Nonfiction

From Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire and "one of America's most courageous young journalists" (NPR), comes The Great Pretender (Grand Central), 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…