It won't be published in its final official form until May of 2013, but the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, AKA DSM-V, has already spawned lots of critiques and courses.
My wife, still doing some pro bono therapy, gets at least one offer a week to attend a seminar on DSM-V. I glance at those, but spend much more time on the background comments, including those from the lead editor of DSM-IV.
But let's start with the Rosenhan experiments. In 1973 an academic who was professor of psychology and law at Stanford had eight sane participants (himself among them) present to 12 hospital admission offices in five states with a chief complaint of "hearing voices." They said the messages conveyed were often unclear, but contained the words "empty," "hollow," and "thud."
In each case the voice was unfamiliar and of the same gender as the complainant (the group included one younger psychology graduate student, three professional psychologists, one psychiatrist, a pediatrician, a painter and a housewife). They gave false names, vocations and employment history, but all other details of their lives were true.
All were admitted to psychiatric wards, whereupon they acted completely sane and behaved as they normally would.
None of the staff recognized they were normal and 10 of them were given the diagnosis of schizophrenia. They remained in the hospital for a week to 52 days (average of 19 days) where a number of other patients suspected they were sane (35 of 118 did so with many vocalizing that the so-called patients were journalists or professors).
When the results of the study were initially made known, the staff of a week-known teaching/research hospital said they wouldn't make such mistakes.
At that point, Dr. Rosenhan set up a second experiment, telling the staff of the renowned center that he would send them one or more spurious patients over the next three months.
In reality he sent nobody, yet the hospital staff, suspected a number of the 193 patients who were admitted during that time frame; the physicians, psychologists, nurses and techs alleged that 41 were fakes and, of those, 23 were suspected by one or more psychiatrists.
During their admissions all of the first group publicly took copious notes and the typical comment in the nursing notes was "Patient engaged in writing behavior."
They were only discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission after admitting they were crazy and all were given medications (which they did not swallow; they noted many patients did the same).
They seldom saw physicians except for fleeting encounters; in only 6% of these did staff doctors stop and chat or talk with them.
One comment about this famous study is, "It's hard to be sane in an insane setting?
Sorry, I can't give you links or photos, but I'm on an unplanned trip and using my iPad instead of my laptop.
