Related Experiments
American investigative journalist Nellie Bly feigned symptoms of mental illness to gain admission to a lunatic asylum in 1887 and report on the terrible conditions therein. The results were published as Ten Days in a Mad-House.
Maurice K. Temerlin split 25 psychiatrists into two groups and had them listen to an actor portraying a character of normal mental health. One group was told that the actor "was a very interesting man because he looked neurotic, but actually was quite psychotic" while the other was told nothing. Sixty percent of the former group diagnosed psychoses, most often schizophrenia, while none of the control group did so.
In 1988, Loring and Powell gave 290 psychiatrists a transcript of a patient interview and told half of them that the patient was black and the other half white; they concluded of the results that "clinicians appear to ascribe violence, suspiciousness, and dangerousness to black clients even though the case studies are the same as the case studies for the white clients".
The science writer Lauren Slater may have conducted a very similar experiment for her 2004 book Opening Skinner's Box. She claims to have presented herself at 9 different psychiatric emergency rooms with auditory hallucinations, resulting in being diagnosed "almost every time" with psychotic depression. However, when challenged to provide evidence of actually conducting her experiment, she could not.
In 2008, the BBC's Horizon science program performed a somewhat related experiment over two episodes entitled "How Mad Are You?". The experiment involved ten subjects, five living with previously-diagnosed mental health conditions, and five with no such diagnosis. They were observed by three experts in mental health diagnoses and their challenge was to identify the five with mental health problems. The experts correctly diagnosed two of the ten patients, misdiagnosed one patient, and incorrectly identified two healthy patients as having mental health problems.
Read more about this topic: Rosenhan Experiment
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