Eric Caplan is a historian of American psychiatry whose work explores the institutions, ideologies, and power dynamics that shape mental health care. His forthcoming book, When Healing Harms: The Doctor who Sued a Hospital and the Case the Shook Psychiatry (University of California Press, October 2026), reconstructs the landmark malpractice case of Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge from primary sources never before examined — revealing how a single lawsuit accelerated the transformation of psychiatric practice in the United States.
His first book, Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (UC Press, 1998), challenged the myth of Freud’s foundational role in American psychotherapy, showing that mind-cure practitioners and their physician rivals had already established the practice before Freud arrived on American shores in 1909.
An award-winning teacher and former William Rainey Harper Fellow, Caplan has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. His dual perspective — rigorous scholarship fused with lived experience as someone who has battled depression for decades — gives his work an emotional authenticity that purportedly objective scholarly accounts typically lack.
He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.