Some clippings from my personal document on the experiment:
http://frontierpsychiatrist.co.uk/the-rosenhan-experiment-examined/ (Counter-arguing the conclusions)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment#Impact_and_controversy (The wikipedia article seems a bit biased in that it omits many of the counterarguments.)
(I'm staring a blog soon and the other portions of the document are quite cryptic at this point.)
Link the first:
Spitzer also writes that ‘schizophrenia in remission’ was a diagnosis rarely used by psychiatrists at the time of the experiment, and as such this indicates that the diagnoses given were a function of the patients’ behaviours
Agree that if all Rosenhan had observed was "discharged with an 'in remission' diagnosis" that would prove hospitals can detect sanity well. But the stays were long - maybe psychosis is much sneakier than depression or hypomania and requires longer observation? And Rosenhan observed more - accepting treatme...
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 It's also a fairly good indict of presumably common psychiatric practices, although it's also presumably outdated by now.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