In the 1970s, David Rosenhan showed that healthy people could be diagnosed as mentally ill

In the 1970s psychologist David Rosenhan sent healthy volunteers to 12 psychiatric hospitals, where they claimed to be hearing voices. Once they were admitted, they behaved normally, but the hospitals diagnosed all of them as seriously mentally ill. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the Rosenhan experiment, which challenged the validity of psychiatric diagnosis and set off a furor in the field.

We'll also spot hawks at Wimbledon and puzzle over a finicky payment processor.

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