When Healing Harms

The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial-and the Case That Shook Psychiatry
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-520-40916-3
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

“An absorbing page-turner…”—Psychology TodayThe legal case that changed psychiatry and forced a reckoning within the profession.In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters.Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge.When Healing Harms excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Caplan, Eric

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Rechtswissenschaften Öffentliches Recht Medizin- und Gesundheitsrecht
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie Psychopathologie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete Psychiatrie, Sozialpsychiatrie, Suchttherapie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizinrecht, Gesundheitsrecht

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Prologue
Act I: Rise and Fall  1. Becoming Dr. Osheroff  2. “Gradually, Then Suddenly”  3. “All the Time We Need”  4. Decompensation  5. Cut Off  6. Enough  Interlude 1: In His Own Words  7. The Woman Who Saved My Life
Act II: Law, Litigation, and Loss  8. The French Connection  9. Homecoming  10. Turning the Tables  11. Loaded for Bear  12. Opening Arguments  13. The Battle of the Experts  14. Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
Act III: Lore, Legacy, and Limitations  15. A Pack of Tricks the Living Play on the Living  16. Telling His Story  Interlude 2: Listening to Osheroff  17. The Stories We Tell
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
On the Evidence
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Eric Caplan is author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and recipient of the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.