Works: The Rosenhan Experiment (2008)
A short music-drama for countertenor and piano, which should be staged or semi-staged. The Rosenhan Experiment (or, Being Sane in Insane Places) is based on the famous psychology experiment and paper of the same name by David L. Rosenhan.
Programme Note by Jemima Bannitt
The "Rosenhan Experiment" was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by David Rosenhan in 1972. It was published in the journal Science under the title "On being sane in insane places."
Rosenhan's study consisted of two parts. The first involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients," who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. The second involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent "fake" patients. In the first case hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, in the second the staff falsely detected large numbers of genuine patients as impostors. The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.
The study concluded, "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of depersonalisation and labelling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviours rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.
Benjamin's The Rosenhan Experiment takes as a starting point Rosenhan's famous paper: all the words in this piece are taken directly from the paper, which has been substantially abridged, although no words have been changed. The piece - which is designed to be staged - takes the form of fourteen songs for counter-tenor and piano: the work could therefore be billed as a "song cycle", but is intended by the composer to be described as "music theatre", in the tradition of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, Birtwistle's Bow Down, and Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King.
The counter-tenor is required to act both the parts of Rosenhan, and one of his patients, and to speak, as well as to sing. Whenever he speaks, his voice is the voice of Rosenhan, and whenever he sings (using the vocal technique of sprechgesang virtually throughout), the voice is "The Patient". Musically, Benjamin has treated both "parts" differently, to highlight the sharp difference between the two. Although he is the only named character, Rosenhan represents the institution, the impersonal, and the "inhuman". The Patient is the complete opposite: he is not named; he represents the institutionalised, the depersonalised, but also the "human". We discover aspects of The Patient's life and his experiences, whereas we discover little about Rosenhan except through his sharp and often amusing prose.
The counter-tenor, then, is effectively required to portray a split personality, and the staging itself is designed to reflect this dichotomy. It is simple: one chair, one small table with a reading lamp, piled with magazines. This could be Rosenhan's study, with his journals ready for study, or it could be the purgatorial ward-room of the psychiatric hospital, with out-dated dog-eared copies of magazines of the variety one only ever finds at medical institutions.
Benjamin's The Rosenhan Experiment gives us pause to reflect on the true nature of "insanity". Are the insane merely those unfortunate souls that society has confined to the asylum? Is everyone not in an asylum therefore sane? Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment has moved on significantly since Rosenhan's seminal paper, but with today's policies of "care in the community", ever tighter budgets at the hospital, and an increasingly bizarre and depersonalised world, one can well imagine insisting "no, really, I am not mad!" to incredulous strangers. On the other hand, are we becoming a society in which everyone is "mad" - or at least suffering from some new "mental illness", the treatment for which is the latest wonder-pill from Big Pharma?
Programme note © 2008 Jemima Bannitt
Further Information / Downloads
| Premiere: | 25th May 2008, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London: Robert Ogden (countertenor) and John Reid (piano) |
| Duration: | 30 minutes |
| Instrumentation: | countertenor and piano |
| Available files: |
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| Listen: | You must first get Flash to see and use the MP3 player.
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