- The legal case that changed the course of psychiatry and forced the profession to reassess the situation. *
In 1979, Dr. Rafael Usherov voluntarily entered Chestnut Lodge Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric hospital, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a closed ward, denied medication, and underwent seven months of psychotherapy.This experience physically weakened him and caused him to have a psychotic breakdown before his parents could secure his transfer to a hospital ready to prescribe much-needed antidepressants. But the damage had been done: his marriage, his clinic, his whole reputation had collapsed.
Then he did something unprecedented. He has filed a lawsuit against Chestnut Lodge.When Healing Hurt reveals the long-buried story behind one of the most important - and most misunderstood - medical malpractice issues in modern psychiatry, and reveals its impact that persists to this day.Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives and hundreds of letters, video testimonies and interviews, Eric Kaplan offers the ultimate account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed to treat a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure was obscured and distorted for more than four decades.
