Blog > Thoughts > Sean's Thoughts > You Can’t Tell Just By Looking
You Can’t Tell Just By Looking
Written by Sean on Thursday, May 6, 2010
I recently caught a fascinating documentary on TV. It was called “How Mad Are You?” by Horizon, and originally aired in 2008 on the BBC. It doesn’t discuss BIID, but it certainly made for a fascinating experiment.
Here’s the description of the documentary:
Ten volunteers have come together for an extraordinary test. Five are ‘normal’ and the other five have been officially diagnosed as mentally ill. Horizon asks if you can tell who is who, and considers where the line between sanity and madness lies.
They had the volunteers go through a series of tests and challenges. Three well known mental health professionals were asked to observe the volunteers via camera going through these challenges, and then, try to sort out who had, or not, a diagnosed mental illness. I was very interested to see that Dr. Michael First was one of the specialists invited to make that diagnostic work.
The three experts were, in the end, able to correctly identify the diagnosis for only 2 people. Yep, after a full week of observing people’s behaviour, they were only able to put the right "label" on 2 of the 10 participants.
At the beginning of the documentary, they talk about the 1973 experiment by Dr David Rosenhan. This guy conducted an experiment with several associates. They all voluntarily checked themselves in psychiatric in-patient wards. Only 2 out of 9 associates were not mental health professionals. They did not behave in any way to "cheat" or give false impressions. But without a fail, they were all diagnosed as "crazy". Things like writing in a journal as put down in case-notes as "compulsive writing". It shows that mental health professionals have to take a good look at how they do things.
The results of this particular study for the documentary were also fascinating. Seeing the shrinks discuss and debate and question who had which condition was really fascinating. They were laughing at their own inability to determine anything with certainty.
This confirms something I’d known for a long time. People can’t tell we have BIID just by looking at us. Even those who know us well.
Crazy is as crazy does, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder in the end!
Tags: BIID, Documentary, Mental Health, Psychiatrist
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8 Comments
Of course… In my case you can tell by looking, because after my face I don’t have an area that’s free of self-inflicted scars.
When I meet someone for the first time I always assume that they are crazy. I’m usually right, which is a good thing because that means they are eligible to become my friend. If someone insists that they are normal and have never had any mental illness, I stay well clear of them. Such assertions are typical of serial killers.
I started working at the psychiatric hospital here nineteen years ago this month. I was unaware of the system at the cafeteria, which is that lunch is free for the patients, full price for visitors, and discounted for employees. The guy behind the counter asked me if I was a patient, and I started laughing. I wasn’t laughing at the question; I was laughing because I was thinking that I really did belong on the locked ward upstairs. He got defensive and said “I can’t tell the difference you know!”
Every day I get to talk with people who are having serious enough problems with mental illness that they have been hospitalised. We have nice chats in the lunch line or at a table. By and large the only ones who might attract a second glance are those so heavily medicated that they are shuffling around in a daze.
It has come to my attention that there are certain people who engage in compulsive writing on this website; lunatics all!
4 On 6 May, 2010, art5080 said:
So, do all of us get a free lunch?
(here at the Devotee, Wannabee, Pretender, BIID Asylum – that is).
/Art
I long ago became convinced that the essential diffeence between the supposedly sane and the supposedly crazy is social acceptability of behavior.
@Art: Today at the cafeteria I again had lunch with my paraplegic friend. It’s amazing the magnetic attraction that wheelchairs have for each other. I wonder if the manufacturers have ever thought of making non-magnetic wheelchairs.
I had the fried chicken. My friend did not. Instead he opted for the unrecognisable futuristic slimy looking
substance. Despite this obvious insanity he was denied a free lunch. Apparently the criteria are strict indeed.
Some nasty person wrote a comment here implying that the more a person writes on this website the more insane they must be. Since Sean writes more than anyone else here, it is quite possible that only he qualifies for the free lunch.
Something I noticed watching that documentary is the amount of women the shrinks analysing the group seemed to pick. It made me feel like women acting weird are seen as *more* crazy than a man who does the same thing.
Am I reading too much into this? But out of all the people they chose to talk to, to analyse furthur, only one was male.
@LusyLu: That’s an interesting observation. Historically, the medical profession has been predominantly male and has viewed women as being physically and psychologically inferior. Simply the usage of the word hysteria (from hustera, the Greek for uterus) says a lot.
I consistently advise my female friends to seek female health care professionals where possible. I’m usuallly not so sexist but my personal experience, and that of many other women, has been that men often seem ill-suited to these professions, as exemplified by their condescending attitute towards women. There are exceptions of course, and I have been well pleased with my most recent psychotherapist who is male.
I’m wondering if the origin of this is simply that, in many people’s minds, the word “different” is synonymous with “inferior” or “crazy”.
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1 On 6 May, 2010, Gravity said:
This was really interesting.
I particularly liked that they thought the bipolar woman was definitely completely stable.
It’s interesting though… I think this has something to do with our tendency to put labels on personality traits.
I’m diagnosed with depression, and I take medication for it. I have obsessive personality traits, that are not an illness, but may appear so to someone looking for it.
If anyone is watched intently people would see some odd things; no one is normal. People would see me washing my hands twice, and put a label of OCD on it. The difference between that and my depression is that I SOUGHT HELP for the depression. I sought help because I couldn’t function, because I was very unwell.
That, surely, is the point at which a personality trait becomes a problem? The point at which your life cannot continue as normal.