From: rhw@att.com (Robert Wentworth)
Subject: Re: Peter Breggin, _Toxic Psychiatry_ (Q)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 01:02:20 GMT


>In article <1992Dec24.121004.939@ariel.ec.usf.edu> eclark@gauss.math.usf.edu. (Edwin Clark) writes:
>>In article <1992Dec17.001057.10783@genie.slhs.udel.edu> nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Nancy Lebovitz) writes:
>>>In article <24417@alice.att.com> ark@alice.UUCP () writes:
>>>>In article <1992Dec15.155632.21024@athena.mit.edu> jgnassi@athena.mit.edu (John Angelo Gnassi) writes:
>>>>
>>>>> If a patient with a psychiatric disorder is lucid, evidences
>>>>> understanding of the situation, is not in immediate danger of harming
>>>>> self or others, they can walk out AMA - Against Medical Advice.
>>>>
>>>>Does anyone else remember the article written by the journalist who
>>>>walked into a hospital one day, claiming to hear voices, with the
>>>>intent of seeing what happened and writing about it?
>>>>
>>>>He told the doctor(s) that he heard voices in his head saying things
>>>>like `Thud.' in a normal tone of voice.  Any other questions he answered
>>>>truthfully.  After a while he said the voices had stopped.  At no time
>>>>did he do anything to suggest that he might harm himself or others.
>>>>
>>>>What he found:
>>>>
>>>>	Even though he continued to behave as a journalist,
>>>>	and would have admitted what he was doing had anyone
>>>>	asked, no one did.  They did make notations in his
>>>>	records, though, saying things like `Patient engages
>>>>	in writing behavior.'
>>>>
>>>>	He had a very hard time getting out.  Indeed, if I remember
>>>>	correctly, the only reason he was let out at all was that
>>>>	before going in, he made sure several other people knew
>>>>	what he was up to so that he could bring them in to testify
>>>>	on his behalf.
>>>>
>>>>This may, of course, be an isolated incident.  Can someone point me at
>>>>the article?
>>>
>>
>>
>>Did the journalist "patient" have  private insurance--if not
>>who was  picking up the tab? I have heard stories of cases in
>>which patients miraculously recovered when their insurance ran
>>out. 
>>
>>eclark@math.usf.edu


This was not an isolated incident.  I don't know about the "journalist"
you're thinking of, but this sounds extremely similar to an article in
"Science" entitled "Sane in Insane Places" (197?).  The article documents a
study in which at least half a dozen nominally sane experimenters had
themselves admitted to a variety of public and private psychiatric
hospitals.  At the admission interview, they claimed to hear voices (yes,
saying innocuous things like "thud") and then stopping indicating any
symptoms once they were admitted.  Experimenters did not swallow any of
the offered medications.

There were a number of interesting findings.  In no case did a staff member
ever detect that the experimenters were "normal", though sometimes other
patients did.  The initial diagnosis (usually of schizophrenia) was never
retracted, though sometimes it was modified to schizophrenia in remission.
Initially they tried to hide their note-taking, but later were open about it--
no staff member ever asked them what they were writing, and staff
sometimes assumed the writing was pathological.  The experimenters also
quantified the amount of staff interaction, which turned out to be minimal.
Furthermore, higher status staff members had less interaction with patients.
When nurses or doctors were asked direct, legitimate questions, the patient
seldom if ever received a relevant reply.  (As a benchmark they tried asking
similar questions in a non-psychiatric hospital setting, and got much more
favorable responses.  At a university, when they asked questions of
professors walking briskly as if they needed to be someplace, they always
got a relevant answer.)

I don't have the full reference handy, but strangely it appears in the
list of references to Prof. Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall
Street" (which is an excellent book on the stock market).  (If pressed,
I'll look up the full reference.)

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