St Elizabeths Hospital (1996), located in Washington, D.C., now boarded up and abandoned, was one of the sites of the<unk>  The<unk>  or Thud experiment was an experiment conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The participants feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals but acted normally afterwards. They were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and were given antipsychotic medication. The study was conducted by psychologist David<unk> , a Stanford University professor, and published by the journal Science in 1973 under the title "On Being Sane in Insane Places". It is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis, and broached the topic of wrongful involuntary commitment.<unk>  along with 8 other people (5 men and 3 women) went into these 12 hospitals across 5 states along the West coast of the US. The pseudo patients who were only admitted for a short period of time went to a different hospital, hence they went to 12 hospitals but there were only 9 participants altogether.<unk> 's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including<unk>  himself) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they no longer experienced any additional hallucinations. As a condition of their release, all the patients were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take antipsychotic medication. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia "in remission" before their release. The second part of his study involved a hospital administration challenging<unk>  to send pseudopatients to its facility, whose staff asserted that they would be able to detect the pseudopatients.<unk>  agreed, and in the following weeks 41 out of 193 new patients were identified as potential pseudopatients, with 19 of these receiving suspicion from at least one psychiatrist and one other staff member.<unk>  sent no pseudopatients to the hospital. While listening to a lecture by R. D. Laing, who was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement,<unk>  conceived of the experiment as a way to test the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. The study concluded "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviors rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution, and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.
Rosenhan experiment
Harrington–Hollingsworth experiment
Minor test
Sereny test
Mentzer index
Milch classification
Resonance frequency analysis
Projective test