A review by paperbookslove
The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan

2.0

I have a lot of problems with this book. My biggest one is she doesn't address her own bias. She starts this book wanting to love Doctor Rosenhan because his study, "On Being Sane in Insane Places", supports her own personal experience. When the flaws in the study become clear, especially whether or not he fabricated much of it, she has a difficult time reconciling them. The chapters about Rosenhan and her quest to learn who the pseudopatients were are really interesting but the rest of it is unneeded editorializing about how to "fix" the mental health care system. She didn't do enough research on that incredibly broad topic to address any of it. Her opinions rely too much on her own personal experience and she didn't even have a mental illness in the end. I really, really, hated the epilogue of this book. Her takeaways really bothered me and while our health care system has many problems, her dismissal of psychiatry in general and the approval of dangerous alternative medicine were really concerning to me.

If you want to read this book, I would focus only on the chapters about Doctor Rosenhan.