Capitol Reef National Park

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Reef_National_Park 

 

Capitol Reef National Park
IUCN category II (national park)
Capitol Reef National Park
Location in the United States Show map of the United StatesShow map of UtahShow all
Location	Wayne, Garfield, Sevier, and Emery counties, Utah, United States
Nearest city	Torrey
Coordinates	38°12′N 111°10′WCoordinates: 38°12′N 111°10′W
Area	241,904 acres (978.95 km2) 670 acres (270 ha) private
Established	December 18, 1971
Visitors	1,227,627 (in 2018)
Governing body	National Park Service
Website	Official website

Capitol Reef National Park is an American national park in south-central Utah. The park is approximately 60 miles (97 km) long on its north–south axis and just 6 miles (9.7 km) wide on average. The park was established in 1971 to preserve 241,904 acres (377.98 sq mi; 97,895.08 ha; 978.95 km²) of desert landscape and is open all year, with May through September being the highest visitation months.

Partially in Wayne County, Utah, the area was originally named "Wayne Wonderland" in the 1920s by local boosters Ephraim P. Pectol and Joseph S. Hickman. Capitol Reef National Park was designated a national monument on August 2, 1937, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to protect the area's colorful canyons, ridges, buttes, and monoliths; however, it was not until 1950 that the area officially opened to the public. Road access was improved in 1962 with the construction of State Route 24 through the Fremont River Canyon.

The majority of the nearly 100 mi (160 km) long up-thrust formation called the Waterpocket Fold—a rocky spine extending from Thousand Lake Mountain to Lake Powell—is preserved within the park. Capitol Reef is an especially rugged and spectacular segment of the Waterpocket Fold by the Fremont River. The park was named for its whitish Navajo Sandstone cliffs with dome formations—similar to the white domes often placed on capitol buildings—that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold. Locally, reef refers to any rocky barrier to land travel, just as ocean reefs are barriers to sea travel.

Geography

Park map

Capitol Reef encompasses the Waterpocket Fold, a warp in the earth's crust that is 65 million years old. It is the largest exposed monocline in North America. In this fold, newer and older layers of earth folded over each other in an S-shape. This warp, probably caused by the same colliding continental plates that created the Rocky Mountains, has weathered and eroded over millennia to expose layers of rock and fossils. The park is filled with brilliantly colored sandstone cliffs, gleaming white domes, and contrasting layers of stone and earth.

The area was named for a line of white domes and cliffs of Navajo Sandstone, each of which looks somewhat like the United States Capitol building, that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold.

The fold forms a north-to-south barrier that has barely been breached by roads. Early settlers referred to parallel impassable ridges as "reefs", from which the park gets the second half of its name. The first paved road was constructed through the area in 1962. State Route 24 cuts through the park traveling east and west between Canyonlands National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, but few other paved roads invade the rugged landscape.

The park is filled with canyons, cliffs, towers, domes, and arches. The Fremont River has cut canyons through parts of the Waterpocket Fold, but most of the park is arid desert. A scenic drive shows park visitors some highlights, but it runs only a few miles from the main highway. Hundreds of miles of trails and unpaved roads lead into the equally scenic backcountry.

History

Native Americans and Mormons

Petroglyph in Capitol Gorge

 

Navajo Dome formation

 

Fruita School House

 

Capitol Gorge

 

Fremont-culture Native Americans lived near the perennial Fremont River in the northern part of the Capitol Reef Waterpocket Fold around the year 1000. They irrigated crops of maize and squash and stored their grain in stone granaries (in part made from the numerous black basalt boulders that litter the area). In the 13th century, all of the Native American cultures in this area underwent sudden change, likely due to a long drought. The Fremont settlements and fields were abandoned.

Many years after the Fremont left, Paiutes moved into the area. These Numic-speaking people named the Fremont granaries moki huts and thought they were the homes of a race of tiny people or moki.

In 1872 Alan H. Thompson, a surveyor attached to United States Army Major John Wesley Powell's expedition, crossed the Waterpocket Fold while exploring the area. Geologist Clarence Dutton later spent several summers studying the area's geology. None of these expeditions explored the Waterpocket Fold to any great extent, however. It was, as now, incredibly rugged and forbidding. 

Following the American Civil War, officials of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City sought to establish missions in the remotest niches of the Intermountain West. In 1866, a quasi-military expedition of Mormons in pursuit of natives penetrated the high valleys to the west. In the 1870s, settlers moved into these valleys, eventually establishing Loa, Fremont, Lyman, Bicknell, and Torrey.

Mormons settled the Fremont River valley in the 1880s and established Junction (later renamed Fruita), Caineville, and Aldridge. Fruita prospered, Caineville barely survived, and Aldridge died. In addition to farming, lime was extracted from local limestone, and uranium was extracted early in the 20th century. In 1904 the first claim to a uranium mine in the area was staked. The resulting Oyler Mine in Grand Wash produced uranium ore. 

By 1920 no more than ten families at one time were sustained by the fertile flood plain of the Fremont River and the land changed ownership over the years. The area remained isolated. The community was later abandoned and later still some buildings were restored by the National Park Service. Kilns once used to produce lime are still in Sulphur Creek and near the campgrounds on Scenic Drive.

Early protection efforts

Local Ephraim Portman Pectol organized a "booster club" in Torrey in 1921. Pectol pressed a promotional campaign, furnishing stories to be sent to periodicals and newspapers. In his efforts, he was increasingly aided by his brother-in-law, Joseph S. Hickman, who was the Wayne County High School principal. In 1924, Hickman extended community involvement in the promotional effort by organizing a Wayne County-wide Wayne Wonderland Club. That same year, Hickman was elected to the Utah State Legislature.

In 1933, Pectol was elected to the presidency of the Associated Civics Club of Southern Utah, successor to the Wayne Wonderland Club. The club raised U.S. $150 (equivalent to $2,963 in 2019) to interest a Salt Lake City photographer in taking a series of promotional photographs. For several years, the photographer, J. E. Broaddus, traveled and lectured on "Wayne Wonderland".

In 1933, Pectol was elected to the legislature and almost immediately contacted President Franklin D. Roosevelt and asked for the creation of "Wayne Wonderland National Monument" out of the federal lands comprising the bulk of the Capitol Reef area. Federal agencies began a feasibility study and boundary assessment. Meanwhile, Pectol guided the government investigators on numerous trips and escorted an increasing number of visitors. The lectures of Broaddus were having an effect.

Roosevelt signed a proclamation creating Capitol Reef National Monument on August 2, 1937. In Proclamation 2246, President Roosevelt set aside 37,711 acres (15,261 ha) of the Capitol Reef area. This comprised an area extending about two miles (3.2 km) north of present State Route 24 and about 10 mi (16 km) south, just past Capitol Gorge. The Great Depression years were lean ones for the National Park Service (NPS), the new administering agency. Funds for the administration of Capitol Reef were nonexistent; it would be a long time before the first rangers would arrive.

Administration of the monument

Administration of the new monument was placed under the control of Zion National Park. A stone ranger cabin and the Sulphur Creek bridge were built and some road work was performed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. Historian and printer Charles Kelly came to know NPS officials at Zion well and volunteered to watchdog the park for the NPS. Kelly was officially appointed custodian-without-pay in 1943. He worked as a volunteer until 1950, when the NPS offered him a civil-service appointment as the first superintendent.

During the 1950s Kelly was deeply troubled by NPS management acceding to demands of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that Capitol Reef National Monument be opened to uranium prospecting. He felt that the decision had been a mistake and destructive of the long-term national interest. It turned out that there was not enough ore in the monument to be worth mining.

In 1958 Kelly got additional permanent help in protecting the monument and enforcing regulations; Park Ranger Grant Clark transferred from Zion. The year Clark arrived, fifty-six thousand visitors came to the park, and Charlie Kelly retired for the last time.

During the 1960s (under the program name Mission 66), NPS areas nationwide received new facilities to meet the demand of mushrooming park visitation. At Capitol Reef, a 53-site campground at Fruita, staff rental housing, and a new visitor center were built, the latter opening in 1966.

Visitation climbed dramatically after the paved, all-weather State Route 24 was built in 1962 through the Fremont River canyon near Fruita. State Route 24 replaced the narrow Capitol Gorge wagon road about 10 mi (16 km) to the south that frequently washed out. The old road has since been open only to foot traffic. In 1967, 146,598 persons visited the park. The staff was also growing.

During the 1960s, the NPS purchased private land parcels at Fruita and Pleasant Creek. Almost all private property passed into public ownership on a "willing buyer-willing seller" basis.

Preservationists convinced President Lyndon B. Johnson to set aside an enormous area of public lands in 1968, just before he left office. In Presidential Proclamation 3888 an additional 215,056 acres (87,030 ha) were placed under NPS control. By 1970, Capitol Reef National Monument comprised 254,251 acres (102,892 ha) and sprawled southeast from Thousand Lake Mountain almost to the Colorado River. The action was controversial locally, and NPS staffing at the monument was inadequate to properly manage the additional land.

National park status

Tower and rock layers at Capitol Reef

 

The vast enlargement of the monument and diversification of the scenic resources soon raised another issue: whether Capitol Reef should be a national park, rather than a monument. Two bills were introduced into the United States Congress.

A House bill (H.R. 17152) introduced by Utah Congressman Laurence J. Burton called for a 180,000-acre (72,800 ha) national park and an adjunct 48,000-acre (19,400 ha) national recreation area where multiple use (including grazing) could continue indefinitely. In the United States Senate, meanwhile, Senate bill S. 531 had already passed on July 1, 1970, and provided for a 230,000-acre (93,100 ha) national park alone. The bill called for a 25-year phase-out of grazing.

In September 1970, United States Department of Interior officials told a house subcommittee session that they preferred about 254,000 acres (103,000 ha) be set aside as a national park. They also recommended that the grazing phase-out period be 10 years, rather than 25. They did not favor the adjunct recreation area.

It was not until late 1971 that Congressional action was completed. By then, the 92nd United States Congress was in session and S. 531 had languished. A new bill, S. 29, was introduced in the Senate by Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah and was essentially the same as the defunct S. 531 except that it called for an additional 10,834 acres (4,384 ha) of public lands for a Capitol Reef National Park. In the House, Utah Representative K. Gunn McKay (with Representative Lloyd) had introduced H.R. 9053 to replace the dead H.R. 17152. This time, the House bill dropped the concept of an adjunct Capitol Reef National Recreation Area and adopted the Senate concept of a 25-year limit on continued grazing. The Department of Interior was still recommending a national park of 254,368 acres (102,939 ha) and a 10-year limit for grazing phase-out.

S. 29 passed the Senate in June and was sent to the House. The House subsequently dropped its own bill and passed the Senate version with an amendment. Because the Senate was not in agreement with the House amendment, differences were worked out in Conference Committee. The Conference Committee issued their agreeing report on November 30, 1971. The legislation—'An Act to Establish The Capitol Reef National Park in the State of Utah'—became Public Law 92-207 when it was signed by President Richard Nixon on December 18, 1971.

Climate

According to the Köppen climate classification system, the Capitol Reef Visitor Center has a Cold semi-arid climate (BSk).

Climate data for Capitol Reef Visitor Center, elevation 5,653 ft (1,723 m), 1981-2010 normals, extremes 1981-2019
Month	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Year
Record high °F (°C)	58.6 (14.8)	68.3 (20.2)	78.3 (25.7)	84.4 (29.1)	94.6 (34.8)	100.2 (37.9)	100.8 (38.2)	97.9 (36.6)	95.4 (35.2)	86.1 (30.1)	70.4 (21.3)	61.5 (16.4)	100.8 (38.2)
Average high °F (°C)	40.6 (4.8)	46.4 (8.0)	54.7 (12.6)	65.0 (18.3)	74.5 (23.6)	85.3 (29.6)	90.4 (32.4)	87.9 (31.1)	80.2 (26.8)	66.1 (18.9)	51.3 (10.7)	40.6 (4.8)	65.3 (18.5)
Average low °F (°C)	17.8 (−7.9)	22.7 (−5.2)	30.2 (−1.0)	36.2 (2.3)	44.7 (7.1)	53.1 (11.7)	60.4 (15.8)	58.5 (14.7)	50.4 (10.2)	39.0 (3.9)	27.6 (−2.4)	18.2 (−7.7)	38.3 (3.5)
Record low °F (°C)	−4.2 (−20.1)	−11.8 (−24.3)	9.1 (−12.7)	18.1 (−7.7)	27.2 (−2.7)	34.6 (1.4)	42.4 (5.8)	45.1 (7.3)	29.9 (−1.2)	11.7 (−11.3)	8.0 (−13.3)	−7.5 (−21.9)	−11.8 (−24.3)
Average precipitation inches (mm)	0.52 (13)	0.34 (8.6)	0.53 (13)	0.47 (12)	0.59 (15)	0.47 (12)	0.91 (23)	1.20 (30)	0.80 (20)	0.98 (25)	0.49 (12)	0.32 (8.1)	7.62 (194)
Average dew point °F (°C)	17.3 (−8.2)	20.8 (−6.2)	23.0 (−5.0)	24.5 (−4.2)	29.1 (−1.6)	32.0 (0.0)	40.0 (4.4)	41.8 (5.4)	34.8 (1.6)	28.2 (−2.1)	21.9 (−5.6)	17.5 (−8.1)	27.6 (−2.4)

Geology

Waterpocket Fold from the ISS

 

The area including the park was once the edge of a shallow sea that invaded the land in the Permian, creating the Cutler Formation. Only the sandstone of the youngest member of the Cutler Formation, the White Rim, is exposed in the park. The deepening sea left carbonate deposits, forming the limestone of the Kaibab Limestone, the same formation that rims the Grand Canyon to the southwest.

During the Triassic, streams deposited reddish-brown silt that later became the siltstone of the Moenkopi Formation. Uplift and erosion followed. Conglomerate, followed by logs, sand, mud, and wind-transported volcanic ash, then formed the uranium-containing Chinle Formation.

The members of the Glen Canyon Group were all laid down in the middle- to late-Triassic during a time of increasing aridity. They include:

• Wingate Sandstone: sand dunes on the shore of an ancient sea
• Kayenta Formation: thin-bedded layers of sand deposited by slow-moving streams in channels and across low plains
• Navajo Sandstone: huge fossilized sand dunes from a massive Sahara-like desert.

The Golden Throne. Though Capitol Reef is famous for white domes of Navajo Sandstone, this dome's color is a result of a lingering section of yellow Carmel Formation carbonate, which has stained the underlying rock.

The San Rafael Group consists of four Jurassic-period formations, from oldest to youngest:

• Carmel Formation: gypsum, sand, and limey silt laid down in what may have been a graben that was periodically flooded by sea water
• Entrada Sandstone: sandstone from barrier islands/sand bars in a near-shore environment
• Curtis Formation: made from conglomerate, sandstone, and shale
• Summerville Formation: reddish-brown mud and white sand deposited in tidal flats.

Streams once again laid down mud and sand in their channels, on lakebeds, and in swampy plains, creating the Morrison Formation. Early in the Cretaceous, similar nonmarine sediments were laid down and became the Dakota Sandstone. Eventually, the Cretaceous Seaway covered the Dakota, depositing the Mancos Shale. 

Only small remnants of the Mesaverde Group are found, capping a few mesas in the park's eastern section. 

Near the end of the Cretaceous period, a mountain-building event called the Laramide orogeny started to compact and uplift the region, forming the Rocky Mountains and creating monoclines such as the Waterpocket Fold in the park. Ten to fifteen million years ago, the entire region was uplifted much further by the creation of the Colorado Plateau. This uplift was very even. Igneous activity in the form of volcanism and dike and sill intrusion also occurred during this time. 

The drainage system in the area was rearranged and steepened, causing streams to downcut faster and sometimes change course. Wetter times during the ice ages of the Pleistocene increased the rate of erosion.

Visiting the park

The closest town to Capitol Reef is Torrey, about 11 mi (18 km) west of the visitor center on Highway 24, slightly west of its intersection with Highway 12. Torrey has a population of less than 200, with a few motels and restaurants. Highway 12, as well as a partially unpaved scenic backway named the Burr Trail, provide access from the west through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the town of Boulder.

On April 9, 2020, Capitol Reef National Park was closed to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Activities

A variety of activities are available to tourists, both ranger-led and self-guided, including auto touring, hiking, backpacking, camping, bicycling (on paved and unpaved roads only; no trails), horseback riding, canyoneering, and rock climbing. The orchards planted by Mormon pioneers are maintained by the National Park Service. From early March to mid-October, various fruit—cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, or apples—can be harvested by visitors for a fee.

Hiking and backpacking

A hiking trail guide is available at the visitor center for both day hikes and backcountry hiking. Backcountry access requires a free permit.

Hickman Bridge

 

Numerous trails are available for hiking and backpacking in the park, with fifteen in the Fruita District alone. The following trails are some of the most popular in the park:

• Cassidy Arch Trail: a very steep, strenuous 3.5 mi (5.6 km) round trip that leads into the Grand Wash to an overlook of the Cassidy Arch.
• Hickman Bridge Trail: a 2 mi (3.2 km) round trip leading to the natural bridge.
• Frying Pan Trail: an 8.8 mi (14.2 km) round trip that passes the Cassidy Arch, Grand Wash, and Cohab Canyon.
• Brimhall Natural Bridge: a popular, though strenuous, 4.5 mi (7.2 km) round trip with views of Brimhall Canyon, the Waterpocket Fold, and Brimhall Natural Bridge.
• Halls Creek Narrows: 22 mi (35 km) long and considered strenuous, with many side canyons and creeks; typically hiked as a 2-3 day camping trip.

Auto touring

Visitors may explore several of the main areas of the park by private vehicle:

• Scenic Drive: winds through the middle of the park, passing the major points of interest; the road is accessible from the visitor center to approximately 2 mi (3.2 km) into the Capitol Gorge.
• Notom-Bullfrog Road: traverses the eastern side of the Waterpocket Fold, along 10 mi (16 km) of paved road, with the remainder unpaved.
• Cathedral Road: an unpaved road through the northern areas of the park, that traverses Cathedral Valley, passing the Temples of the Sun and Moon.

Camping

The primary camping location is the Fruita campground, with 71 campsites (no water, electrical, or sewer hookups), and restrooms without bathing facilities. The campground also has group sites with picnic areas and restrooms. Two primitive free camping areas are also available.

The Trap (TV series)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
Title screen
Written by	Adam Curtis
Directed by	Adam Curtis
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	3
Production
Executive producer(s)	Stephen Lambert
Producer(s)	Adam Curtis Lucy Kelsall
Running time	180 mins (in three parts)
Production company(s)	BBC
Release
Original network	BBC Two
Picture format	16:9 1080i
Audio format	Stereo
Original release	11 March – 25 March 2007
Chronology
Preceded by	The Power of Nightmares (2004)
Followed by	All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC television documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It originally aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Two in March 2007. The series consists of three 60-minute programmes which explore the modern concept and definition of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom."

Production

The series was originally to be called Cold Cold Heart and was scheduled for broadcast in 2006. Although it is not known what caused the delay in transmission, nor the change in title, it is known that a DVD release of Curtis's previous series The Power of Nightmares had been delayed due to problems with copyright clearance due to the large quantity of archive material used in Curtis's montage technique.

Another documentary series (title unknown) based on very similar lines—"examining the world economy during the 1990s"—was to have been Curtis's first BBC TV project upon moving to the BBC's Current Affairs unit in 2002, shortly after producing Century of the Self.

Episodes

Part 1. "F**k You Buddy"

In part one, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought.

The programme traces the development of game theory, with particular reference to the work of John Nash (the mathematician portrayed in A Beautiful Mind), who believed that all humans are inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategize constantly. Building on his theory, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system games that reflected his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called 'Fuck You Buddy' (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken. These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they were surprised to find that instead of betraying each other, the secretaries cooperated every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the models, but proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects. "This is in contrast to the proposed theoretical solution in which the two secretaries would have shared the amount g only, with the first secretary receiving m in addition. Upon inquiry, it developed that they had entered into the experiment with the prior agreement to share all proceeds equally!"

It was not known at the time that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and as a result, he was deeply suspicious of everyone around him—including his colleagues—and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him. It was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his theories. Footage of an older and wiser Nash was shown in which he acknowledges that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.

Curtis examines how game theory was used to create the US's nuclear strategy during the Cold War. Because no nuclear war occurred, it was believed that game theory had been correct in dictating the creation and maintenance of a massive American nuclear arsenal—because the Soviet Union had not attacked America with its nuclear weapons, the supposed deterrent must have worked. Game theory during the Cold War is a subject that Curtis examined in more detail in the To the Brink of Eternity part of his first series, Pandora's Box, and he reuses much of the same archive material in doing so.

Archive interview with R.D. Laing during episode 1

Another strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish and shrewd and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counter-culture in the 1960s. Reference is made to an experiment run by one of Laing's students, David Rosenhan, in which bogus patients, self-presenting at a number of American psychiatric institutions, were falsely diagnosed as having mental disorders, while institutions, informed that they were to receive bogus patients, misidentified genuine patients as imposters. The results of the experiment were a disaster for American psychiatry, because they destroyed the idea that psychiatrists were a privileged elite that was genuinely able to diagnose, and therefore treat, mental illness.

Curtis credits the Rosenhan experiment with the inspiration to create a computer model of mental health. Input to the program consisted of answers to a questionnaire. Curtis describes a plan of the psychiatrists to test the computer model by issuing questionnaires to "hundreds of thousands" of randomly selected Americans. The diagnostic program identified over 50% of the ordinary people tested as suffering from some kind of mental disorder. According to Dr. Jerome Wakefield, who refers to the test as "these studies", the results it found were viewed as a general conclusion that "there is a hidden epidemic." Curtis and leaders in the psychiatric field never addressed whether the computer model was being tested or used without having been validated in any way, but rather used the model to justify vastly increasing the portion of the population they were treating.

In an interview, the economist James M. Buchanan decries the notion of the "public interest", asking what it is and suggesting that it consists purely of the self-interest of the governing bureaucrats. Buchanan also proposes that organisations should employ managers who are motivated only by money. He describes those who are motivated by other factors—such as job satisfaction or a sense of public duty—as "zealots". 

At the start of the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, leading to a popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. Curtis shows that it was this belief which allowed the theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher, who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible—and placing former nationalised institutions into the hands of public shareholders—a form of social equilibrium could be reached. This was a return to Nash's work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone pursued their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society would result. 

The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas, statistics—and these figures, combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness, have created "a cage" for Western humans. The precise nature of the "cage" is to be discussed in part two.

Contributors

• John Nash, 1994 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• Friedrich von Hayek, Nobel-winning economist and political philosopher
• James M. Buchanan, Nobel-winning economist famous for his work on public choice theory
• Professor Thomas Schelling, Nobel-winning economist and game theorist
• Robert Kavesh, government economist, 1950s
• Philip Mirowski, historian and philosopher of economics and politics
• Alain Enthoven, nuclear strategist at RAND Corporation, 1956–60
• R.D. Laing, psychiatrist
• Dr Morton Schatzman, psychiatrist and colleague of R. D. Laing
• Clancy Sigal, colleague of R. D. Laing
• Madsen Pirie, founder of the Adam Smith Institute
• Sir Antony Jay, co-author of BBC comedy series Yes Minister
• David Rosenhan, attendee of R. D. Laing's talks in the US; creator of the Rosenhan experiment
• Paul McHugh, psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital
• Robert Spitzer, chair of the DSM-III task force
• Dr Jerome Wakefield, psychiatrist

Part 2. "The Lonely Robot"

Part two reiterated many of the ideas of the first part, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. 

This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by check-list based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in part one. 

People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal. They then presented themselves at psychiatrist's offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated. The alleged result is that vast numbers of Western people have had their behaviour and mental activity modified by SSRIs without any strict medical necessity. 

The episode also showed a clip of a fight in a Yanomami village from the film The Ax Fight by Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch. According to Chagnon the fight is an example of the impact of kin selection on humans, since the people fighting chose sides on the basis of kinship. Curtis interviews Chagnon and puts to him the assertion of fellow anthropologist Brian Ferguson that much of the Yanamamo violence, particularly its intensity, was very strongly influenced by the presence of Westerners handing out goods which the tribesmen fought over; in this case the goods were highly prized and useful machetes. Chagnon, however, insists that his presence had had no influence whatsoever on the situation, citing the fact that similar fights happened when he wasn't present, which he also documented through informants. Curtis asked, "You don't think a film crew in the middle of a fight in a village has an effect?" Chagnon replied, "No, I don't," and immediately stopped the interview. 

Footage of Richard Dawkins propounding his gene-centered view of evolution is shown, with archive clips spanning two decades to emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour have slowly been absorbed by mainstream culture. (Later, however, the documentary gives evidence that cells are able to selectively replicate parts of DNA dependent on current needs. According to Curtis, such evidence detracts from the simplified economic models of human beings.) This brings Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of the Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the "robotic" description of mankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more currency with society's engineers. 

The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure everything it could by introducing such arbitrary and unmeasurable targets as:

• Reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48%
• Reduction of global conflict by 6%

It also introduced a rural community vibrancy index in order to gauge the quality of life in Britain's villages and a birdsong index to measure the apparent decline of wildlife. 

In industry and public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas and plans. It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose. What the government did not realise was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat.

Curtis describes how, in order to meet arbitrary targets:

• Lothian and Borders Police reclassified dozens of criminal offences as "suspicious occurrences" in order to keep them out of crime figures;
• Some NHS hospital trusts created the unofficial post of "The Hello Nurse," whose sole task it was to greet new arrivals in order to claim for statistical purposes that the patient had been "seen", even though no treatment or examination took place during the encounter;
• NHS managers took the wheels off trolleys and reclassified them as beds, while simultaneously reclassifying corridors as wards, in order to falsify Accident & Emergency waiting times statistics.

In a section called 'The Death of Social Mobility', Curtis describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education. In the UK, the introduction of school performance league tables was intended to give individual schools more power and autonomy, to enable them to compete for pupils, the theory being that it would motivate the worst-performing schools to improve; it was an attempt to move away from the rigid state control that had offered little choice to parents while failing to improve educational standards, and towards a culture of free choice and incentivisation, without going as far as privatising the schools. Following publication of the school league tables, wealthier parents moved into the catchment areas of the best schools, causing house prices in those areas to rise dramatically—ensuring that poor children were left with the worst-performing schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of working class Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the middle class have increased slightly, and those of the highest one percent of earners (the upper class) have quadrupled. Similarly, babies in the poorest areas in the UK are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas. 

Curtis ends part two with the observation that game theory and the free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

Contributors

• James M. Buchanan, winner of Economics Prize for public choice theory
• Philip Mirowski, historian and philosopher of economics and politics
• Robert Rubin, economic adviser to Clinton
• Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton (1993–1997)
• Thomas Frank, political journalist
• John Maynard Smith, geneticist (speaking in 1976)
• Napoleon Chagnon, anthropologist (filmed The Ax Fight in 1975)
• Richard Dawkins, popularizer of genetics (speaking in 1987)
• Paul McHugh, psychiatrist-in-chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital
• Robert Spitzer, chair of the DSM-III task force
• Dr Jerome Wakefield, psychiatrist
• Arthur Levitt, SEC Chair under Clinton (1993–2001)
• Itzhak Sharav, accounting professor
• Kevin Phillips, political analyst
• Brian Ferguson, anthropologist
• John Nash, winner of the Economics Prize for game theory

Part 3. "We Will Force You to Be Free"

Archive interview with Isaiah Berlin

 

The final part focusses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explains how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfil one's potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin's essays on the topic and wrote to him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. As Berlin was on his deathbed at the time, Blair never got a reply.

The programme begins with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty and Berlin's opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the safest of the two concepts. Curtis then explains how many political groups that sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it. For example, the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in doing so they ended up with the Reign of Terror. Similarly, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the established order and replace it with a society in which everyone is equal, ended up creating a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its objectives.

Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve one's goals, but also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms, was an idea developed by Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He developed it from the existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that terrorism was a "terrible weapon, but the oppressed poor have no others." These views were expressed, for example, in the revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers. 

This part also explores how economic freedom had been used in Russia and the problems this had introduced. A set of policies known as "shock therapy" (also described in the 2007 book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein) were brought in mainly by outsiders, which had the effect of destroying the social safety net that existed in most other western nations and Russia. In the latter, the sudden removal of the subsidies for basic goods caused their prices to rise enormously, making them hardly affordable to ordinary people. An economic crisis escalated during the 1990s and some people were paid in goods rather than money. Then-president Boris Yeltsin was accused by his parliamentary deputies of "economic genocide" due to the large numbers of people now too poor to eat. Yeltsin responded to this by removing parliament's power and becoming more autocratic. 

At the same time, many formerly state-owned industries were sold to private businesses, often at a fraction of their real value. Ordinary people, often in financial difficulties, would sell shares, which to them were worthless, for cash, without appreciating their true value. This culminated with the rise of the "Oligarchs"—super-rich businessmen who attributed their rise to the sell-offs of the 90s. It resulted in a polarisation of society into the poor and ultra-rich, and indirectly led to a more autocratic style of government under Vladimir Putin, which, while less free, promised to give people dignity and basic living requirements. 

There is a similar review of post-war Iraq, in which an even more extreme "shock therapy" was employed—the removal from government of all Ba'ath party employees and the introduction of economic models which followed the simplified economic model of human beings outlined in the first two parts—this resulted in the immediate disintegration of Iraqi society and the rise of two strongly autocratic insurgencies: one based on Sunni-Ba'athist ideals and another based on revolutionary Shi'a philosophies. 

Curtis also looks at the neoconservative agenda of the 1980s. Like Sartre, they argued that violence is sometimes necessary to achieve their goals, except they wished to spread what they described as democracy. Curtis quotes General Alexander Haig, then-US Secretary of State, as saying that, "Some things were worth fighting for." However, Curtis argues, although the version of society espoused by the neoconservatives made some concessions towards freedom, it did not offer true freedom. Although the neoconservatives, for example, forced the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile and the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines to hold democratic elections, these transformations to democracy essentially replaced one elite with another, and the gap between those who have power and wealth, and those who have neither, remained; the freedom the change provided was therefore relatively narrow in concept. 

The neoconservatives wanted to change or overthrow the Sandinistas—a socialist group in Nicaragua—who were seen as tyrannical, destabilising, and a threat to US security; the US therefore supported anti-communist rebels known collectively as the Contras, who, Curtis states, carried out many violations of human rights, including the torture and murder of civilians. US Government financial support to the Contras had been banned by the US Congress, so other means were used to continue financing them, including the CIA allegedly providing aircraft for the rebels to fly cocaine into the United States, as well as the Iran–Contra affair in which the US illegally supplied weapons to the Iranian government, originally in exchange for assistance to gain the release of US prisoners in Lebanon, but also allegedly for cash which was then given to the Contras. Curtis uses this as another example of how the neoconservatives had fallen into the trap that Berlin had predicted: although they wanted to spread negative freedom, because they saw their ideology as an absolute truth they were able to justify using coercion and lies and also to support violence in order to perpetuate it. 

However such policies did not always result in the achievement of neoconservative aims and occasionally threw up genuine surprises. Curtis examines the Western-backed government of the Shah in Iran, and how the mixing of Sartre's positive libertarian ideals with Shia religious philosophy led to the revolution which overthrew it. Having previously been a meek philosophy of acceptance of the social order, in the minds of revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, Revolutionary Shia Islam became a meaningful force to overthrow tyranny. 

The programme examines the government of Tony Blair and its role in achieving its vision of a stable society. In fact, argues Curtis, the Blair government had created the opposite of freedom, in that the type of liberty it had engendered wholly lacked any kind of meaning. Its military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the UK and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions on liberty. 

In essence, the programme suggests that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, results in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves. 

The closing minutes directly state that if Western humans are ever to find their way out of the "trap" described in the series, they would have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong, and that not all attempts to change the world for the better necessarily lead to tyranny.

Contributors

• Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher
• Kenneth Clark, historian, presenter of BBC TV series Civilisation
• Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist
• Stuart Hall, cultural historian
• Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher
• Frantz Fanon, psychoanalyst, revolutionary
• Jim Howard, field director, OXFAM
• Michael Ledeen, advocate of US regime change policy
• Alexander Haig, first US Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan
• Samuel P. Huntington, US political scientist
• Elliott Abrams, Assistant US Secretary of State 1981–1989
• Robert Parry, Press Association reporter in Nicaragua in the 1980s
• Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher
• Jeffrey Sachs, US economist
• Yevgeny Kiselyov, general director of NTV, Russian TV station

Reception

Economist Max Steuer criticised the documentary for "romanticis[ing] the past while misrepresenting the ideas it purports to explain"; for example, Curtis suggests that the work of Buchanan and others on public choice theory made Government officials wicked and selfish, rather than simply providing an account of what happened.

In the New Statesman, Rachel Cooke argued that the series doesn't make a coherent argument. She said that while she was glad Adam Curtis made provocative documentaries, he was as much of a propagandist as those he opposes.

While commending the series, Radio Times stated that The Trap's subject matter was not ideal for its 21:00 Sunday timeslot on the minority BBC Two. This placed The Trap against Castaway 2007 on BBC One, the drama Fallen Angel, the first two episodes in a series of high-profile Jane Austen adaptations on ITV1, and the sixth season of 24 on Sky One. However, the series had a consistent share of the viewing audience throughout its original run:

1. "Fuck You Buddy" (11 March 2007): ~ 1.4 million viewers; 6% audience share
2. "The Lonely Robot" (18 March 2007): ~ 1.3 million viewers; 6% audience share
3. "We Will Force You to Be Free" (25 March 2007) ~ 1.3 million viewers; 6% audience share

Featured music

• "The Godfathers at Home" from The Godfather Part II soundtrack (opening title)
• "Intermezzo" from The Karelia Suite by Jean Sibelius (opening title, episode one; also in episode three)
• "Return to Hot Chicken", from the album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One by Yo La Tengo
• "Nowhere Near" from the album Painful by Yo La Tengo
• "On Some Faraway Beach", from the album Here Come the Warm Jets by Brian Eno
• "Age of Consent", from the album Power, Corruption & Lies by New Order
• "Assault on Precinct 13 (Main Title)" from the Assault on Precinct 13 soundtrack by John Carpenter
• "Scene d'Amour", "Interlude", "The Reunion", "The Match Box" and other movements from the Vertigo and North by Northwest scores by Bernard Herrmann
• "Cosmonaute" from the album Monokini by Stereo Total
• "Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee
• "Becalmed" from the album Another Green World by Brian Eno
• "Taking Tiger Mountain" from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy by Brian Eno
• "The Thing (Main Title)" from The Thing score by Ennio Morricone
• "Profondamente, Nel Mostro - Part 1" from Il Mostro score by Ennio Morricone, used near the end of the first and the third (Yeltsin part) episode.
• "Contest Winners" from the Carrie score by Pino Donaggio
• "Great Release" from LCD Soundsystem by LCD Soundsystem
• "La Marseillaise" (end credits, episode three)
• The Gadfly, Op. 97 "Romance" by Dmitri Shostakovich
• "Theme from Starman" (1984 film by John Carpenter) by Jack Nitzsche
• "The Aquarium" from "Le Carnaval des Animaux" by Camille Saint-Saëns
• "Theme from Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man" (1981 film by Bernardo Bertolucci) by Ennio Morricone

From the motion picture Carrie: "For the Last Time We'll Pray" by Pino Donaggio.

Rosenhan experiment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

The main building of St Elizabeths Hospital (1996), located in Washington, D.C., now boarded up and abandoned, was one of the sites of the Rosenhan experiment

 

The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The experimenters feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals, and acted normally afterwards. They were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and were given antipsychotic drugs. The study was conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan, 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.

Rosenhan's study was done in eight parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including Rosenhan 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 felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. 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 an offended hospital administration challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 250 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 2 of these receiving suspicion from at least one psychiatrist and one other staff member. In fact, Rosenhan had sent no pseudopatients to the hospital. 

While listening to a lecture by R. D. Laing, who was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, Rosenhan 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.

In a 2019 popular book on Rosenhan by author Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender, the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment has been questioned.

Pseudopatient experiment

Rosenhan himself and seven mentally healthy associates, called "pseudopatients", attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by calling for an appointment and feigning auditory hallucinations. The hospital staff were not informed of the experiment. The pseudopatients included a psychology graduate student in his twenties, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter, and a housewife. None had a history of mental illness. Pseudopatients used pseudonyms, and those who worked in the mental health field were given false jobs in a different sector to avoid invoking any special treatment or scrutiny. Apart from giving false names and employment details, further biographical details were truthfully reported.

During their initial psychiatric assessment, the pseudopatients claimed to be hearing voices of the same sex as the patient which were often unclear, but which seemed to pronounce the words "empty", "hollow", or "thud", and nothing else. These words were chosen as they vaguely suggest some sort of existential crisis and for the lack of any published literature referencing them as psychotic symptoms. No other psychiatric symptoms were claimed. If admitted, the pseudopatients were instructed to "act normally", reporting that they felt fine and no longer heard voices. Hospital records obtained after the experiment indicate that all pseudopatients were characterized as friendly and cooperative by staff.

All were admitted, to 12 psychiatric hospitals across the United States, including rundown and underfunded public hospitals in rural areas, urban university-run hospitals with excellent reputations, and one expensive private hospital. Though presented with identical symptoms, seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia at public hospitals, and one with manic-depressive psychosis, a more optimistic diagnosis with better clinical outcomes, at the private hospital. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, and the average was 19 days. All were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia "in remission", which Rosenhan considered as evidence that mental illness is perceived as an irreversible condition creating a lifelong stigma rather than a curable illness.

Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors. In the first three hospitalizations, 35 of the total of 118 patients expressed a suspicion that the pseudopatients were sane, with some suggesting that the patients were researchers or journalists investigating the hospital. Hospital notes indicated that staff interpreted much of the pseudopatients' behavior in terms of mental illness. For example, one nurse labeled the note-taking of one pseudopatient as "writing behavior" and considered it pathological. The patients' normal biographies were recast in hospital records along the lines of what was expected of schizophrenics by the then-dominant theories of its cause.

The experiment required the pseudopatients to get out of the hospital on their own by getting the hospital to release them, though a lawyer was retained to be on call for emergencies when it became clear that the pseudopatients would not ever be voluntarily released on short notice. Once admitted and diagnosed, the pseudopatients were not able to obtain their release until they agreed with the psychiatrists that they were mentally ill and began taking antipsychotic medications, which they flushed down the toilet. No staff member reported that the pseudopatients were flushing their medication down the toilets. 

Rosenhan and the other pseudopatients reported an overwhelming sense of dehumanization, severe invasion of privacy, and boredom while hospitalized. Their possessions were searched randomly, and they were sometimes observed while using the toilet. They reported that though the staff seemed to be well-meaning, they generally objectified and dehumanized the patients, often discussing patients at length in their presence as though they were not there, and avoiding direct interaction with patients except as strictly necessary to perform official duties. Some attendants were prone to verbal and physical abuse of patients when other staff were not present. A group of bored patients waiting outside the cafeteria for lunch early were said by a doctor to his students to be experiencing "oral-acquisitive" psychiatric symptoms. Contact with doctors averaged 6.8 minutes per day.

Non-existent impostor experiment

For this experiment, Rosenhan used a well-known research and teaching hospital, whose staff had heard of the results of the initial study but claimed that similar errors could not be made at their institution. Rosenhan arranged with them that during a three-month period, one or more pseudopatients would attempt to gain admission and the staff would rate every incoming patient as to the likelihood they were an impostor. Out of 193 patients, 41 were considered to be impostors and a further 42 were considered suspect. In reality, Rosenhan had sent no pseudopatients; all patients suspected as impostors by the hospital staff were ordinary patients. This led to a conclusion that "any diagnostic process that lends itself too readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one".

Impact and controversy

Rosenhan published his findings in Science, in which he criticized the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and the disempowering and demeaning nature of patient care experienced by the associates in the study. In addition, he described his work in a variety of news appearances, including to the BBC:

I told friends, I told my family: "I can get out when I can get out. That's all. I'll be there for a couple of days and I'll get out." Nobody knew I'd be there for two months ... The only way out was to point out that they're [the psychiatrists] correct. They had said I was insane, "I am insane; but I am getting better." That was an affirmation of their view of me.

The article generated an explosion of controversy. The experiment is argued to have "accelerated the movement to reform mental institutions and to deinstitutionalize as many mental patients as possible".

Many respondents to the publication defended psychiatry, arguing that as psychiatric diagnosis relies largely on the patient's report of their experiences, faking their presence no more demonstrates problems with psychiatric diagnosis than lying about other medical symptoms. In this vein, psychiatrist Robert Spitzer quoted Seymour S. Kety in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan's study:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behavior of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labeled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

Kety also argued that psychiatrists should not necessarily be expected to assume that a patient is pretending to have mental illness, thus the study lacked realism. Rosenhan called this the "experimenter effect" or "expectation bias", something indicative of the problems he uncovered rather than a problem in his methodology. Others have pointed out that a competent psychiatrist or psychologist would be aware of the possibility of transient symptoms and would be willing to consider other explanations for a seemingly brief symptom, than the lifelong organic mental illness they instead insisted upon being acknowledged by the patient.

In a 2019 popular book on Rosenhan by author Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender, the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment has been questioned; Cahalan argues that Rosenhan never published further work on the experiment's data, nor did he deliver on a book on it that he had promised. Moreover, after half a century, she could not find experiment's subjects, save two—Rosenhan himself, dead since then, and another volunteer, whose testimony was allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's statements. Susannah concluded that she cannot be completely certain that Rosenhan cheated, despite titling her book 'The Great Pretender'.

Related experiments

In 1887 American investigative journalist Nellie Bly feigned symptoms of mental illness to gain admission to a lunatic asylum and report on the terrible conditions therein. The results were published as Ten Days in a Mad-House.

In 1968 Maurice K. Temerlin split 25 psychiatrists into two groups and had them listen to an actor portraying a character of normal mental health. One group was told that the actor "was a very interesting man because he looked neurotic, but actually was quite psychotic" while the other was told nothing. Sixty percent of the former group diagnosed psychoses, most often schizophrenia, while none of the control group did so.

In 1988, Loring and Powell gave 290 psychiatrists a transcript of a patient interview and told half of them that the patient was black and the other half white; they concluded of the results that "clinicians appear to ascribe violence, suspiciousness, and dangerousness to black clients even though the case studies are the same as the case studies for the white clients."

In 2004, psychologist Lauren Slater claimed to have conducted an experiment very similar to Rosenhan's for her book Opening Skinner's Box. Slater wrote that she had presented herself at 9 psychiatric emergency rooms with auditory hallucinations, resulting in being diagnosed "almost every time" with psychotic depression. However, when challenged to provide evidence of actually conducting her experiment, she could not. The serious methodologic and other concerns regarding Slater's work appeared as a series of responses to a journal report, in the same journal.

In popular media

In 2008, the BBC's Horizon science program performed a somewhat related experiment over two episodes entitled "How Mad Are You?". The experiment involved ten subjects, five with previously diagnosed mental health conditions, and five with no such diagnosis. They were observed by three experts in mental health diagnoses and their challenge was to identify the five with mental health problems solely from their behavior, without speaking to the subjects or learning anything of their histories. The experts correctly diagnosed two of the ten patients, misdiagnosed one patient, and incorrectly identified two healthy patients as having mental health problems. Unlike the other experiments listed here, however, the aim of this journalistic exercise was not to criticize the diagnostic process, but to minimize the stigmatization of the mentally ill. It aimed to illustrate that people with a previous diagnosis of a mental illness could live normal lives with their health problems not obvious to observers from their behavior.