Truth Won't Out

"Truth serum" doesn't necessarily make people blurt out the truth. In the current American Journal of Psychiatry, Professor Frederick C. Redlich of Yale University Medical School tells how he and his associates arrived at that conclusion after an experimental sampling of students and professional people, some normal, some slightly neurotic.

Before the tests, each of the subjects agreed to tell an examiner the truth about some embarrassing incident in his life. Then they told a second examiner a "cover" story. After giving each subject a tongue-loosening injection of sodium amytal, the second examiner tried to uncover the facts. A successful female psychologist, for instance, told how she got drunk, invited a man to her room and misbehaved with him. Her cover story: the man did the inviting and then tried unsuccessfully to seduce her. A 22-year-old secretary told how she used to pose as a nude model for artists who made passes at her. Her cover: she only posed for blameless photographers, and never in the nude.

The psychologist, whom the doctors considered a well-balanced individual, stuck to her cover story in spite of the sodium amytal. The ex-model, who was classified as "emotionally labile," i.e., unstable, forgot her cover story and told the truth soon after she got the needle.

The experiment indicates, according to Professor Redlich, that well-balanced people can stick to a lie in spite of sodium amytal. But neurotics are likely either to confess eagerly, as the ex-model did, or get all tangled up, sometimes telling fantasies more damaging than the truth. In any case, Professor Redlich believes that statements made under the influence of sodium amytal and related drugs should not be treated as simple truth. A psychiatrist might make some sense out of them, but not a judge or a jury.

Professor Redlich does not know whether "truth drugs" are used in totalitarian countries to get confessions; they may not be necessary. "We suspect," he says, "that many of the striking confessions in police states were obtained from severely neurotic, guilt-ridden and self-punitive persons. Such persons are likely to confess without much pressure; but even the less severely disturbed persons with guilt-producing fantasies will confess if ... weakened by prolonged, grueling and humiliating interrogation . . ."

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