Part 1
The Rosenhan experiment used in the establishing the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted in 1972 by David Rosenhan, titled “On being sane in insane places” consisted of two main parts. The area second part of the experiment, where the staff in the psychiatric hospitals falsely detected a large number of genuine patients as impostors is not a justification as to why the sane people cannot be distinguished from the insane in psychiatric hospitals (Fontaine 348-365). It is this is because in the experiment, the inability of the nurses to identify the imposters cannot be a generalized aspect, their inability to distinguish the sane from the insane was out of their carelessness they did not take their time to look at the patient’s history. Therefore for the experiment to have worked best the pseudopatients should have been combined with a number of insane people. Therefore in the future the researchers should incorporate a number of ‘true’ patients to the number of ‘fake’ patients and see whether the results will be different.
Part 2
Some of the keywords which need to be analyzed from this particular experiment include: pseudopatients, psychiatric hospitals and insane (Spinner 1226-1226).
The term pseudopatient in the Rosenhan experiment is used to refer to a fake patient, the patient is mainly a researcher and the aim of the researcher is to pose as a patient with mental disorders in order to find out whether the psychiatry staff will be able to realize that the patient is pretending.
Psychiatric hospitals are also termed as mental hospitals, there is a variation of the treatment these facilities offer to people with mental disorders as well as the structural unit of the facilities. However all psychiatric hospitals have developed several ways of diagnosing different types of mental disorders as well as the varying severity of the disorders among people.
The term insane is collective and it refers to a mental state which tends to inhibit the normal perception, social interaction and general behavior, it is a severe mental illness.
Works Cited
Fontaine, Michael. "On Being Sane In An Insane Place – The Rosenhan Experiment In The Laboratory Of Plautus’ Epidamnus". Current Psychology 32.4 (2013): 348-365. Web.
Spinner, Benjamin A. "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater; New York, W. W. Norton And Company, 2004, 256 Pages, $24.95". PS 57.8 (2006): 1226-1226. Web.
