In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for

In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, American psychiatry was in the middle of a public credibility crisis. The diagnostic manual the profession depended on, the DSM-II, had been published in 1968  and was widely understood, even within the profession, to be unreliable. Different psychiatrists examining the same patient frequently produced different diagnoses. The same patient examined at different times could be diagnosed with different conditions…