Breggin Peter

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Peter R. Breggin, MD, has been called "the conscience of psychiatry" for his efforts to reform the mental health field, including his promotion of caring psychotherapeutic approaches and his opposition to the escalating overuse of psychiatric medications, the oppressive diagnosing and drugging of children, electroshock, lobotomy, involuntary treatment, and false biological theories. Dr. Breggin has created a new reform organization that brings together professionals and laypersons concerned with a critical analysis of biopsychiatry but with additional special emphasis on effective empathic approaches in mental health and education (www.empathictherapy.org). The first Empathic Therapy Conference will be held in Syracuse, New York, April 8-10, 2011 (about the conference). A Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant at NIMH, Dr. Breggin's private practice is in Ithaca, New York, where he treats adults, couples, and families with children. He also offers consultations in clinical psychopharmacology and often acts as a medical expert in criminal, malpractice and product liability suits. He is the author of many scientific articles and books including Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime (2008). Dr. Breggin's most recent book is Wow, I’m an American! How To Live Like Our Nation's Heroic Founders (2009). This unique book shows us how to live our personal lives by the same principles that our Founders fought for and memorialized in our nation's great documents.

Dr. Breggin testifies before Congress in 2010 on antidepressant drugs causing increased suicide, violence & mania in the military. See the video here.
Psychiatric drug adverse reactions (side effects) and medication spellbinding

FDA actions and shortcomings
Legal cases: criminal, malpractice and product liability suits involving antidepressants, tranquilizers, antipsychotic drugs, mood stabilizers, stimulants, children and ADHD, electroshock (ECT), and psychosurgery
See Dr. Breggin's astonishing speech on Totalitarian Psychiatry & the Nazi Holocaust.

Since the early 1970s, Dr. Peter Breggin has been active as a medical expert in malpractice and product liability suits, as well as criminal cases in which psychiatric or psychoactive drugs have contributed to abnormal behavior. He has also testified in cases involving involuntary treatment, electroshock treatment, and psychosurgery. He has testified more than 70 times in court.

Blunting ourselves with drugs is not the answer to overwhelming emotions. Intense emotions should be welcomed. Emotions are the vital signs of life. We need and should want them to be strong. We also need our brains and minds to be functioning at their best, free of toxic drugs. That allows us to use our intelligence and understanding to the fullest. Thinking clearly is one of the hallmarks of taking charge of oneself instead of caving in to helplessness.

Throughout his career, Dr. Breggin has been especially concerned about the psychiatric abuse of children and the failure to provide more effective solutions through improved parenting, educational reform and community resources. As the drug companies and organized psychiatry have sought larger markets for pharmaceutical products, children have come under extensive from the psychopharmaceutical complex. The first great assault took place in the form of diagnosing children with ADHD and then medicating them with stimulant drugs. Soon millions of children were defined as mentally dysfunctional or defective and were submitted to brain-damaging psychoactive medications.

By far the most up-to-date information of the dangers associated with ECT can be found in a chapter in Dr. Breggin’s book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, Second Edition (2008). Dr. Breggin brings together and evaluates dozens of articles demonstrating permanent brain damage from ECT including irreversable severe memory loss and wide spread cognitive disabilities. Many patients lose their ability to practice their professions or to conduct their lives in a normal fashion. Dr. Breggin was the medical expert in the first and only electroshock malpractice suit won by the injured patient. He was also the expert in a recent malpractice suit against an ECT doctor that resulted in a settlement of more than $1 million.

In 2007 a long-term follow-up study of ECT patients conducted by a team of shock-advocates lead by Harold Sackeim confirmed Dr. Breggin's observations that the "treatment" is devastating to the mental functions, frequently causing dementia with permanent disruption of memory and a variety of other cognitive functions.

The acronym ECT stands for "ElectroConvulsive Therapy" (also called EST, for ElectroShock Therapy) a psychiatric treatment in which electricity is applied to the head and passed through the brain to produce a grand mal or major convulsion. The seizure brought about by the electric stimulus closely resembles, but is more rigorous or strenuous than that found in idiopathic epilepsy or in epilepsy following a wide variety of insults to the brain.

Patients given ECT are administered an electric current of sufficient intensity and duration to produce an acute organic brain syndrome, characterized by the classic symptoms of disorientation to time, place, and person; mental deterioration in all intellectual spheres such as abstract reasoning, judgment, and insight; emotional lability with extremes of apathy or euphoria; and overall childlike helplessness.

Psychosurgery is the destruction of normal brain tissue for the purpose of treating psychiatric disorders or for the control of emotions and behavior. It does not include operations, such as those for Parkinson's disease or epilepsy, where an identifiable physical abnormality in the brain is causing a known physical disorder.
Lobotomy and other psychosurgeries merit special attention because, as the prototype of brain-damaging therapeutics, they can shed light on the clinical effects of other brain-disabling treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and major tranquilizers. Despite the paucity of active practitioners and advocates of psychosurgery, many psychiatric authorities have condoned this treatment precisely because the principles that find their extreme expression in lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery also find more subtle expression in all the major somatic treatments in psychiatry.

The widespread diagnosing of children is a subtle form of social control that suppresses children rather than providing them with what they need to fulfill their basic needs in the home, school and family. For more information about social control and youngsters see the Children's section under Special Topics and Children's section under Scientific Papers, and well as several of Dr. Breggin's books, especially Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (1998). Dr. Breggin's blogs often address current children's issues.

Both Peter Breggin and Ginger Breggin have worked extensively to stop racist psychiatric programs of social control, especially those aimed at subuding inner city children. These successful reform projects are described in detail in their book, The War Against Children of Color (1998). The following article is based on the book and presents a summary of their efforts.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is no longer affiliated with the Center for the Study of Psychiatry, informally known as International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, which he founded and led from 1972-2002, and Dr. Breggin will not participate in its conferences. Dr. Breggin and his colleagues will hold their new annual spring conference April 8-10, 2011. Details are available at http://www.empathictherapy.org.

Most psychiatric drugs can cause withdrawal reactions, sometimes including life-threatening emotional and physical withdrawal problems. In short, it is not only dangerous to start taking psychiatric drugs, it can also be dangerous to stop them. Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done carefully under experienced clinical supervision. Methods for safely withdrawing from psychiatric drugs are discussed in Dr. Breggin's books, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008) and Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008).