Review by Booklist Review
Following her bestselling memoir, Brain on Fire (2012), about how an unknown pathogen caused brain inflammation, seizures, and paranoia, journalist Cahalan tackles a larger medical mystery that also raises profound questions about the field of psychiatry. Her quest: to figure out the true story behind an influential 1973 article in Science, On Being Sane in Insane Places, that changed the national conversation about mental health. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other sane, healthy people pretended to hear voices and committed themselves to psychiatric institutions to see if doctors and staff could distinguish between individuals who were genuinely ill versus the undercover pretenders. But Cahalan began wondering if the now deceased Rosenhan, who never revealed the volunteers' real names, might have made it all up? She notes that the study contributed to the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals, and to important disclosures about how depersonalized mentally ill patients felt and how psychiatric conditions were often dismissed as less legitimate than physical ones. Cahalan's compelling and provocative investigation raises many questions about our attitudes toward mental illness and psychiatry.--Karen Springen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Cahalan (Brain on Fire) sets a new standard for investigative journalism in this fascinating investigation into a pivotal psychological study. In 1973, the mental health system was in trouble, she writes, thanks to weak diagnostic criteria and overburdened hospitals and health-care providers. Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan understood it would take a grand gesture to incite reform--such as recruiting seven sane individuals to feign auditory hallucinations. Rosenhan used their accounts of institutionalization to write the 1973 article "On Being Sane in Insane Places," which sparked controversy and led to the widespread reform or closure of institutions and a revision of the DSM. However, his volunteers' identities were never revealed, which to Cahalan raises the question--was he hiding anything? Driven by her own traumatizing experience as a misdiagnosed psychiatric patient, Cahalan pours through Rosenhan's notes and lists of his known contacts, attempting to match real people to the study's unnamed subjects, and ultimately is unable to find proof that six out of the seven fake patients really existed. She also discovers the wholesale omission of a volunteer's account that contradicted Rosenhan's argument. Her impeccable inquiry into the shadowy reality of Rosenhan's study makes an urgent case that the psychological and psychiatric fields must recover the public trust that "Rosenhan helped shatter." Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
A former reporter for the New York Post, Cahalan was institutionalized for a month because doctors believed she had a psychiatric illness, though she actually had an autoimmune type of encephalitis. When she recovered, Cahalan became interested in the process of how she came to be misdiagnosed and treated. Cahalan discovered a 1970s study, "On Being Sane in Insane Places" by Stanford's David Rosenhan, which purported to determine the effectiveness of psychiatric diagnosis through the introduction of false, sane, patients into psychiatric hospitals. His study affected government support of psychiatric hospitals and the way the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defined specific illnesses. The resulting changes still affect mental health care in the U.S. today, though Cahalan dug deeper into Rosenhan's research and came to the conclusion that most of his data was fabricated. Though ably narrated by Christie Moreau and by the author, a pronunciation error or two stand out. VERDICT Will be of interest to those seeking to learn about the U.S. mental health system and/or psychology.--Cheryl Youse, Norman Park, GA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sharp reexamination of one of the defining moments in the field of psychiatry."There are not, as of this writing, any consistent objective measures that can render a definitive psychiatric diagnosis," writes New York Post journalist Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, 2012) at the beginning of this gripping account of a study that rocked the foundational concepts of how we judge sanity. In the early 1970s, David Rosenhan, a Stanford professor of psychology, sent eight sane people into hospitals for the insane in an experiment involving diagnostics and conditions for the mentally ill. The eight participants told the intake doctors that they were experiencing aural hallucinations, and they were all admitted for varying lengths of time. The resulting article, which appeared in Science, is credited with helping to change both diagnostic and hospitalization procedures. At first, Cahalan approaches the article, "On Being Sane in Insane Places" (1973), with a level of awe and appreciation and treats readers to a tour of the miseries that patients enduredmost notably, isolation and dehumanizationas well as a review of her own misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Eventually, doubts start to creep into the author's investigation, discrepancies that a purportedly scientific article should not have contained: lying about hospitalization dates, exaggerating medical records, playing with numbers, and more. Cahalan follows all the leads like a bloodhound, in particular trying to uncover the identities of the patients. Her pursuit reads like a well-tempered mystery being picked apart, with tantalizing questions for which many of the answers are just out of reach. While "On Being Sane" may have been partially fabricated, it was also an important force in the deinstitutionalization of care for the mentally ill. Cahalan draws a vivid and critical picture of Rosenhan and the ramifications of his most prominent work.A well-told story fraught with both mystery and real-life aftershocks that set the psychiatric community on its ear. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
