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The Great Pretender. The undercover mission that changed the way we think about madness

14.99 €
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The Great Pretender. The undercover mission that changed the way we think about madness
14.99 €
"The Mentally Healthy in the Place of the Insane" is what David Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, called his exposé. Journalists and psychiatrists had infiltrated psychiatric institutions undercover many times before, but this was the first time such an operation had been conducted on such a large scale and accompanied by the collection of detailed empirical data, and the result was a publication in the major scientific publication Science. Rosenhan's study was a "sword that pierced the heart of psychiatry": it undermined its authority, sparked fierce debate among psychiatrists, and influenced the formation of a new system for diagnosing mental illness. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated, but decades later, when there are almost no living witnesses to the famous experiment, Suzanne Cahalan took up the investigation of Rosenhan's story. She was led down this path by another "great sham" - autoimmune encephalitis, a disease whose symptoms mimicked schizophrenia and bipolar disorder but had physical causes - obvious bodily dysfunctions. For Susanne, Rosenhan's experiment is an attempt to answer a question that was central to her and that the researcher himself was asking: if sanity and insanity exist, how do we tell them apart?
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