Kam Brock was overcome with emotion as she made her way to a New York Police Department impound site to pick up her car, but the cops—for reasons that are still unclear—thought the 32-year-old Long Island woman was emotionally disturbed. Brock was cuffed and committed to a hospital for a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation, where she tried to convince her doctors there had been some sort of misunderstanding. “I told (the doctor) Obama follows me on Twitter to show her the type of person I am," Brock said, according to the New York Daily News. They locked her up for eight days.
The crazy thing is, Obama really was following her on Twitter... kind of. As the Washington Post points out, @BarackObama is actually run by a non-profit created from Obama's campaign funds that tweets using his name in the hopes that potential donors will make the same mistake as Brock. But it's probably fair to say that if her doctors didn't even think to check if @BarackObama was following her, they wouldn't have understood that distinction either. And while its unclear what other factors may have contributed to her extended stay in a psychiatric hospital, it is clear that the Obama reference had a significant impact on the staff’s opinion that Brock was detached from reality. The New York Daily News reports that her treatment plan required her to “state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.”
The takeaway may be that psychiatric hospitals just aren’t very good at distinguishing the sane from the insane. Many in the field of psychiatry have held conflicting views on diagnosing psychiatric illnesses for decades, as Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan wrote in a 1973 article in Science:
The belief has been strong that patients present symptoms, that those symptoms can be categorized, and, implicitly that the sane are distinguishable from the insane. More recently, however, this belief has been questioned. Based in part on theoretical and anthropological considerations, but also on philosophical, legal, and therapeutic ones, the view has grown that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless at best and downright harmful, misleading, and pejorative at worst. Psychiatric diagnoses, in this view, are in the minds of the observers and are not valid summaries of characteristics displayed by the observed.
[For more of this story, written by Kate Wheeling, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...-hospitals-diagnoses]
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