There is a very interesting story in “Aesop’s Fables”: two pockets. The story says that the creator of the year when the creation of man, in front of him and behind him were hanging a pocket, the front of the one used to fill the shortcomings of others, the back of the one used to fill their own shortcomings. But man’s eyes grow in front of ah, so he always first see a lot of shortcomings of others, as for their own, forget in the back of the mind.
See people, know people, evaluate people, choose pro or distant, is a must for everyone in the world. People have too many things to keep busy, so the easiest way is to label and categorize the people around you, and then choose different ways to deal with them for a certain category. This mentality is actually very common, everyone can use skilled, just like a person is labeled “mental illness”, his many normal actions in the eyes of others may also be the performance of the disease.
This conclusion is not made up by the author, but based on a famous experiment published in the journal “Science”, which many people may have heard of, it is called “Rosenhain experiment”, which took place in the United States, in order to test the criteria for identifying mentally ill people at that Time. Q: What kind of people do we consider mentally ill in our daily lives?
We may have a lot of answers, perhaps babbling demented, perhaps often yelling for no reason, perhaps randomly hurt people …… But have you ever thought, in what kind of situation, normal people will also be treated as mentally ill?
It may be for the benefit. For example, I have seen cases where Family members were sent to a mental hospital because of a fight over family property. There may be more, so I won’t go into them all here. And then back to the experiment itself, the experiment is very absurd and very thought-provoking, and even associated with a large number of reality.
The initiator of the experiment was David Rosenhan, who went on to teach at Stanford University after receiving his PhD in psychology. One of the courses in psychology was related to psychosis, but as you know, practice is the test of truth, and “to know but not to be, is just unknown”. At that time, the theory of this course was very abstract and the students listened to it in a cloudy way and did not understand it at all, so they complained to this professor.
Instead of accusing them of being picky, Rosenhain had the idea that if they wanted to understand the specifics of mental illness, they should go to a mental hospital and experience it for themselves. In order to ensure the safety of the students, Rosenhain decided to try it himself, and the professor was almost driven crazy by the lonely and boring Life after only 9 days, and he was only experiencing it.
Although this experience let Rosenhain give up the idea of calling students to visit the mental hospital, but he is really a wonderful person, and a new strange thought: in such a depressing environment, I a normal person can be tossed to wail, pain under some reactions and mental illness seems to be similar, how can the doctors and nurses here correctly distinguish between the mentally ill and normal people? What are their criteria for determining? Could there be a miscarriage of justice?
Rosenhahn is a very passionate professor of practice, he immediately began to develop a “fake patient” experimental plan to prove their hypothesis. The experiment involved a total of eight people, including himself, and to ensure the randomness of the subjects, the dummy patients had to cover a wide range of identities (two psychologists in addition to him, as well as housewives, volunteer students, teachers, painters, etc.).
The choice of psychiatric hospitals is also from public to private all inclusive, there are good conditions, poor conditions, a total of 12, but including Rosenhain 8 people mixed into the psychiatric hospital method exactly the same: claiming that their ears always receive some strange sounds such as “clang”, “crack” and so on, that is, pretend to hallucinate, so as to accept the initial diagnosis, to see if they will be treated as patients.
Rosenhain expected to have a success rate of half, but never expected that the success rate was so high that he was dumbfounded. 7 out of 8 people were judged to be “schizophrenic” and one was judged to be “bipolar”, and were neatly invited to the psychiatric hospital. According to Rosenhain’s request, these people stopped pretending to behave abnormally once they were admitted and quietly recorded their “treatment process” inside, which had to be kept secret to avoid being discovered.
The results surprised Rosenhain again, because after these people stopped pretending to be sick, their behavior in eating, drinking and even going to the bathroom would still be monitored, and the health care provider would be around to discuss that their behavior showed abnormalities (even though it was going on normally), and that someone who was left-handed and drank from a cup with his left hand was a symptom of mental illness in the eyes of the health care provider, because “normal people drink from their right hand.
And they found that they do not need to secretly record, record this thing, in their view is an unannounced visit needs to be confidential, and the health care provider accidentally bumped into, did not check what they were writing, but immediately put the treatment process record and write “scribble” as a new “symptom “They did not take those medications. Instead of taking those medications, they quietly flushed them down the toilet, flushing out more than 2,000 tablets before and after, but they were surprised to find that this didn’t prove they were normal either!
Because other psychiatric patients also flush pills, this is seen as an episode of paranoia. Fortunately, the eight men had anticipated the worst and hired lawyers before they were admitted to the hospital, so after 7 to 52 days in the hospital, they were all released on the grounds that their symptoms had “subsided,” but their attempts to prove they were normal all failed, and according to Rosenhain’s post-mortem, some of these men even claimed to have been abused.
Based on this experiment, Rosenhahn wrote a paper, “If sanity and madness exist, how do we distinguish them? published in the journal Science, in which, in addition to pointing out that diagnoses regarding the mentally ill should be more rational and humane, he also made the point that
When a person is considered abnormal, his normal behavior is also labeled as “abnormal” and this conclusion is not based on the behavior itself but on the specific context, i.e. the “labeling effect”. What does that mean? The psychiatric hospital is a very special environment, in this environment of all kinds of behavior, it is easy to be marked with abnormal, all the original no special behavior and personality characteristics, all seem abnormal, a bit of a blind eye to form the meaning of labeling disorder.
This experiment caused a huge sensation at the time, the courts have since weakened the judgment of psychiatrists, the gradual standardization of psychiatric diagnosis and a large number of psychiatric institutions in the United States in 10 years less, these follow-up effects need not be mentioned. In any case, the experiment has been thoroughly famous in psychological and psychiatric circles, and its process and results have been a source of reflection, just like the story mentioned at the beginning –
When we label someone as negative, does everything he does get classified as negative? Are we really as objective as we think we are when we look at people, know them, judge them, and define them? The Analects of Confucius says “too much is not enough”, don’t underestimate this labeling behavior, when the negative accumulates to a degree, it is enough to force the person in it, to the end of the road.
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