When Healing Harms
The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry
University of California Press
ISBN 978-0-520-40916-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-520-40917-0 (ebook)
In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff—a successful physician—entered Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital, seeking treatment for depression. Seven months later, he emerged emaciated, with blackened feet from compulsive pacing, unable to use utensils, having lost forty pounds. His doctors had refused to prescribe antidepressants that were already standard treatment for his condition. When he finally received medication at another hospital, he began recovering within weeks.
His subsequent lawsuit initially seemed like a victory for evidence-based medicine over outdated therapeutic dogma. But the dispute cut deeper—it revealed a profession at war with itself over who decides what constitutes legitimate treatment.
Drawing on more than 120 hours of raw hearing footage, thousands of pages of sealed medical records, legal transcripts, and personal correspondence that no previous scholar examined, this book reconstructs the case from primary sources for the first time in four decades of scholarship.
Advance praise
What readers are saying
“In When Healing Harms, Eric Caplan reexamines one of the most influential legal cases in the history of American psychiatry. Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge has been written about before but never with the care and thoroughness that Caplan brings to the story. What emerges from his research is a poignant medical and legal drama—and a new understanding of a turning point in modern psychiatry and the patient who brought it about.”
Peter D. Kramer, MD
bestselling author of Listening to Prozac
“A masterful job... Written with verve and style and using a dazzling array of novel source material, Eric Caplan documents a striking but often misunderstood example of psychiatric malpractice.”
Andrew Scull, PhD
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Diego; author of Madness in Civilization and Desperate Remedies
“A fascinating dive into the world of Raphael Osheroff, whose lawsuit over his inept treatment at a famed psychiatric hospital sealed the fate of psychoanalytic models of care for serious mental disorders... an engrossing account that humanizes the person behind the lawsuit, illuminating his suffering and vividly portraying the end of an era in psychiatry.”
Paul Appelbaum, MD
Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine & Law, Columbia University; Past President of the American Psychiatric Association
“A compelling exploration of all aspects of this story, legal and personal... an in-depth biography of nephrologist Ray Osheroff, telling of how his life was upended by depression and his subsequent legal battles with Chestnut Lodge.”
Robert Whitaker
George Polk Award winner; author of Madness in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic
Also by Eric Caplan
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University of California Press, 1998
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