Eric Caplan - "When Healing Harms" - Matthew Gambino

Eric Caplan will discuss When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial - and the Case That Shook Psychiatry. He will be joined in conversation by Matthew Gambino. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 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. About the interlocutor: Matthew Gambino is a psychiatrist and a historian with an interest in recovery-oriented care for seriously mentally ill men and women in the community. He is Chief of the Section for Recovery Services at Jesse Brown VAMC, where he oversees the Psychosocial Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Program (PRRTP), the Mental Health Intensive Case Management (MHICM) program, the Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Center (PRRC), and the VHA Vocational Rehabilitation (VHA-VR) program. He has written on the history of psychiatric racism, ethical issues involved in the introduction of malarial fever therapy for neurosyphilis, and institutional culture in the mid-twentieth century United States. Dr. Gambino holds an appointment in the Department of Medical Education at the Univerity of Illinois and has been involved in medical student education in the humanities and social sciences. The 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...