
The Great Pretender
The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
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Narrated by:
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Christie Moreau
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Susannah Cahalan
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By:
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Susannah Cahalan
About this listen
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Pick
From "one of America's most courageous young journalists" (NPR) comes a propulsive narrative history investigating the 50-year-old mystery behind a dramatic experiment that changed the course of modern medicine.
For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness - how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people - sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society - went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever.
But, as Cahalan's explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today?
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Susannah Cahalan (P)2019 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Breathtaking! Cahalan's brilliant, timely, and important book reshaped my understanding of mental health, psychiatric hospitals, and the history of scientific research. A must-read for anyone who's ever been to therapy, taken a brain-altering drug, or wondered why mental patients were released in droves in the 1980s. And a thrilling, eye-opening read even for those who thought they weren't affected by the psychiatric world." (Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead and Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give)
"A well-told story fraught with both mystery and real-life aftershocks that set the psychiatric community on its ear." (Kirkus)
"Susannah Cahalan has written a wonderful book that reflects years of persistent and remarkable historical detective work. The Great Pretender is an extraordinary look at the life of a Stanford professor and a famous paper he published in 1973, one that dramatically transformed American psychiatry in ways that still echo today. The book is fast-paced and artfully constructed - an incredible story that constitutes a tribute to Cahalan's powers as both a writer and a sleuth." (Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity)
"The Great Pretender is a tight, propulsive, true-life detective story which somehow also doubles as a sweeping history of our broken mental health-care system. Cahalan herself has experienced this system as both a patient and a reporter, and her background informs every fascinating page of this dogged investigative odyssey. It is an amazing achievement, and there is no question it will go down as the definitive account of one of the most influential psychology experiments of all time." (Luke Dittrich, New York Times best-selling author of Patient H.M.)
"Cahalan researched The Great Pretender over the course of five years, but the pages practically turn themselves. It's absorbing, sometimes sobering, sometimes seriously funny. Cahalan's narration makes the reading great fun, with an urgency occasionally akin to a thriller." (Shelf Awareness)

Editor's Pick
What is sanity?
"I loved Susannah Cahalan’s memoir, Brain on Fire, for both its unflinching firsthand portrayal of a young woman’s experience with a mysterious brain condition, as well as its detective-like exploration into her diagnosis. So I’m thrilled to see this brilliant writer tackling the topic of mental health once again in her latest release, The Great Pretender, which focuses on a groundbreaking experiment in which eight healthy individuals voluntarily went undercover into the asylums throughout the US. The outcome is at once a fascinating slice of history, a shocking expose, and an education into the field of psychiatry and mental health treatment—in other words, another captivating combo from Cahalan. I’m thrilled to have the chance to be in this writer’s brain once again."
—Sam D., Audible Editor
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Story
Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.
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Brutal and Beautiful
- By 3dogknits on 07-14-21
By: Vince Granata
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Insane
- America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness
- By: Alisa Roth
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.
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Great required reading
- By K. C. H on 01-16-19
By: Alisa Roth
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The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
- My Tale of Madness and Recovery
- By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle - contributor
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.
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Be Prepared To Feel Insane--
- By Gillian on 04-11-18
By: Barbara K. Lipska, and others
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Blood Orange Night
- My Journey to the Edge of Madness
- By: Melissa Bond
- Narrated by: Melissa Bond
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.
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This book is not a memoir of benzos
- By Mark Lawson on 04-27-24
By: Melissa Bond
What listeners say about The Great Pretender
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- Run Darren run!
- 01-19-20
Slow going but got better.
I was excited to read this because I tore through Brain on Fire so fast. I knew this was going to be different but I had high hopes.it was slow going and boring at first but it got more interesting after the first few chapters. The story telling is great and I get why people say it reads like a mystery but at times it gets boring going off on tangents and statistics and lost interest.
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5 people found this helpful
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- susan mcdonough
- 12-06-19
I’m thrilled people are talking about mental health
I loved Susannah Cahalan’s first book And while this one is more technical. The world needs to start reading and researching and finding answers to why some people are touched with mental illness and why some are not. Is it the inability to process folic acid, Is it a slight swelling in the brain due to immune issues, is it Harmons?? I am so hopeful that we are closer to understanding. I praise Susannah For her dedication to this topic. She was the right person to be touched with insanity and recover from it. Thank you.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Shellie Mach
- 01-27-20
Enlightening
Anyone interested in mental health should read this book. Mental health is such an important issue in our society today.
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- Valerie
- 09-02-21
What’s the Takeaway?
Imagine being a passenger in a car and the driver is talking to you about New York the whole ride, so you assume that’s where you’re headed. But then just as you’re about to reach New York he hops off the highway and turns toward Pennsylvania, and it turns out you’re actually going there… Or maybe not. Hard to know because the car just kind of slows to a stop in the middle of nowhere.
I’m just not sure what I was supposed to gain from this when all was said and done. The message seemed crystal clear for the first ~75-80% of the book, and then took a turn in an entirely different direction. It’s like okay, interesting twist, but where does it leave things?
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9 people found this helpful
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- Samantha
- 03-20-20
Take it all with a grain of salt.
The beginning and the middle were top notch, and I was absolutely fascinated until the last couple chapters of the book. You took a perfectly good book and just... YEETED IT OUT THE WINDOW. The theory that Rosenhan outright made up parts of his study and that America should reopen it's asylums are two ideas that I, AS A MENTALLY ILL PERSON, find disgusting and outright insulting.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-27-19
Thought provoking
Irresistible, moving unbiased information delivered with unwavering honesty. A must read for psychiatric community, families, caregivers and all touched with the day to day grappling of what we call mental illness.
Highly recommend
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3 people found this helpful
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- Junkal
- 03-06-20
A great book for any professional of the mind
Read this book if you are in any way related to psychology, psychiatry or even medicine. It will open your eyes.
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- Tunt Bailey
- 06-10-22
interesting listen
very interesting topic. I always wondered. how people got inside views of people in asylum
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-10-19
pretty boring
struggled to finish, she repeats herself over and over and doesn't really have a clear path or plot.
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5 people found this helpful
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- CmSt3ampunk
- 09-08-21
Second half much more interesting than the first
wish the second portion of the book was more fleshed out, it went quite a few direcrions before finding what I felt was the most interesting topic.
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