Who Emptied the Asylums

A revolt, a famous study with a man missing from it, and a question everybody thinks they can answer. The hospitals did empty. Almost nothing you have been told about why is right.

A course on the thought of Deinstitutionalisation.

Psychology · Medicine

What you will learn

• State the reason Rosenhan's footnote gives for excluding the ninth pseudopatient.
• Describe what Lando actually reported about his hospitalisation.
• Explain why the difference between a stated reason and an inferred one matters here.
• State Goffman's definition of a total institution.
• Explain what his comparison to prisons is claiming.
• Describe the access and funding conditions he chose to print.
• List what Healy says happened to psychiatry in 1968.
• Explain why the antipsychiatry argument travelled beyond psychiatry.

Course outline

1. The Ninth Pseudopatient — The most cited study in the history of psychiatry had nine volunteers and reported eight. The ninth found out he had been dropped by reading about it in a journal, and what he had to say was the…
2. What Is Prison-Like About Prisons — Goffman's Asylums did more damage to the mental hospital than any study, and it was funded by the government's psychiatric research institute, which asked him to change two adjectives.
3. The Year Nobody Wrote About — Two psychiatry departments were occupied, senior figures of the field were forced out, and effective treatments were banned in several countries. The histories of 1968 do not mention any of it.
4. The Ward He Did Not Mention — When a psychiatrist prepared a critique of On Being Sane in Insane Places, Rosenhan tried to head it off by saying his own hospitalisation had been a teaching exercise, unrelated to the study. Most…
5. The Lateral Shift — The hospitals emptied. The patients did not go home. They went to nursing homes, because two 1965 amendments let states move the cost of their care to Washington.
6. A Consensus About Clusters — Thirty years after psychiatry declared a biological revolution, the head of its research establishment pointed out that none of its diagnoses rests on a biological marker — and said what that would…

Terms introduced

total institution, antipsychiatry, pseudopatient, deinstitutionalisation, lateral shift, Titles 18 and 19, community mental health centre, diagnostic validity

Part of the Simposeum course library.