I have to find the link,
but you can find references for it I'm sure
About ten years ago,
at one of those big universities with large psychology dept.'s
MIT or Harvard, something like that
They did a study.
A whole whack of students were chosen as the test subjects.
They were tested beforehand, all were COMPLETELY sane.
Tests out the bloody wahoo
So they take this mob of SANE people
and send them off to the various hospitals in town to book themselves in
after a short course in how to APPEAR schizophrenic.
They wanted to see how a normal person would be discovered through the process.
Years later,
even after every hospital and clinic was made aware of the fact
that these people had never been ill at all,
the students who participated were still getting treated as if they were mentally ill
any time they went to any hospital for any kind of regular health problem.
Or applied for jobs.
YEARS later. A DECADE later,
the stigma of that label still followed them, even though they were never actually crazy.
It's an insidious thing, and it creeps throughout the system.
And the system through which it creeps is much larger than you think.
I always found that story very disturbing.
Don't you?
Long ago, if a man married a rich woman,
all he had to do to get her money,
was tell another male doctor she was insane.
She'd never get out, and he'd be rich.
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