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.

"Eric Caplan's fascinating medical history book When Healing Harms recounts a pivotal case of psychiatric malpractice and its consequences… a revealing exposé of medical malpractice that reconstitutes the long-silenced voice of a psychiatric patient." ― Foreword Reviews

“In a book that is Shakespearean in its tragedy, as intriguing as a legal thriller, and as incisive as a political exposé, Caplan chronicles the story of Raphael "Ray" Osheroff—a physician functionally sentenced to a Bedlam-like mental institution—and his three-decades-long effort to gain both justice and vindication.” ― The US Review of Books