When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—And the Case that Shook Psychiatry
A SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL EVENT — AND A FASCINATING STORY
Please Note: No Continuing Education Credit will be awarded for this event.
Presented by:
Eric Caplan
Writer & Historian
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 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 medication he desperately needed — Silver Hill. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, 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 which 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 Dr. Osheroff fought to change.
As a result of participating in this activity, you should be able to:
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Examine the role of expert testimony and cross examination in cases of medical malpractice
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Explain the importance of the patient’s voice in the design of treatment plans for mental health care
- Discuss the potential harms of care that is not inclusive of multiple modalities
PLEASE NOTE: NO CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT WILL BE AWARDED FOR THIS EVENT.