How a fraudulent experiment set psychiatry back decades

In January 1973, Science (along with Nature, the most influential general science journal in the world) published an article that immediately captured major media attention. David Rosenhan, a Stanford social psychologist, reported that eight pseudo-patients had presented themselves at a variety of mental hospitals, 12 in all, complaining that they were hearing voices saying ‘hollow, empty and thud’, but otherwise behaving completely normally.

All of them, he reported, were promptly admitted, and all but one diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia (the other receiving the somewhat more hopeful diagnosis of manic depressive psychosis). It took weeks for them to be released, though they were instructed to show no symptoms once admitted. When they were finally discharged, they received the damning diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia in remission’, a label that promised to compromise their futures ever afterwards.

At the time the paper appeared, psychiatrists were already under siege. One of their number, Thomas Szasz, had recently pronounced that mental illness was a myth, and that his fellow professionals were little better than gaolers.