“On the Troubling Trail of Psychiatry’s Pseudopatients Stunt: Susannah Cahalan’s Investigation of the Social-Psychology Experiment That Saw Healthy People Sent to Mental Hospitals Finds Inconsistencies”, 2019-10-29 (; backlinks; similar):
Although Rosenhan died in 2012, Cahalan easily tracked down his archives, held by social psychologist Lee Ross, his friend and colleague at Stanford. They included the first 200 pages of Rosenhan’s unfinished draft of a book about the experiment…Ross warned her that Rosenhan had been secretive. As her attempts to identify the pseudonymous pseudopatients hit one dead end after the other, she realized Ross’s prescience.
The archives did allow Cahalan to piece together the beginnings of the experiment in 1969, when Rosenhan was teaching psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania…Rosenhan cautiously decided to check things out for himself first. He emerged humbled from nine traumatizing days in a locked ward, and abandoned the idea of putting students through the experience.
…According to Rosenhan’s draft, it was at a conference dinner that he met his first recruits: a recently retired psychiatrist and his psychologist wife. The psychiatrist’s sister also signed up. But the draft didn’t explain how, when and why subsequent recruits signed up. Cahalan interviewed numerous people who had known Rosenhan personally or indirectly. She also chased down the medical records of individuals whom she suspected could have been involved in the experiment, and spoke with their families and friends. But her sleuthing brought her to only one participant, a former Stanford graduate student called Bill Underwood.
…Underwood and his wife were happy to talk, but two of their comments jarred. Rosenhan’s draft described how he prepared his volunteers very carefully, over weeks. Underwood, however, remembered only brief guidance on how to avoid swallowing medication by hiding pills in his cheek. His wife recalled Rosenhan telling her that he had prepared writs of habeas corpus for each pseudopatient, in case an institution would not discharge them. But Cahalan had already worked out that that wasn’t so.
Comparing the Science report with documents in Rosenhan’s archives, she also noted many mismatches in numbers. For instance, Rosenhan’s draft, and the Science paper, stated that Underwood had spent seven days in a hospital with 8,000 patients, whereas he spent eight days in a hospital with 1,500 patients.
When all of the leads from her contacts led to ground, she published a commentary in The Lancet Psychiatry asking for help in finding them—to no avail. Had Rosenhan invented them, she found herself asking?