13

W. UNDERWOOD

This was an exciting time for those who demanded a revolution in psychiatry’s ranks, and Rosenhan and his study stood on the front lines. Yet, strangely, at the height of his success, Rosenhan began pulling back from the spotlight. Why, for example, had he never finished his book? He had landed a lucrative book deal (the first paid installment, eleven thousand dollars, was the equivalent of an assistant professor’s yearly salary) and had even written eight chapters, well over a hundred pages of it. By 1974, Rosenhan had already shared several chapters with Doubleday book editor Luther Nichols, who was enthusiastic and hungry for more details. In an editorial letter, Nichols promised that success was all but assured. “More work of this kind will get the book finished before you know it,” Nichols wrote, “and then, if present interest can be sustained and certain features enhanced as described above, some very pleasant rewards should come your way. They will be well deserved.” But Rosenhan would never reach out for these “pleasant rewards.” He achieved what few academics ever do—worldwide attention and adoration, earning him a spot among the greats of the field—but in his son Jack’s words, the study “became the bane of his existence.”

This sudden instinct to shun the spotlight fell in line with other quirks from his private papers that I couldn’t quite square. He took such pains to keep the details of the study a secret that he even used the pseudonyms in his personal notes. Who was he trying to protect?

I returned to Palo Alto and visited Rosenhan’s son, Jack, hoping he might be able to lead me to some clues to better understand his father’s motivations. Jack, the kind of teddy-bear man you can’t help but hug the first time you meet him, adored his father, but freely admits that he doesn’t share David’s love of academics. Jack is an active guy with a contagious laugh; a man whose talents veered outside the classroom and onto the fields, more comfortable in tracksuits and baseball caps than suits and ties. Jack loves his family—his two girls; his wife, Sheri—and the soccer team he has coached to state championships.

We sat at his dining table as Jack spread out pictures, letters, and books from his garage—content that I had not yet seen—that had survived his father’s move to a nursing home over a decade ago. Jack shared stories of his father’s sharp humor and his gentle but firm parenting style. Jack recalled the time he sneaked out to go to a party when he was a teenager and returned to find every entrance to the house locked except the sliding door to his parents’ bedroom. When he stepped in he found his father wide awake, greeting Jack from his bed, asking if he had a good time and to please close the sliding door behind him. Jack lay awake all night worried about the trouble he had gotten himself in, but the next morning his father wasn’t mad—in fact, Rosenhan gave him a later curfew. Jack was so unnerved by the experience he never sneaked out again.

We sifted through Jack’s photo albums: a picture of Rosenhan with Jack at his wedding, their arms outstretched in a gesture of celebration, Rosenhan’s beard flecked with gray and Jack young and rosy-cheeked; Rosenhan during his graduation from Yeshiva University wearing a cap and gown, black-rimmed glasses, and a mischievous grin; Rosenhan in his twenties goofing off for the camera; Rosenhan and Mollie on their wedding day; Rosenhan as a child smiling broadly with his scowling, buttoned-up mother and his equally smiley younger brother. A life.

While sorting through the boxes in his garage, Jack discovered a few more diary entries from Rosenhan’s Haverford hospitalization and letters from his stay that were addressed to Jack. On cursory glance, the letters looked like David’s other handwritten notes—beautiful but barely legible, and coded.

And then a clue.

I nearly discounted it, thinking it was yet another outline of his unpublished book Odyssey into Lunacy, until I saw that this version was handwritten, unlike the typed versions in his files. Next to a bullet point reminding him to add references to a study, Rosenhan had written: “see list [?] sexual preoccupation (I owe this to W. Underwood).”

W. Underwood. The name sounded familiar, but I had cycled through so many names over the course of my research that it was impossible to pin down the source. It wasn’t until weeks later, scouring my files, that I came across a list of psychology graduate students photocopied from Stanford’s 1973 yearbook during an earlier visit to the campus’s Green Library. And there was W. Underwood.

A PubMed search for “Wilburn Underwood” yielded a clear link to David Rosenhan. In 1973 and 1974, a Wilburn Underwood and David Rosenhan co-authored two studies on affect and altruism in children, measuring how charitable second and third graders would be when primed to be happy or sad by rigging a game so that each child was a “winner” or a “loser,” the same bowling game Rosenhan had used in his research on children at Swarthmore. The second-listed author, a man named Bert Moore, gave me a clear-cut lead: He worked as the dean for the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Dallas. I shot off a quick plea for help, realizing that it was a long shot that Bert would remember a man he’d worked with four decades ago, let alone still be in touch with him.

To my delight, Bert returned the email within minutes with contact details for “Bill.” I would later learn that Bert Moore sent me this email while suffering through the final stages of pancreatic cancer.

Bill—I now had a first name, which matched Rosenhan’s description of the soft-spoken, red-bearded graduate student named “Bill Dixon.” Dixon was, according to Rosenhan, “the person least likely to make it through the admission interview. Professors should not be trusted to objectively evaluate their students. But for what it is worth, Bill struck me then as he does now, as a person with an enormous sense of balance. He works very hard, and he plays equally hard.” There wasn’t much else written about Bill, but this whisper of the man seemed pretty compelling to me.

I tamped down my growing enthusiasm, reminding myself that Bert hadn’t confirmed that Bill Underwood was a pseudopatient—just that he existed and was still living somewhere with a Texas area code. I wrote to Bill and five days later, on my birthday, I received this gift:

Hi, Susannah.

I was indeed in the pseudo-patient study. I can’t imagine what I would have to add but if you want to talk that would be fine.

Bill U

There he was. My first living pseudopatient.