The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness Audiobook (Free)

‘One of America’s most courageous youthful journalists’ and the writer from the #1 NY Situations bestselling memoir Brain burning investigates the surprising mystery behind the dramatic test that revolutionized contemporary medicine (NPR).

Doctors have got struggled for centuries to define insanity–how do you diagnose it all, how do you treat it, how do you even understand what it really is? Searching for a remedy, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist called David Rosenhan and seven other people–sane, healthful, well-adjusted users of society–went undercover into asylums around America to check the legitimacy of psychiatry’s labels. Forced to stay inside until they’d ‘tested’ themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling tales of their treatment. Rosenhan’s watershed research broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down establishments and changing mental wellness diagnosis forever.

But, as Cahalan’s explosive brand-new research shows with this real-life detective tale, very little with this saga is exactly as it seems. What really occurred behind those shut asylum doors?