When David Rosenhan asked mock “patients” to infiltrate a mental facility he fou

Question

When David Rosenhan asked mock “patients” to infiltrate a mental facility he found that they had some difficulty in getting back out. After mental health professionals had labelled these individuals as “schizophrenic” they had a difficult time seeing the normalcy of the patients’ behaviours. It is nonetheless true, though, that diagnosis and identification of mental disorders aids in developing a prognosis and treatment plan. Can people with mental disorders escape the potentially harmful consequences of being labelled “sick,” “ill,” or otherwise?

Explanation / Answer

David Rosenhan challenged the diagnostic system; putting the individuals self-reporting being the source of the symptoms compared to the environmental context in which the symptoms arose.The diagnostic label changed the perspective of the person, so that all of their behaviour was interpreted within the context of the diagnosis. Psychiatric diagnoses are able to broadly direct treatment e.g. antidepressant medication and psychotherapy addressing negative cognitions and depression maintaining behaviours for diagnosed depression; antipsychotics for schizophrenia and trauma psychotherapy for PTSD. People with mental illness often yearn for self-discovery and cannot be empowered without an accurate understanding of their condition. Diagnoses can maintain people as patients, but improved understanding of aetiology and effects of treatments such as mindfulness and medication on the brain provides the opportunity to empower the person to escape the suffering and labelling of being a patient. Mental health professionals feel that diagnosis is not a label, but rather a scientific way of classifying disorders, which enables health care professionals to have systematic pathways for managing patients who present with psychiatric symptoms. According to the labelling theory after a patient is given a diagnosis, he/she starts behaving in a different way, which is called a secondary deviance.Then people start treating them differently, which makes things even worse. Patient assumes the "sick role", which according to Parsons, relieves patients from the responsibility of their lives. So,in conclusion patients cannot completely escape the negative consequences of labeling,but psychiatrists working with patients need to be extremely cautious both in the use of diagnostic labels to describe a patient and mindful of the influence that such labels can have on their own clinical judgements.Training and supervision are also really important to help clinicians become more aware of the judgements they make that might affect treatment and crucially challenge these. In order to improve treatments and support available to patients, greater awareness of the negative impacts such labels can have should be shared throughout the professions in particular in training. Mental health professionals could explore the bio-psycho-social factors in the assessments of patients in order to better understand what the problem is and how these symptoms of the problem developed, are maintained or get worse. This would help improve the treatment efficiency, lessen the stigmatising nature of medical labels, and avoid the unwanted influence such labels can have on clinicians' judgements.

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