Remission
A state in which the symptoms of an illness have subsided. In Rosenhan's 1973 paper, the pseudopatients were said to have been discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission.
According to Rosenhan's paper, eight people who were admitted to psychiatric hospitals after saying only that they heard voices behaved normally once inside, and were discharged after 7 to 52 days with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission[1].
In 1976 Spitzer seized on that diagnosis. At the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the records of more than 300 patients discharged with schizophrenia in the previous year contained not one coded as in remission, and eleven of twelve other hospitals said the term was never used or used for only a few patients a year. If doctors had given these pseudopatients so rare a label, he argued, they must have noticed that the patients had no symptoms[2].
In 2023 the sociologist Andrew Scull reported that the chart of one pseudopatient who has been traced has no note of remission, and the space for the reason for discharge is blank[3].
Related terms
- SchizophreniaAn illness in which the connections between mental functions such as thought and feeling break down. The word was coined in 1908 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler.
Sources
- D. L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science 179(4070), 250–258 (1973).
- R. L. Spitzer, “More on Pseudoscience in Science and the Case for Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of D. L. Rosenhan's 'On Being Sane in Insane Places' and 'The Contextual Nature of Psychiatric Diagnosis',” Archives of General Psychiatry 33(4), 459–470 (1976).
- A. Scull, “Rosenhan revisited: successful scientific fraud,” History of Psychiatry 34(2), 180–195 (2023).