On Being Sane In Insane Places Summary

“On Being Sane in Insane Places” by D.L. Rosenhan focuses on an experiment testing if sanity can be distinguished from insanity, how the labels of diagnoses stick, and depersonalization within the mental institutes. The experiment and the purpose of the experiment is set up in the first few paragraphs. The purpose of the experiment is to find if the sane are detectable within mental institutions. To test this they had eight pseudopatients get admitted into twelve different mental hospitals across the nation. With each patient only the names of them and their occupations were changed to keep the diagnosis from embarrassing them later in life (Rosenhan 251). The past and present relationships along with their everyday actions were kept the same …show more content…
The general degree of cooperative responses is considerably higher for these university groups than it was for pseudopatients in psychiatric hospitals. (Rosenhan 255) This is an ideal example of ethos because it is actual information pulled from his experiment. It is also beneficial to his argument because it shows how the patients were treated differently than the “normal” people. When compared to the number of responses given to patients in the hospital it is obvious that the patients are not seen as actual people. Throughout the entire essay Rosenhan uses other authors to make his argument stable, just before the end of his work he uses an author named Goffman. Goffman refers to the process of socialization in the psychiatric institutions as “mortification” (257) Mortification means great embarrassment or shame, this shows that trying to get help or to socialize within the institute was difficult and embarrassing at the least. It also pushed people to feel shame that they had even tried to communicate with the staff. The use of this author helps Rosenhan’s argument by providing another source who found depersonalization among mental