Stephen Van-Hagen

Rosenhan's "Thud"


It was just a monosyllabic
word, not much to bring
crashing down
walls of American
psychiatry. Inside those walls
we were imprisoned for sixty
days and sixty
nights, psychotropic drugs
coursing through our veins, eight
sane individuals who became seven
schizophrenics and one case of
bipolar disorder. As
you do. Reaffirm their view
of you. The only way
out: psychiatric catch-22.

They made us promise we'd send
more fakes when we'd got out
and we agreed. They claimed
they'd found forty one.
But we'd sent none.
It was the fakes
who'd done the finding.