What would it take to be labeled insane?

In 1887, Nellie Bly checked herself into a New York asylum to find out. She got in with surprising ease. Getting out was something else entirely.

Nearly a century later, David Rosenhan ran an experiment to see if anything had changed. Healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals, claimed to hear a single voice, and were admitted. Once inside, they acted completely normal. It didn’t matter.

This episode follows both investigations from the inside and looks at what they revealed about how systems make decisions and why those decisions are so difficult to reverse.

Attribution Notes:

• Every effort was made to cross-check primary sources and modern research. Where paraphrasing is used, it’s drawn from the texts below with narrative license for clarity and flow.
• If you spot an error or have a source to suggest, DM @thisagainshow

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This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust.

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59899

Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179, no. 4070 (1973): 250–258. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1735662

Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Spitzer, Robert L. “On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 84, no. 5 (1975): 442–452. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-00177-001

Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.