He immediately thought of what would happen if a normal person pretended to be a mental patient and entered a mental hospital. Will the hospital really admit real mental patients? I think, as the designer of the experiment, Rosen should have made his own guess about the experimental results.
But not everyone can go to a mental hospital. Rosen chose seven people from different occupations, including painters, psychologists, teachers, students and housewives. These people have no history of mental illness, and their mental state and stress resistance are good. To ensure the experiment, he arranged for these people, including himself, to enter several different mental hospitals for diagnosis and treatment.
He told these people that they always hear "clang" when they go to see a doctor, and they are no different from normal people in other aspects. Finally, all seven of them were considered to have "schizophrenia". These people were soon placed in hospital. But when I was in hospital, I said that I couldn't hear the sound, so I let it go and let it stay in the hospital for observation. During this period, whatever they do will be regarded as conforming to the behavioral characteristics of mental illness, and it is also regarded as abnormal behavior to want to record their daily life.
Some experimenters also said that medical staff would discuss their illness in front of them. What impressed me most was that a female nurse would adjust her underwear shoulder strap in front of them, not because the female nurse had any special hobbies, but because she didn't treat them as normal people at all. This phenomenon is beyond everyone's expectation, which is really ironic.
The most incredible thing is that it was not the medical staff who first discovered that they were not mental patients, but the "veritable" mental patients inside. They questioned whether they were journalists and newspaper workers who came to the hospital for secret investigation or normal people who came to experience life. Will mental patients still recognize their own kind? Are all patients in mental hospitals really mentally ill, or are there really people like them?
After four years of "treatment", although several subjects are completely normal, they are still not allowed to leave the mental hospital. Fortunately, they had found a good lawyer before they were hospitalized, and they came out successfully. In this regard, Rosen put forward a series of questions, such as "Are the characteristics that lead to the diagnosis of a person's abnormal behavior based on these behaviors themselves or on the background situation?
He believes that a mental hospital, as a special environment, will be labeled as "mental illness" as long as people go in. Just like we usually drink with a few good friends, if everyone thinks you are drunk, no matter what normal behavior you do, it will be considered as the unique behavior of drunkards. "Look, I'd say he's drunk" because you were labeled as "drunk".
After Rosen's paper was published in scientific journals, it caused a great sensation. Many psychologists and medical staff in mental hospitals questioned his experiment, and one of them even challenged Rosen's experiment, thinking that they could accurately identify mental patients.
Therefore, Rosen reached an agreement with the hospital. In the next period of time, Rosen will send some normal people to the hospital to pretend to be mental patients, and the hospital needs to identify the counterfeiters. In the next two months, the hospital received about 250 visitors, and finally they picked out 4 1 normal people who thought they were sent by Rosen.
But in fact, Rosen said he didn't send anyone to this hospital. As a result, this mental hospital with a good reputation was immediately criticized by everyone, and Rosen's name was completely known to the public. In the next decade, many mental hospitals in the United States closed down and the number of mental patients dropped sharply.
In court, the sentence of escape punishment for mental patients has also been weakened. A number of movies about mental hospitals have been released, such as Flying Over the Madhouse and First-degree Fear. In order to escape punishment, the hero pretended to be a mental patient and was sent to a mental hospital. After living in a mental hospital for a while, he really became a mental patient.
The problems related to mental illness and mental illness are indeed a problem that still puzzles us today. After the publication of Rosen's experimental results, the diagnostic manual of the United States was rewritten, and the relevant schools represented by Freud were not fully believed by people, and people's understanding and research on mental illness became more cautious and cautious.
This incident has given us a lot of inspiration. First of all, we should pay attention to, without in-depth understanding, don't treat anyone with rigid and concrete thinking, and don't label some people with bad labels easily. Who knows if we will bring trouble and trouble to others?
Secondly, whether in the field of responsible work or in daily life. All our temporary decisions may affect the fate of others' lives. I hope we can be more patient when facing others and contacting others, and face the world and ourselves with a clear mind.
Finally, Rosen concluded, "Once a person is diagnosed as abnormal, all his behaviors and characteristics will be labeled accordingly." The influence of this "label effect" is really too serious. If we are limited by a rigid thinking, then many things have only one result in our hearts.