Grice and Goffman on irrationality

Speranza

Goffman writes:

"When the individual's stigma is established in him during his stay in an institution, and when the institution retains a discrediting hold upon him for a period after his release, one may expect a special cycle of passing. For example, in one mental hospital -- see Goffman's study of St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC, partly reported in "Asylums" (New York: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1961) -- it was found that patients RE-ENTERING the community often planned to pass in some degree.

"Patients who were forced to rely on the rehabilitation officer, the social service worker, or the employment agencies for a job, often discussed among theeir fellows the contingencies they faced and the standard strategy for dealing with them."

"Patients express the feeling that after staying in a placement job of this kind, long enough to save some money and get loose from hospital agencies, they would quite work and, on the basis of the six-month work record, get a job someplace else, this time TRUSTING everyone at work would BE KEPT IGNORANT of the stay in a mental hospital."

Goffman gives the reference: "for evidence of the frequency of ex-patients employing such a passing cycle, see M. Linder and D. Landy, "Post-discharge experience and vocational rehabilitation needs of psychiatric patients," "Mental Hygiene", vol. XLII 1958, p. 39.