> Do you think if the same experiment were to be repeated today; the results would be different?
Yes. Big institutions have closed. Smaller hospitals replaced them and most people get treated in the community.
For example: my county has a population of about 600,000 people. About 4,500 people are on the books of the local MH trust at any time. There are only about 150 inpatient beds at any time.
People only go into hospital if they are a danger to themselves or others - hearing a voice that says "empty" or "hollow" or "thud" is not something anyone would be hospitalised for.
To get a diagnosis of schizophrenia you have to match the symptoms over a six month period and be assessed by the same doctor during that time. one of the benefits of the DSM / ICD is that doctors now use a set of standards when diagnosing mental illness.
The paper suggests that this is only a problem with psychiatry. This is something you hear from lot of people. "No test exists to diagnose a psychiatric illness, thus psychiatry is a sham. Look, I can get diagnosed if I lie to doctors!" This ignores the fact that there are a bunch of physical-health diseases you can get diagnosed with if you lie to doctors, but we don't call those a sham. Your link even talks about that:
> Many 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 Kety in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan's study :[5]
>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.
Your link mentions RD Laing in the lead. RD Laing is now thoroughly discredited. (Although he did have some interesting ideas). You should read some of his books.
> Many 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 Kety in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan's study :[5]
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.
> The link mentions related experiments with similar results as recent as 2008
No it does not.
There's a probable hoax from someone who can't provide any evidence, from 2004; and a totally different "experiment" (tv show) from 2008 where doctors were not allowed to interact with patients. You'd get similar results if the patients had physical health ailments.