The roles of pro and con are often taken over by voices of different people. At one time they may be against the patient. He described these in vivid detail in his great 1911 monograph, Dementia Praecox or, The Group of Schizophrenias: the pathological or hostile powers" that beset them. their entire transformed relationship to the external world. The voices, he wrote, embodied "all their strivings and fears. He recognized that the "voices" his patients heard, however outlandish they might seem, were closely associated with their mental states and delusions. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace other treatments, and careful history taking, looking at the whole life of the patient, had largely been replaced by the use of DSM criteria to make snap diagnoses.Įugen Bleuler, who directed the huge Burghölzli asylum near Zurich from 1898 to 1927, paid close and sympathetic attention to the many hundreds of schizophrenic people under his care. This belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that "hearing voices" spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance. This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist (and himself a pseudopatient), emphasized, among other things, that the single symptom of "hearing voices" could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one pseudopatient as "writing behavior"), but none of the pseudopatients were identified as such by the staff. Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappeared and that they felt fine. Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with "manic-depressive psychosis"), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Their single complaint was that they "heard voices." They told hospital staff that they could not really make out what the voices said but that they heard the words "empty," "hollow," and "thud." Apart from this fabrication, they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories. It was entitled "On Being Sane in Insane Places," and it described how, as an experiment, eight "pseudopatients" with no history of mental illness presented themselves at a variety of hospitals across the United States. In 1973 the journal Science published an article that caused an immediate furor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |