Finally, I shared the letters with Florence, the keeper of the files, to get her take. With her clinical eye, honed from years as a psychologist at an acute care facility and working with the “worried well” in her private practice, I believed her when she concluded: “There’s no way that Mary was a pseudopatient. She was a real patient.”
Why, then, did Rosenhan file this inside his unpublished book on the pseudopatients? If the letter had arrived only after his study, I wondered if “use letter from Cincinnati” could mean that he’d planned to supplement his discussions in the book with Mary’s experiences. It was a possibility, at least, though he had not yet used any hospitalizations other than the pseudopatients’ in the existing drafts of the book.
In addition to Mary’s letters, Rosenhan kept among his notes two journals: the first, one-hundred-plus pages from a Swarthmore undergraduate who in the summer of 1969 spent a month at Massachusetts General Hospital observing their psychiatric unit; and the second, unfinished diaries from two Penn State undergraduates, who, following the publication of Rosenhan’s study, went undercover in Pennsylvania psychiatric hospitals. Why had Rosenhan kept these files, yet retained none of his own pseudopatients’ notes?
More questions—zero answers.
Despite a glimmer of hope, the Beasleys, pseudopatients #2 and #3, and Martha Coates, #4, remained at large.
I naively thought that Carl, the recently minted psychologist whom Rosenhan feared was becoming addicted to the pseudopatient charade, would be simple to track down, thanks to reporting done before me. Several people had suggested that Martin Seligman, considered “the founding father of positive psychology,” who coined the term learned helplessness, was a pseudopatient. His biography matched up with only one: Carl, my #7. When I reached him and eventually interviewed him, however, he delivered the bad news—he was not Rosenhan’s pseudopatient, though he did go undercover at Norristown State Hospital with Rosenhan for two days in 1973 after the publication of “On Being Sane in Insane Places” to help Rosenhan gather more color for his book. Medical records I tracked down confirmed this.
So it was back to square one. If Rosenhan’s notes were to be believed, Carl’s age distinguished him. He seemed to be somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-eight, high for a newbie psychologist who had only recently received his clinical PhD. I knew he wasn’t at Stanford because the university didn’t offer an advanced degree in clinical psychology, meaning that Carl likely came from another institution, and, let’s be honest, that institution could be anywhere on the East or West Coasts (really anywhere in between, too). Even though I now considered Rosenhan to be at best an unreliable narrator, he was the only guide I had. But after hundreds of emails exchanged with anyone ever connected with Rosenhan, hours spent on the phone, and days sorting through his papers and correspondences to find any legitimate clues, I was giving up hope. No one fit the bill—until one finally did.
I kept coming across the name Perry London. It’s too bad Perry isn’t here, people kept saying to me. He’d know everything. Rosenhan and Perry worked and played together, co-authoring over a dozen papers, mainly on hypnosis, and writing two abnormal psychology textbooks together. Both were larger than life (though Perry, unlike Rosenhan, was large in stature, too); both had big booming laughs with big booming personalities. Perry would know all there was to know about the study—if anyone did—but he had died in 1992. The past was largely buried and gone until I arrived in the Londons’ lives, reopening old wounds in an effort to resurrect a man I’d never met.
His daughter Miv, a psychotherapist in Vermont, responded to my email and connected me with her mother, Vivian London, Perry’s ex-wife. I was properly vetted enough for Vivian to Skype with me from her home in Israel. She reminded me of my mother, and not just because they were both born in the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx, but also because they both have tough, take-no-shit exteriors. She shared the origin story of Perry and Rosenhan’s long-standing friendship. Vivian had connected them when Rosenhan worked as a counselor at the summer camp that her family owned.
“Everyone loved David,” she told me. He was the kind of counselor who could calm any homesick child, curling up beside a particularly upset one and soothing him to sleep. One summer when Rosenhan couldn’t attend, he sent a friend of his to take his place as a counselor. The following year this friend couldn’t make it and sent another friend in his stead, a boisterous young man named Perry London. Vivian and Perry started a summer fling that led to a wedding that also led to Vivian’s introducing Rosenhan to Perry.
When I mentioned “Carl Wendt,” my seventh pseudopatient, and the brief description that Rosenhan had included in his notes, Vivian stopped me. “Was he an accountant in Los Angeles?” she asked.
“He may have been.”
“That outline kind of matches a good friend of Perry’s in Los Angeles.”
“What was his name?”
She hesitated. I pressed. She pushed back. For the next five minutes, we debated. What if he doesn’t want to be found? she asked. If he kept this secret for this many years, maybe he didn’t want to expose it? I countered, explaining that there was nothing to be ashamed of and if his family wanted him to remain anonymous, I would follow their wishes. Eventually, she relented.
“Maury Leibovitz,” she said.
The name sounded so familiar. Vivian told me a bit more about this Maury character: Maury, like Carl, left behind a lucrative accounting gig in his early middle age to return to school and get a doctorate in psychology. He landed at USC, where Perry London became his teacher, mentor, and close friend. It was not implausible (at all!) that Rosenhan would have reached out to Perry for help in finding pseudopatients or that Rosenhan would have met Perry’s students during, say, a Friday-night Shabbat party (there were lots of those happening then). There was only one degree of separation between Rosenhan and Maury. And Maury fit the Carl bill to a T. Maury was even a fan of tennis, according to Vivian, which matched Rosenhan’s comment in a draft of his book that called Maury “athletic.”
When we logged off Skype, Vivian sent me a follow-up email. She was nearly as excited as I was. “It has become obvious to me that Maury is your man. I don’t even understand how I could have doubted it.”
I put on a pot of coffee, opened up my filing cabinet, which was filled with photocopies of Florence’s files, and resumed my dig. I was sure I had seen that name, Maury Leibovitz, before at some point, but I couldn’t place it. It didn’t take me long to find a reference. In that same outline of his book, marked in pencil—right by the CINCINNATI note that (mis)led me to Mary—Rosenhan wrote the word: LEIBOVITCH.
Did he mean Leibovitz?
It made so much sense. Not only did the two have a friend in common, but Rosenhan, I found, actually wrote a letter of recommendation for Leibovitz in November 1970, which meant that they also had a working relationship. This couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
Maurice (“Maury”) Leibovitz wasn’t exactly difficult to track down. A Google search yielded a glowing New York Times obituary, published the same year Perry died. He was a major figure in the art scene in New York as the vice chairman and president of the Knoedler Gallery (now defunct after lawsuits for fraud long after Leibovitz’s death), a New York institution. New Yorkers regularly walk by the Gertrude Stein statue sculpted by Jo Davidson in Bryant Park, which Maury donated to the city.
With Maury Leibovitz came a theory about how a famous painter—pseudopatient #5, Chestnut Lodge’s “Laura Martin”—got involved with the study. Maury Leibovitz was a man deeply embedded in the art world. He could easily have been the bridge between Rosenhan and Laura.
Leibovitz was survived by three sons, an ex-wife, and a girlfriend. Of the sons, Dr. Josh Leibovitz, a Portland-based addiction specialist who had inherited his father’s interest in the mind, was the easiest mark. I left a message at his office and waited.
The next day a man’s Southern California drawl greeted me on the phone.
“I have reason to believe that your father was one of [Rosenhan’s] pseudopatients, one of the volunteers. Does this make sense to you at all?” I asked Dr. Leibovitz.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes.” I could feel my heart jumping up to my throat. Seconds passed before he spoke again.
“No,” he said steadily. “I don’t believe that is true.”
I sighed. Over the course of the next twenty minutes I tried to make my case, which Dr. Leibovitz batted down: Maury would have been too old to be my Carl (Maury was fifty-two, when Rosenhan listed him as anywhere from thirty-eight to forty-eight, depending on the document, though, really, how much could we trust Rosenhan’s descriptions at this point?). He also was famously claustrophobic and would never have allowed himself to be confined to a mental hospital. And finally, the family was out of the country in Zurich during the time that the study took place.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “But it’s not my dad.”
But it was. It had to be. I pushed, positing the delicate question: Could it be possible he didn’t know his father as well as he thought he did?
“I’ve got to tell you, my dad was not a man to keep secrets. We were extremely close, so I doubt he would withhold something like that. I mean, I knew every detail of his life,” he said. “My dad would have probably written a book about it. He would not have been quiet about it.”
But why, I added, would the name Leibovitz, though spelled wrong, be in Rosenhan’s notes? I was like a bloodhound on a scent, and nothing he could say or do would knock me off it. I asked him to speak with his mother—she would have noticed that her husband was absent for at least sixty days (this was another issue with Carl: Some of Rosenhan’s documents said he was in for sixty days over three hospitalizations, while others said seventy-six days over four hospitalizations), so to my mind she would be the deciding vote. He promised to get back to me with an answer but denied my request to speak to her directly, effectively asking me not to waste his elderly mother’s remaining moments on earth.
At this point, I was clinging to the hope that this would all work out like a Doomsday cult member clings to her belief that the end is nigh even as the sun rises the next morning.
Another setback came that same week, this time in the form of a text message from the Chestnut Lodge psychologist, who had finished going through the hospital’s patient files.
“No one with the name or initials [of Laura Martin] was admitted in the late 60’s or early 70s.” Worse still, no person from 1968 through 1973 stayed at the hospital for only fifty-two days. The average stay, even into the 1980s, was fifteen months. “There was no way that this patient and her art work would have been presented during a [fifty-two-day] stay,” she wrote. To get a patient conference, you had to be in Chestnut Lodge for much longer. Doctors didn’t feel they knew their patients well enough to present a whole case study five weeks in. But Nancy Horn had recalled that someone had been there. Did she get it wrong or had Rosenhan lied about that, too?
As I was reeling from the news, I received this email from Dr. Leibovitz: “I spoke with mother and she is really confident that my father was never involved in such a study. She is 86 and a very private person. She was not interested in discussing any further. Good luck with the research. Keep me posted if you ever find out who that person was.”
Why did every single one of my leads go nowhere? Why had Rosenhan so obscured the path to these pseudopatients? What was he protecting? I felt betrayed by a man I’d never met. Had I spent my time pursuing phantoms in a fictional universe?
I returned to Laura Martin’s file one more time, this time with a furious, skeptical eye. I reexamined Rosenhan’s description in his unpublished book of the patient conference, where Laura’s psychiatrist used her paintings to reveal the underlying symptoms of her mental illness. Rosenhan quoted him directly: “The upper portion of the painting is the patient’s wish. Unable to handle the impulse life that surges beneath, she wishes for blandness. And perhaps in her better moments she can mobilize that blandness. But in the main it is difficult. She lacks the ego controls, on the one hand, and the impulses are too strong on the other. The blandness that she desires, representing both peacefulness and absolute control over her impulses, simply cannot be achieved. At best she can achieve moments of calm, punctuated alternately by depression and loss of control.”
The psychobabble continued. Her doctor moved on to four other paintings and then arrived at her sixth, and final, one. “The bottom half of the painting [is] much less intense… the colors here are better integrated… Mrs. Martin’s impulse life is better integrated.” A thick line separating top and bottom became proof to the doctor that Laura had improved under the watchful eye of his care.
Knowing now how far Rosenhan was willing to stretch truth, the problem here seemed unmistakable. This scene was too on the nose. Even the psychoanalytic interpretation of her paintings sounded clichéd, too much of a New Yorker cartoon depiction of a pipe-smoking analyst. And then the unlikely coincidence that Rosenhan himself was consulted on her case—he wasn’t a clinical psychologist and hadn’t worked with patients since his early days after getting his PhD, so why would someone in Washington, DC, call him to travel to see one of his own patients? Then there was the issue of how he managed to pay for these hospitalizations. He wrote in his private letters that he funded the hospitalizations himself (to avoid insurance fraud and other possible illegalities). Fifty-two days in one of the swankiest hospitals in the country would have cost a fortune, even then. Where did he get the money?
Kenneth Gergen may have been right after all. Did any of this even happen?
26
AN EPIDEMIC
Now the question was: Had Rosenhan outright invented pseudopatients to up his “n”—or the number of subjects in his data set—to lend more legitimacy to his findings? Had getting away with his exaggerated symptoms emboldened him to go ten steps further and invent pseudopatients? Did he get caught up with a book deal and out of desperation decide to fill in the blank pages? This elaborate ruse no longer seemed impossible: There were Mary Peterson’s letters and the undergraduates’ journals and their odd placement within Rosenhan’s files; there was Chestnut Lodge and his “famous artist” pseudopatient Laura Martin, whose case conference sounded a bit too perfect; and then there was Carl, who so closely resembled one of Rosenhan’s friends, but one who had never participated in the study.
I hadn’t wanted to believe that the man I had so admired could turn out to be this—whatever this was. My goal was no longer to just find the pseudopatients; I was now seeking out proof that they didn’t exist. So I spent the next months of my life chasing ghosts. I wrote a commentary for the Lancet Psychiatry asking for help. I made a speech at the American Psychiatric Association, calling for anyone who had ever met David Rosenhan to contact me. I hunted down rumors, spending a month pursuing a lead that St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, was one of Rosenhan’s locations, just because the Wikipedia page on his study included an image of the hospital as its key art. I even hired a private detective, who got no further than I had. I contacted everyone who had ever entered Rosenhan’s orbit, and was shocked to find as I departed further from his inner circle how many people wanted no part in the retelling of his story, including one former secretary who may have had access to some of his work during the writing of “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” When I reached her, all she would offer was, “Well, he did often use some ‘creative thinking.’” She laughed, and then her tone darkened: “I have nothing nice to say, so I won’t say anything at all.”
All navigable roads led back to Bill and Harry. Students, fellow professors, and friends either knew nothing about the study or led me straight back to the two I had already found.
I researched lying and found a splashy Daily Mail article that claimed to offer “scientifically proven” ways to spot a liar using textual analysis that scoured writing for “minimal self-references and co
nvoluted phrases” and “simple explanations and negative language.” Unfortunately, when I ran this by a real expert, Jamie Pennebaker, a University of Texas social psychologist who studies lying, he said that it was impossible to suss out a liar from text alone, and that anyone who told me otherwise was probably lying to me.
I ran all of this researched skepticism past Florence. She had often called Rosenhan a “storyteller” and said that he might have been happier as a novelist than a researcher, but would the fantastical side of him go this far? At first, Florence doubted he would. But upon further reflection she wrote me an email:
“I continue to wonder whether some of these folks were fabricated… it would certainly explain why David never completed the book.”
It was a good point. His publisher, Doubleday, sued him in 1980 in the Supreme Court of New York to recoup the first installment advance for Locked Up (by then he had changed the name from Odyssey into Lunacy), which was already seven years late and would never be delivered. Had the editor’s encouraging comments, in which he also suggested adding more detail about the “vague” pseudopatients, spooked Rosenhan? To almost everyone I spoke with, his abandonment of the study that made his career was the most concerning, even damning, evidence that something was seriously amiss.
After the publication of “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Rosenhan returned to researching altruism, publishing a paper on the effects of success and failure on childhood generosity. After 1973, he jumped from topic to topic, from mood and self-gratification to the joys of helping to moral character to pseudoempiricism to the study of nightmares experienced after an earthquake. The research all seemed a bit unfocused. In fact, one colleague told me, after all of his success with his famous paper and professorship at Stanford, “David became sort of less involved academically… less research oriented generally.”
His most successful work, after the study, was a textbook on abnormal psychology that he published with Martin Seligman and that as of this writing is in its fourth edition and is still used in classrooms around the country. He researched juror behavior, including one paper on how note-taking aids jurors’ recall of facts and another on their ability (or, rather, inability) to disregard facts that judges had ruled inadmissible. He also joined forces with Lee Ross and Florence Keller as trial consultants—or psychologists who help with trial preparations, like jury selection and opening and closing statements—early adopters in the use of the social sciences to aid in legal analysis.
The Great Pretender Page 26