David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

The problem of false priors, deliberate misdirection, and motivated reasoning are insidious. Having to un-learn false models is difficult and expensive, personally, bit especially socially.

Even if Rosenhan's experiment was a fraud, the notion that psychiatric institutions or the field of psychology does not engage in the practice of arbitrary, thinly-supported, or entirely fictitious diagnosis, or failure to account for changes in condition, at least at times isn't disproved. And ... at least to my lay understanding ... this does seem to manifest elsewhere than in Rosenhan's accounts.

There are two competing sets of motivated reasoning to be considered here, which makes determination of ground truth that much more difficult.

On false priors, I've been familiar for a time with the notion of "Wittgenstein's Ladder", a/k/a "Lies told to children" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder):

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

-- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.54

This leads to the challenge over time of finding oneself having climbed the ladder, but in discussions with others, constantly confronted with it, and having to explain around or over it. Wittgenstein's Ladder becomes, when erected horizontally across a passage of understanding rather than vertically to greater heights or across gulfs, Wittgenstein's Barricade.

It's this constant having-to-retread-fundamentals which seems to actively impede further development of knowledge and understanding, and which I've found increasingly intolerable in much popular media and discussion. Worse when it's not even the fundamentals which are being retread, but someone's self-serving current reformulation (often worse than the original). See Schopenhauer's "On Authorship".

Ultimately he claimed to have eight pseudo-patients, but investigation has turned up three, and none match what was described in the paper. (Eg, Rosenhan said it was easy to be admitted, even after showing limited symptoms, but he was actually only admitted after showing extreme symptoms. He said life while admitted was dreadful, but one of the subjects was dropped because he found it peaceful and helpful.)

Occam's razor suggests that there were only 3-4, he lied about their results, and made up the rest. But maybe there were some others, and maybe some of them actually had experiences similar to the paper? But even so, at best, he lied, filtered data, and reported very mixed results as being anything but. More likely....yes, complete horseshit.

There's no real defence of his work possible; at this point it's just speculating over whether it was all lies, or just a misleading mixture of lies and truth, and trying to estimate the damage it did.