‘One of America’s most courageous young journalists’ and the author from the #1 New York Situations bestselling memoir Human brain burning investigates the shocking mystery behind the dramatic experiment that revolutionized modern medicine (NPR).

Doctors have got struggled for centuries to define insanity–how carry out you diagnose it all, how do you treat it, how do you even understand what it really is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist called David Rosenhan and seven additional people–sane, healthy, well-adjusted users of society–went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry’s labels. Forced to remain inside until they’d ‘proved’ themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and much more troubling tales of their treatment. Rosenhan’s watershed study broke open up the field of psychiatry, shutting down establishments and changing mental health diagnosis forever.

But, as Cahalan’s explosive brand-new research shows within this real-life detective tale, very little in this saga is exactly as it appears. What really occurred behind those closed asylum doors?