On January 2, 1979, Dr. Rafael Osheroff was admitted to Chestnut Lodge, an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Maryland. Osheroff had a bustling nephrology practice. He was married with three children, two from a previous marriage. Everything had been going well except his mood.
For the previous two years, Osheroff had suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression. Dr. Nathan Kline, a prominent psychopharmacologist in New York City, had begun Osheroff on a tricyclic antidepressant and, according to Kline’s notes—which were later revealed in court—he improved.
But then Osheroff decided, against Kline’s advice, to change his dose. He got worse. So much worse that he was brought to Chestnut Lodge.
For the next seven months, Osheroff was treated with intensive psychotherapy for narcissistic personality disorder and depression. It didn’t help. He lost 40 pounds, suffered from excruciating insomnia, and began pacing the floor so incessantly that his feet became swollen and blistered.
Osheroff’s family, distressed by the progressive unraveling of his mind, hired a psychiatrist in Washington D.C. to intervene. In response, Chestnut Lodge held a clinical case conference yet decided to not change treatment. Importantly, they decided to not begin medications but to continue psychotherapy. They considered themselves “traditional psychiatrists”—practitioners of psychodynamic psychotherapy, the technique used by Sigmund Freud and other pioneers.
At the end of seven months, in a worse state yet, Osheroff’s family had him transferred from Chestnut Lodge to Silver Hill in Connecticut. Silver Hill’s doctors immediately diagnosed him as having a psychotic depressive episode and began him on a combination of phenothiazine and tricyclic antidepressants—a combination that recent clinical trials had shown to be effective.
[For more of this story, written by Daniel Barron, go to https://blogs.scientificameric...amp;utm_medium=email]
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