Between 1969 and 1972 a group of colleagues and I gained admission to psychiatric hospitals, by simulating by thinking single symptom which was we said that we heard voices, and the voices said, empty (vacío), dull (aburrido), thud (batacazo). The moment we were admitted to the hospital we abandoned our symptom and we behave the way we usually pay. The question was would anyone detect that we were saying. The anwser was no, no on ever did admitted with the diagnosis in the main of paranoid schizophrenia we would discharge with de diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in remission, now in remission doesn´t mean quite the same thing as saying the term we use to describe the expierence is dehumanized, nobody talks, to you, nobody has any contact with, the average contact of patients with staff was about six and a half minutes a day, nobody comes to visit, the first time I was in a psychiatric hospital on admissions ward with 41 man my wife constituted four of the seven visitors on a weekend.
Psychiatric hospitals our storehouses for people in society who you really don´t want who you really don´t understand and for whom you have lost a great deal of sympathy.
Staff need constantly to be reminded and it is very hard to remind they are after all doing their best on the front end but they need constantly to be reminded that the people wo are their charges are not mereley collections of symptoms, they are people with spouses with children, with parents, with jobs, wiht mortgages, and bills to pay that they are in the fulles sense of the word very human and very unhappy.
A re-enacted interpretation of David Rosenhan’s classic experiment as created by students of LeTourneau University.
