The Rosenhan Labelling Experiment - 1973: Oral Presentation notes.

Subject  > Social Science Essays  > Psychology  > Psychological Theories & Authors

David Rosenhan was an American Psychologist who was interested in the field of abnormal Psychology. Rosenhan questioned the need and usefulness of categorizing people into diagnostic groups of sane and insane people. Rosenhan was one of the first psychologists to specifically design an experiment to investigate people’s perceptions of sanity and insanity. The aim of this experiment was to determine if psychiatric diagnosis is in the mind of observers and is more related to the environment in which the person is situated, rather than the person’s behaviour. Rosenhan’s hypothesis was that pseudo patients would be seen as insane when placed in a mental institution. He believed psychiatric diagnoses were not valid. The Rosenhan Labelling Experiment consisted of two parts. In the first, Rosenhan ...

... another 42 patients were considered suspicious. Rosenhan had sent no pseudo patients into the hospital and the people the staff suspected to be fake were in fact genuine patients. Rosenhan concluded, “A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own”. Hospital staff expected to see mental illness in people admitted to the institution, so that’s what they saw. No matter how the patients acted they would be seen as insane simply because that label had been placed on them. Behaviors such as note taking were seen as symptoms of mental illness because they were in the hospital but if any other person who didn’t have the label of “mentally ill” were seen taking notes it

essay continues for another 100 words