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In a 1973 article titled On Being Sane in an Insane Place, published in Science (Vol. 129, pp. 250-258)—the official organ of the American Academy of the Advancement of Science—D. L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, questioned whether psychiatrists can tell the normal from the abnormal, the sane from the insane. He wondered whether the salient characteristics leading to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environment and contexts in which observers find them. He contended that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless, harmful, misleading, and pejorative. To demonstrate his thesis, Rosenhan designed an experiment in which a group of people who were not psychiatrically ill attempted to gain admittance to psychiatric hospitals by feigning mental illness. If a significant number of these pseudo patients could be admitted (eight were admitted to twelve hospitals), then he could 'prove' that we ought to seriously question whether there are objective criteria in the assessment of mental illness.
The editors of the Journal of Psychiatry and Law point to the Szaszian implications of this work concerning the existence of mental illness and the legal implications pointed out by Rosenhan, such as patients being needlessly stripped of their citizenship privileges: voting, driving, and handling their own accounts. The impression created by Rosenhan's article is that psychiatrists willy-nilly incarcerate individuals in mental institutions for