemporary advocate of children having bipolar disorder is psychiatrist Demitri F. Papolos, author of The Bipolar Child. However, in this, Papolos admits: “Diagnosis in psychiatry is a problem. After all, there are no lab tests that conclusively pinpoint a diagnosis….”

 

The sad fact is, any child diagnosed with bipolar—especially after being previously labeled with some DSM disorder—and treated with psychiatric drugs, is most likely suffering drug-induced damage, both physically and mentally. The prevalence in “bipolar” diagnoses is really a massive psychiatric drug push to children. Pediatric neurologist Fred Baughman, Jr., wrote: “The fact of the matter is—and a fact to which the country had better wake up—is that there is no abnormality to be found in any of psychiatry’s ‘diseases’—not in infants, not in toddlers, not in preschoolers, not at any age. Without invented ‘diseases,’ the psychiatric-pharmaceutical cartel would have nothing to treat. These are normal children with disciplinary and educational problems that can and must be resolved without recourse to drugs. Deceiving and drugging is not the practice of medicine. It is criminal.”

 

There is a world of difference between the art of identifying symptoms and the science of finding and treating causes. Psychiatrists specialize in cataloguing symptoms and then try to convince people that the symptoms are causes and that their treatments work, merely because the symptoms appear to have dissipated or changed.

 

But these are not causes, they are just symptoms and their treatments have brought about a worsening of the person’s condition. Blind to real causes, they remain blind to the consequences of their actions. And herein lies the most important truth concerning the plague of social problems characterizing our youth and general society today—psychiatrists defining every child or adolescent problem in life as a “mental disorder,” to be controlled by mind-altering drugs.

 

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child or adult exhibiting signs of what psychiatrists say are “mental disorders,” can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. For example, decades ago, the term “mad as a hatter” stemmed from workers using mercury to prepare felt hats. The fumes and the quantity accidentally ingested produced an organic deterioration resulting eventually in dementia. Thus a sizeable number of hatters became “mad” as a result of chronic mercury pollution.

 

Any person labeled with a so-called psychiatric disorder needs to receive a thorough physical examination by a competent medical—not psychiatric—doctor to first determine what underlying physical condition is causing the manifestation, including, but not limited to testing for:

• lead or pesticide poisoning

• thyroid conditions

• diabetes

• heart disease

• worms

• viral or bacterial infections

• malnutrition

• head injuries or tumors

• allergies

• vitamin and/or mineral deficiencies

• mercury exposure