A journey into the nature of sanity

“IF SANITY AND INSANITY exist, how shall we know them?” So begins a landmark 1973 study by Stanford psychology professor David Rosenhan, who persuaded eight healthy people to feign hallucinations and commit themselves to mental asylums. Once inside, they would have to prove their sanity to get out. The study’s impact was explosive, demonstrating that even trained professionals struggled to tell the difference between the mentally ill and the mentally healthy. It was so pivotal in reshaping our understanding and diagnosis of madness that 46 years later, it is still taught widely.

In journalist Susannah Cahalan turns her investigative skills to this famous experiment. Her interest in the trauma of being labeled insane is personal: at 24, She was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder before it emerged that she had a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. “For every miracle like me, there are … a thousand rotting away in jails or abandoned on the streets for the sin of being mentally ill,” she writes, “a million told that it’s all in their heads, as if our brains aren’t inside those heads.”