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Why Be Insane When You Can Be Normal Summary

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Why Be Insane When You Can Be Normal In Opening Skinner’s Box, there are several stories that are very fascinating. The fourth chapter that really gets the brain thinking is “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The chapter is about a psychiatrist named David Rosenhan that went through with an experiment that opened up the inside of an insane asylum. He became ill and doctors had no idea what was wrong with him. David becomes admitted along with eight of his friends and they all see the pros and cons on the inside. At the end Rosenhan used the results he found for medical research.
David Rosenhan was a professor emeritus of law and psychology at Stanford. One day he was rushed to the emergency room where his whole body shut down on him. The doctors had no idea what was going on with him. …show more content…

When the psychologist was evaluating David, he asked him what his problem was. David simply said “I’m hearing a voice and its saying thud.” After the psychologist sat there for a while and tapped his pen, Rosenhan was finally led down a hallway to an exam room. He then said that he was fine and wanted to know when he will go home. The doctor’s just smiled at him and said “when you are well.” After the doctors took the vital signs of David, they sent him into a room where he would “take” his medication to make him sane. While he was in a room where all the patients gathered in, he saw a patient get severely punished for telling a nurse “I like you”. In today’s medicine, any diagnosis can be wrong because the doctor does not look at the huge picture of what is going on. Psychiatry needs to have more research developed. There has been a development since the beginning of the discovery of psychiatry. They started out with the shock treatment and now they have shrinks that people talk to try to get the voice out of their head. There still are insane asylums, but they are not like how they use to

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