Rosenhan's Measure Of Insanity
The purpose of Rosenhan’s study was to determine if sanity could be distinguished from insanity. Rosenhan wanted to determine if the diagnoses of some sort of mental illness came from the patients themselves or did the environment produce the diagnoses. The prevailing thought at the time was that sanity and insanity are easily distinguishable. The psychological symptoms of patients could be simply categorized which supported the idea of such a belief. The goal of the study was to test the idea whether sanity could be recognized. Rosenhan believed if the sanity of the pseudopatients were always detected then normality is distinguishable from abnormality. However, if the sanity of the pseudopatients were never discovered, this supported the