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Words: | Submitted: Mon Sep 22 2003
... classification to be of real value then it must be valid and reliable. Research has suggested that psychiatric research is notoriously unreliable and studies have shown that even very experienced psychiatrists only agree about 50% of the time outlined by Rosenhan's experiment. In this experiment he sent "patients" with pretend schizophrenia into a mental hospital and then they acted "sane", in which some were retained for up to 30 days, in which he concluded that psychiatrists couldn't tell the sane from the insane. Szasz suggested that "madness" is manufactured to label those people in society who do not conform to rules of social or to conventional moral standards. Society sets up rules for behaviour and anyone who breaks these rules are labelled deviant. Historically deviant behaviour has been used to even lock up political dissidents, but in present western culture, the term "mental disorder" is not used to define mental "deviant" ...
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