The genius is on the left, the lunatic is on the right

Chapter 10 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

A car transporting mentally ill patients to another hospital had a flat tire on the way. When the driver changed the tire, he found that the three mentally ill patients in the car had all escaped.In order not to take responsibility, the driver tricked three people into the car by giving them a free ride, and drove the three normal people all the way to a mental hospital.After a month of "torture", the three were successfully rescued.So a reporter interviewed them separately.

Reporter: "When you were locked up in a mental hospital, what methods did you use to try to get out?"

A: "I thought, if you want to go out, you must first prove that you are not sick. So I told them: 'The earth is round.' This is a truth. People who can tell the truth can't be regarded as mentally ill."

Reporter: "The result?"

A: "As a result, when I said No. 14 times, the nurse stuck a needle in my butt without any explanation, and then said: 'The earth is indeed round, we all know that, you need to repeat it so many times Is it?' So, I can only stay in the ward obediently."

Reporter: "How did you get out of the mental hospital?"

B: "Just like A, I was rescued by C."

Reporter: "Then when you entered the mental hospital by mistake and tried to get out, what did you do?"

B: "In order to prove that I am a normal person, I said a lot of normal things, I told them that I am a sociologist, who is the current president of the United States, who is the head of state of the United Kingdom, who is the chancellor of Germany...but no wait After I finished speaking, they gave me a sedative shot."

Reporter: "Then do you know how C got out and saved the two of you?"

B: "Yes. After he came in, he didn't say anything. It was time to eat and sleep. When it was time to watch TV, he went out to watch TV. When the nurse poured water for him, he replied thank you. After 28 days, they let him out."

This incident explained a truth to us, sometimes, the more eager to prove yourself, the more you can't prove it.Because no one is willing to follow your train of thought to think about problems.

However, from the perspective of a mental hospital, whether to admit a patient depends on whether the patient's behavior is normal or abnormal, and how to judge whether a person's behavior is normal or abnormal is a basic problem in psychology.

Just like there are no two identical leaves in the world, there are also great differences between people. Therefore, in psychology, it is impossible to formulate a complete and almost unbiased evaluation mechanism to judge people's Behavior, psychologists can only distribute all behaviors on a continuous "axis", and judge with the extreme ends as extremes.

To this end, psychologist David Rosenhann has conducted long-term research on mental hospitals, and one of the experiments is very interesting.

Rosenhann recruited 8 people, including himself, to carry out the experiment. The requirement of the experiment was to let the 8 subjects pretend to be mental patients and enter the mental hospital, and then live in a normal state in it. The purpose of the experiment was to see Let's see if these normal people who are mixed with mental illness can be found by the hospital. From this, it can be deduced whether the so-called "psychiatric examiner" judges based on the patient's behavior or the behavior caused by the patient's environment. to judge.

The 8 subjects consisted of 3 women and 5 men, including three psychologists, one psychiatrist, one painter, one pediatrician, one graduate student and one housewife.There are a total of 12 targeted mental hospitals, located on the east and west coasts of the United States.

The "game" has officially begun!Everyone started the same way. They called the target hospital to make an appointment for a doctor, and then reported in front of the doctor that they often heard sounds such as "boom", "bang" and "empty", and other performances were normal.When they went to the doctor for consultation, the medical records were all real, and the only thing that was manipulated was their occupation and name.

Eight people visited different doctors and were admitted to different target hospitals for treatment, and seven of them were all diagnosed as "schizophrenia".

After being admitted to the hospital, what the subjects need to do is to behave normally, or in other words, just keep what they usually do, because they have no mental problems themselves, but they need to cooperate with all treatments and take medicine on time every day (but Not really edible).

Because they don't know when they will be released, all 8 subjects need to record everything about themselves in the mental hospital, so as to serve as real data for the experiment.At the beginning, everyone hid their diary-keeping behavior and tried to show that they had returned to normal in front of the medical staff, but soon found that this kind of concealment was meaningless. In the eyes of the medical staff, secretly keeping a diary is just One of the manifestations of disease.

The hospitalization time of the 8 subjects ranged from 7 days to 52 days, and the average hospitalization time was 19 days. The most important point, which is to respond to the purpose of the experiment, is that none of the 8 subjects were found out, and they were released. After coming out, the contents filled in the medical records were exactly the same: "mental illness recovery period".In other words, these 8 normal people were completely treated as mental patients.

And from the diaries they brought out, they found a lot of interesting things, which were beyond the purpose of the experiment.

Incident 3: 3 of the subjects all described similar things. The doctors and nurses in the hospital never doubted the authenticity of their identities, but the patients were not so good at "flickering". In the hospital where the 118 subjects were located Of a total of 35 real patients, [-] questioned them.They discussed: "You are not a real patient, you must be a reporter, lurking in to expose the conditions of the mental hospital."

Event [-]: Before being admitted to the hospital, the subjects had been instructed to have as much contact with doctors and nurses as possible in the psychiatric hospital, preferably to have some substantive conversations. I hoped that such behavior would give the hospital more understanding The patient and the opportunity to judge the "false patient" in time, who knows the result is very strange.

Almost all medical staff obviously resist positive communication with patients. For example, one of the subjects recorded that when he saw the psychiatrist in the hospital, he went up to him and asked very politely, "Hi doctor, I would like to ask When will I be able to become a qualified master of the earth?”, the other party’s reaction was: “Hi, Dave, the weather is really nice today, how do you feel?” As he spoke, he walked straight forward, There was no sign of stopping to chat at all.

The statistics are even more astonishing. When 70% of psychiatrists and nearly 90% of nurses "confronted" with the subjects, they turned a deaf ear and kept going, avoiding any positive contact with patients.Only 23 percent of psychiatrists were able to make eye contact, and only 2 percent were able to stop and chat.

Event 8: Inversely proportional to the serious lack of communication is the abundance and replenishment of drugs. During the admission of the 2100 subjects, they received a total of [-] pills, and of course they would not take these pills.And almost all the subjects found that many of the real patients refused to take the medicine, and threw the pills into the toilet after the medical staff left.

Event [-]: Another subject recorded a gossip.One day, a nurse in charge of the activity area was not dressed properly, so she buttoned and adjusted her bra in front of dozens of male patients in the activity area, not shying away from the difference between men and women.She did this not because she was wanton, but in her eyes, these people were not normal men.

Many of the details recorded by the subjects sound interesting, even a little funny, but when you think about it deeply, it makes people shudder. If this is not an experiment, if these fake patients are really an accident, or because of some special reasons And entered the mental hospital, according to this situation, wouldn't they be labeled as "schizophrenia" innocently?

If they didn't know that they were doing experiments and knew that even if they couldn't get a formal release from a mental hospital, there would be corresponding institutions to "rescue" them, would they still behave like normal people so calmly?If they have not been released, will they lose control of their emotions in such an environment and eventually become a psychopath?
It's no wonder that some film and television works will draw on such themes. Sending normal people to a mental hospital may drive people crazy with a fake show!

The brain-burning logic of a genius or a madman
Rosenhann's experiments demonstrated convincingly that normal people cannot be distinguished from genuinely mentally ill patients, even in state-run mental institutions.However, he did not attribute the responsibility to the identification experts' "inexperienced skills". In fact, in an overly powerful psychiatric institution, the medical staff's judgment of individuals is prone to "fixed thinking", that is, "Since you are here, you must Must be sick."

This "sick hypothesis theory" not only limits the thinking of appraisal experts, but also limits the treatment methods they give.First assume that a person is sick, and then slowly through treatment to alleviate his condition, hoping that the person will recover in the end.This is a normal way of thinking about treatment, but they all forget that the determination at the beginning can easily make some people "lie down".

(End of this chapter)