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Thread: Finally got around to reading this - a really brilliant investigative book that shows convincingly that the super-famous “On Being Sane in Insane Places” study was probably fraudulent.
You know the one: where Stanford’s David Rosenhan sent entirely healthy “pseudopatients” to psychiatric hospitals in the early 1970s, and had them complain of auditory hallucinations. They were all admitted, and even though they behaved 100% normally afterwards...
...they were still diagnosed with various forms of schizophrenia and prescribed antipsychotics and so on. It had a big impact on psychiatry and contributed to the closing down of psychiatric institutions in the US and elsewhere. There’s now a huge shortage of beds in psych wards.
But as Cahalan shows in the book, not only are some of Rosenhan’s “results” exaggerated and/or inconsistent with other reports, some appear to be entirely made up. She went to great lengths to track down the “pseudopatients”, and concludes that several may never have existed.
The paper that reports the “experiment” was published in Science, meant to be the world’s second-top science journal. It’s here ( https://science.sciencemag.org/content/179/4070/250) and you can get the PDF here ( http://depts.washington.edu/psychres/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/100-Papers-in-Clinical-Psychiatry-Psychiatric-Diagnosis-On-being-sane-in-insane-places..pdf).
All of which raises the question: *why has Science not retracted this likely-fraudulent paper?* Why haven’t they even put an “expression of concern” on it?
Is it because the paper is more of a journalistic piece, reporting on a sort of sting investigation that doesn’t count as “science” per se? Well, no - it even reports numbers as if it was a real study.
Is it because the paper is really old now (1973)? But there’s no logical reason why an old fraud should be treated differently from a recent one. Some journals are issuing statements of concern on old articles where strong suspicions are raised. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/08/77-year-old-paper-by-controversial-psychiatrist-hans-eysenck-earns-an-expression-of-concern/
Is it because the fraud allegations need to come from a university or a peer-reviewed source? This seems daft, but I’d hope at least someone at Stanford will look into this - their university’s name is attached to an incredibly dodgy, maybe fraudulent paper!
Is it because, well, even if it was fraudulent it did highlight useful stuff about psychiatric over-diagnosis and institutionalisation? But this is the peer-reviewed literature: fraudulent stuff gets retracted regardless of its influence, or whether we broadly agree with it.
So Science, Stanford University, and anyone else with any power here need to get a retraction notice—or at LEAST a note of concern—on this paper ASAP. And in the meantime you should read The Great Pretender because it really is great. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1838851445/
