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by throwaway646465 1161 days ago
This is an interesting recent addition to the Wikipedia article.

From the summary:

> In 2019 and 2023, historians of psychiatry published evidence that the experiment is a hoax.

And following the link:

> In The Great Pretender, a 2019 book on Rosenhan, author Susannah Cahalan questions the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment. Examining documents left behind by Rosenhan after his death, Cahalan finds apparent distortion in the Science article: inconsistent data, misleading descriptions, and inaccurate or fabricated quotations from psychiatric records. Moreover, despite an extensive search, she is only able to identify two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself, and a graduate student whose testimony is allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's description in the article. In light of Rosenhan's seeming willingness to bend the truth in other ways regarding the experiment, Cahalan questions whether some or all of the six other pseudopatients might have been simply invented by Rosenhan.[11][12] In February 2023, Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego published an article[13] in the peer-reviewed journal History of Psychiatry in support of Cahalan's allegations.

Still - it’s scary how many rights you lose once you’ve been declared unwell. We might just want to start using more recent evidence since that experiment has come under question.

2 comments

That’s not a very convincing rebuttal. Lack of evidence doesn’t mean it never existed. I suggest repeating the study at every in patient psych center.
The experiment being a hoax is a hoax