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Eric Caplan will discuss When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial - and the Case That Shook Psychiatry. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About the book: 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.
About the author: Eric Caplan is a historian of American psychiatry whose work explores the institutions, ideologies, and power dynamics that shape mental health care. He has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. He is the 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.
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Event venue
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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