Press & Media
For review copies, interview requests, and media inquiries about When Healing Harms, please contact:
Media & Publicity
Gretchen Crary
February Media
Literary & Rights
Don Fehr
Trident Media Group
The Book at a Glance
Title: When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry
Author: Eric Caplan
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2026
ISBN: 978-0-520-40916-3 (cloth) / 978-0-520-40917-0 (ebook)
Key Points
- •A case that reshaped American psychiatry — told accurately for the first time, drawing on primary sources no previous scholar examined.
- •A ticking-clock medical thriller with real stakes: a physician denied standard medication for seven months, emerging emaciated and unable to function.
- •Built on 120+ hours of raw hearing footage, thousands of pages of sealed records, and scores of interviews with surviving participants.
- •Directly relevant to today’s mental health crisis: antidepressant prescriptions have surged nearly 400 percent while people with serious mental illness die two to three decades earlier.
- •Timely intersection with the AI therapy and psychedelics debate, connecting a landmark 1980s case to the newest frontiers in mental health.
- •The author lives the story he’s telling — a historian of psychiatry who has battled depression for decades, taking the same class of medications Osheroff was denied.
Author Bio
Eric Caplan is a historian of American psychiatry and the author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (UC Press, 1998). An award-winning teacher and former William Rainey Harper Fellow, he has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. His dual perspective—rigorous scholarship fused with decades of lived experience with depression—gives his work an authenticity that sets it apart from purely academic accounts. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.