The legal case that changed psychiatry and forced a reckoning within the profession.
In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters.
Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge.
When Healing Harms excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.
Table of Contents:
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Prologue
Act I: Rise and Fall
1. Becoming Dr. Osheroff
2. “Gradually, Then Suddenly”
3. “All the Time We Need”
4. Decompensation
5. Cut Off
6. Enough
Interlude 1: In His Own Words
7. The Woman Who Saved My Life
Act II: Law, Litigation, and Loss
8. The French Connection
9. Homecoming
10. Turning the Tables
11. Loaded for Bear
12. Opening Arguments
13. The Battle of the Experts
14. Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
Act III: Lore, Legacy, and Limitations
15. A Pack of Tricks the Living Play on the Living
16. Telling His Story
Interlude 2: Listening to Osheroff
17. The Stories We Tell
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
On the Evidence
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Eric Caplan is author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and recipient of the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Review :
"Eric Caplan's fascinating medical history book When Healing Harms recounts a pivotal case of psychiatric malpractice and its consequences… a revealing exposé of medical malpractice that reconstitutes the long-silenced voice of a psychiatric patient."
