ark (07/15/82)
I also recall reading an article about this. It may have been in New York magazine. A writer showed up at a hospital behaving normally, but (falsely) claiming that he occasionally heard voices saying things like "Thud." It took him months to get out of that hospital.
otto (07/16/82)
I read an article many years ago about an author who went into an insane asylum to write an article on it, posing as a patient. At first he tried to hid the fact that he was taking notes about the activities he observed, but after a while it turned out that the staff there thought his constant note taking was therapy. In the three or four weeks the author was confined, there was only one group of people who detected that he was normal and didn't belong there: the other patients! George Otto Bell Labs, Indian Hill ----------------------
dmr (07/16/82)
Glushko is probably right about the citation for the mental-hospital study. It was certainly in Science, and it was indeed intended as a serious study. (Though, understandably, subsequent letters from the establishment attacked it as frivolous.) Otto misremembers what was for me the most memorable part of the article, the note-taking episode. What actually happened was that one of the participants was observed making notes. Later discovered in the symptomatology section of the nurse's own notes on the "patient" was the immortal phrase "Patient engages in writing behavior." Dennis Ritchie