When Healing Harms
The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry
The legal case that changed psychiatry and forced a reckoning within the profession.
A successful physician enters a prestigious psychiatric hospital. Seven months later he emerges emaciated, unable to use utensils, having lost forty pounds—not because treatment failed, but because it was withheld. The case that followed reshaped American psychiatry. This is its story, told accurately for the first time.
University of California Press
ISBN 978-0-520-40916-3 (cloth)
Reviews
“An absorbing page-turner that recasts the stakes around medical ethics.”
Psychology Today
“What happens when institutions prioritize the preservation of their own power above all else.”
“As intriguing as a legal thriller, and as incisive as a political exposé.”
“A poignant medical and legal drama—and a new understanding of a turning point in modern psychiatry and the patient who brought it about.”
Interview
Psychiatry at the Margins
The Lawsuit That Came to Symbolize the Fall of Psychoanalytic Psychiatry: Eric Caplan on Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge
A long conversation on the Osheroff case, what the record actually shows, and why the story has been told wrong for forty years.
Read the interviewPresentations
Upcoming
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
7:00 pm
Peerless Rockville
Historic Red Brick Courthouse, Room 110 · 29 Courthouse Square, Rockville, MD 20850
RegisterSunday, October 18, 2026
5:00 pm
Politics and Prose
In conversation with Sally Satel
Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue · 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008
Event detailsThursday, October 22, 2026
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Seminary Co-op Bookstores
In conversation with Matthew Gambino
Seminary Co-op Bookstore · 5751 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
Event details
The author
Eric Caplan
is the author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and winner of the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching — the first non-tenure-track member of the faculty to receive it.
A historian of American psychiatry, his work explores the institutions, ideologies, and power dynamics that shape mental health care. His deeper subject is the nature of warranted knowledge — how a claim earns the right to be believed.
He is also founder and Chief Executive Officer of Evidite, which extends that question into engineering: software that checks citations against the public record and shows its work, so a reader can reproduce the finding independently.
Listen to the Preface