Eric Caplan is a historian of psychiatry whose deeper subject is the nature of warranted knowledge — how a claim earns the right to be believed.
His historical training taught him to question inherited narratives without abandoning the pursuit of historical truth, however elusive it may be. His years in pharmaceutical research and development sharpened his thinking about signal and noise, endpoints, inference, evidence, and uncertainty. His professional and personal engagement with psychiatry and psychotherapy deepened his skepticism of simplistic therapeutic dichotomies.
His narrative writing brings these concerns together, turning the adjudication of evidence into story. Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (UC Press, 1998) challenged the myth of Freud’s foundational role in American psychotherapy, showing that mind-cure practitioners and their physician rivals had already established the practice before Freud arrived on American shores in 1909. When Healing Harms (UC Press, 2026) reconstructs the landmark malpractice case of Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge from primary sources never before examined.
His career has spanned academia, law, pharmaceutical research and development, and strategy, with positions at Wesleyan University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Georgetown University Law Center, the D. E. Shaw Group, Pfizer, and McKinsey & Company. A former William Rainey Harper Fellow, he received the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1996 — the first time the award went to a non-tenure-track member of the faculty.
He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Why this story
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Caplan visited someone close to him being treated for depression at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. On the wall near the sign-in desk stood a sign: “ECT and Ketamine,” with an arrow pointing the way. Treatment now focused almost exclusively on the brain—procedures, medications, neuromodulation—with little attention to the mind or the person inhabiting it.
That stark transformation triggered a dormant memory from 1995, when a University of Chicago colleague told him about an extraordinary medical malpractice case in which the plaintiff sued a prestigious psychiatric hospital not for forcing him to take medication, but for refusing to prescribe it. A quarter century would pass before Caplan discovered that there was indeed far more to this story than anyone had imagined.