The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry

Join Peerless Rockville and author Eric Caplan to learn about Osheroff vs. Chestnut Lodge.

A successful physician walked into the best psychiatric hospital in America. Seven months later he could not hold a fork. In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, the most prestigious psychoanalytic hospital in America, expecting world-class care for a severe depression. Instead he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. He emerged forty pounds lighter, unable to use utensils, physically frail and emotionally devastated—not because his treatment failed, but because treatment was withheld. His parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he 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. 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 hospital failed a patient in crisis—and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. When Healing Harms 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.

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