Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Asperger's dropped from revised diagnosis manual [View all]LeftishBrit
(41,208 posts)This is the study by Rosenhan (1973).
At that time, autism was still often thought to be due to 'refrigerator mothers'; there was far less known about the neurological basis of many psychiatric illnesses than nowadays; and people with psychiatric illnesses or developmental disorders were routinely, 'warehoused' for many years in large institutions. (Not so very much earlier, it was not unknown for people to be placed in an institution just because they failed to conform to some social norms and their families found them a nuisance - e.g. some young women who became pregnant out of wedlock.) Nowadays it would be much more difficult to get admission to a psychiatric hospital even if you genuinely need it, because of the reduction in long-term facilities and the cost to the taxpayer or the individual. Malingerers like Rosenhan would be readily detected.
Using a 1973 study as an example of what happens in modern psychiatry, is almost like saying that people who visit their doctor are likely to be bled and given emetics, because this was common medical treatment in the early 19th century.