About Eric Caplan
Eric Caplan is a historian of American psychiatry whose work explores the institutions, ideologies, and power dynamics that shape mental health care. His forthcoming book, When Healing Harms (University of California Press, October 2026), reconstructs the landmark malpractice case of Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge from primary sources never before examined—revealing how a single lawsuit accelerated the transformation of psychiatric practice in the United States.
His first book, 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.
An award-winning teacher and former William Rainey Harper Fellow, Caplan has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. His dual perspective—rigorous scholarship fused with lived experience as someone who has battled depression for decades—gives his work an emotional authenticity that pure academic accounts lack.
He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
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.