RE: Das Rosenhan-Experiment

Please forgive my response in English :)

I wasn't aware that Rosenhan had been discredited. I've done a little reading on the DSM, and general skepticism of psychiatry as a science. I'm not only familiar with Rosenhan, but also Thomas Szasz, Paul McHugh (Johns Hopkins) and other skeptics. I worked in a school that accepted only adolescents who had been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness. I became rather a skeptic myself.

I remember the school social worker, equipped with only an MS in clinical social work, who announced that she could have any one of us committed on her say. This certainly gave me pause.

My students needed help. There was no question about that. They needed a place to rest, to be peaceful, a place where they were 'safe'. However, once they were diagnosed they were trapped. Some of them had what I considered transitory adolescent issues. When placed in a residential facility with others, they became subject almost to a culture of mental illness, and this strongly influenced their behavior.

I didn't think it was a good scene.

Many of my students needed medication. It was obvious they couldn't function without it. But the medication was a blunt instrument. Nobody really knows how it works. It dulls the mind and causes great weight gain. It does nothing to cure. It merely conceals symptoms, often at great cost.

Psychiatry is not really a science, in my opinion. Its diagnostic techniques are, as you suggest in your blog, subjective. There is a need for psychiatry, but in its current state that need is crudely satisfied. Maybe AI (which I basically detest), will offer answers that human studies have not been able to provide?