A well known old experience was done by Rosenhan , David Rosenhan was a American psychologist who exposed the great amount of subjectivity in psychiatric diagnosis . Ok, I am not a medical student and I am aware that all kinds of medical diagnosis might be prone to some subjectivity but not THAT MUCH as psychiatric diagnosis as his experience proved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
The pseudopatient experiment
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For the purposes of the study, eight "pseudopatients" (associates of Rosenhan selected to be a group of varied and healthy individuals) attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. During psychiatric assessment they claimed to be hearing voices that were often unclear, but which seemed to pronounce the words "empty," "hollow" and "thud." No other psychiatric symptoms were claimed, and apart from giving false names and employment details, further biographical details were truthfully reported. If admitted, the pseudopatients were asked to "act normally," report that they felt fine and no longer heard voices.
The pseudopatients were: a psychology graduate student in his twenties, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife. None had a history of mental illness. If admitted, they were to act normally and not display any obvious psychopathology. Subjects were to remain as inpatients until they were discharged by the staff at their hospitals, who were not privy to the experiment and believed the subjects to be real psychiatric patients.
All eight were admitted, seven with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the last with bipolar disorder. Even after admission, none of the pseudopatients were identified as imposters by the hospital staff, although other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors. In the first three hospitalizations notes remarks made by patients to pseudopatients were kept and 35 of the total of 118 patients expressed a suspicion that the pseudopatients were sane. All of the pseudopatients were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia "in remission." Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days and the average was 19 days.
Hospital notes indicated that staff interpreted much of the pseudopatient's behaviour in terms of mental illness. For example, one observer, apparently oblivious to the irony, labeled the note-taking of one pseudopatient as "writing behavior" and considered it pathological. In contrast, actual patients would accuse them of being researchers or journalists based entirely on the same writing behavior.
lol
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The non-existent impostor experiment
For this experiment, Rosenhan used a well-known research and teaching hospital, whose staff had heard of the results of the initial study but claimed that similar errors could not be made at their institution. Rosenhan arranged with them that during a three month period, one or more pseudopatients would attempt to gain admission and the staff would rate every incoming patient as to the likelihood they were an impostor. Out of 193 patients, 41 were considered to be impostors and a further 42 were considered suspect. In reality, Rosenhan had sent no pseudopatients and all patients suspected as impostors by the hospital staff were genuine patients. This led to a conclusion that "any diagnostic process that lends itself too readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one". Studies by others found similarly problematic diagnostic results.
PWNED hahaha
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Related experiments
Maurice K. Temerlin split 25 psychiatrists into two groups and had them listen to an actor portraying a character of normal mental health. One group was told that the actor "was a very interesting man because he looked neurotic, but actually was quite psychotic" while the other was told nothing. Sixty percent of the former group diagnosed psychoses, most often schizophrenia, while none of the control group did so.[2]
Loring and Powell gave 290 psychiatrists a transcript of a patient interview and told half of them that the patients were black and the other half white; they concluded of the results that "Clinicians appear to ascribe violence, suspiciousness, and dangerousness to black clients even though the case studies are the same as the case studies for the white clients".[3]
looool
Not to mention that the Electroshock ,was a well-known and widely practice used by psychiatrists(and still practiced in many countries) to treat certain mental diseases ....the ECT has been proven by many studies that it causes more permanent damage to the brain.
I am totally sure that psychiatry is still prone to such great amount of subjectivity since there's still no medical tools that 'diagnose' most mental "illnesses".
02 Oct 2008, 3:37 pm
Here's hoping I'll be better then these people.
