My preference ordering:
Declared sane and released after 2 days > declared sane and released after 19 days > declared insane and released after 2 days > declared insane and released after 19 days.
I agree that some people might switch the ordering of the second and third outcomes.
I understand that's your preference ordering, I'm asking why you find being declared insane worse than 17 days of captivity.
I haven't seen any links to this on Lesswrong yet, and I just discovered it myself. It's extremely interesting, and has a lot of implications for how the way that people perceive and think of others are largely determined by their environmental context. It's also a fairly good indict of presumably common psychiatric practices, although it's also presumably outdated by now. Maybe some of you are already familiar with it, but I thought I'd mention it and post a link for those of you who aren't.
There's probably newer research on this, but I don't have time to investigate it at the moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment