In 1973, Rosenhan performed a study in which eight healthy adults were admitted to a psychiatric hospital. What did this study demonstrate?

Throughout its development, psychiatry has struggled to legitimate itself as a scientific and medical discipline. Much of this struggle has been attributed to a lack of consensus regarding the nature of mental illness, as well as a standard methodology for making diagnoses. In 1972, David L. Rosenhan published “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” which discusses at length what’s more commonly known as the Rosenhan experiment.
At the time, psychiatric hospitals were diagnosing and admitting unprecedented numbers of people, leading to arguably inhumane conditions and practices within many well-known psychiatric hospitals across the United States. Meanwhile, an essential and basic question remained: how can we know that the myriad psychiatric diagnoses are accurate? In other words, can we test the validity of psychiatric diagnoses?
This is precisely what Rosenhan set out to do in his experiment, which consisted of two parts. The first part, which you reference in your question, involved the participation of three women and five men. By simulating auditory hallucinations in front of the staff at 12 hospitals in five states, the subjects of the study received a psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, a prescription for antipsychotic drugs and were admitted to the hospital. The study illuminated a number of problems within the practice of psychiatry, and worked to show that abnormal behavior can neither be easily categorized, nor traced to certain etiology. Instead, Rosenhan makes the argument that mental illness is a matter of labelling, a social construct.


Rosenham's 1973 study, published as "On being sane in insane places," involved sending psychologically healthy patients into twelve different psychiatric hospitals. The patients told staff at first that they were experiencing hallucinations but, after being admitted to the hospital, acted without having hallucinations. However, the staff in all the hospitals diagnosed the patients with schizophrenia, and the patients spent an average of nineteen days in the hospital before being released.  
The point of the study was that people seem insane in psychiatric hospital settings because the staff and the setting of the hospital act to dehumanize them. The study also questioned how valid psychiatric diagnoses are. Rosenhan wondered whether the diagnoses of patients is rooted in the patients themselves or from the environment around them, and his study suggested that the line between sanity and insanity is not always a clear one—that the environment around people affects whether they are judged sane or insane by medical professionals.

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