Have psychiatric wards changed?

If you found yourself locked up against your will in a psychiatric ward, you would probably do your best to get out. But in 1969 a group of people did just the opposite — they tried to get in. A young American psychologist called David Rosenhan persuaded seven friends (two psychologists, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a housewife, a painter and a student) to see whether they could convince doctors that they were mentally ill simply by claiming to hear voices. Now previously unpublished notes from Rosenhan’s private archive reveal what the experience was really like.

Having claimed to hear words from “thud” and “empty” to “hollow”, words selected because they had never been recorded in psychiatric literature, every pseudo-patient was admitted to hospital for varying lengths of time, from 7 to 52 days. They were given diagnoses of schizophrenia and prescribed a total of 2,100 pills (only two of which were swallowed; in preparation for the study the pseudo-patients had learnt to “cheek” any medication).