- Jun 28, 2017
- Dr. Peter Breggin
Want to spend a full day with Robert Whitaker and myself on July 26, 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina? I have arranged for us to do a workshop together open to the public. Would you also like to hear me give a luncheon talk on July 27 at the same great conference?
My Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy is cosponsoring the William Glasser Institute’s annual conference. Bill Glasser was a friend and colleague of mine who rejected medicating patients and focused on the importance of learning to make choices and exercising free will in therapy. It will be a brilliant conference, oriented around providing good psychotherapeutic help.
On a More Grim Note
At the upcoming William Glasser Institute conference, in addition to better alternatives I will also be examining the negative impact of modern psychiatry on both individuals and society.
A recent email from Canadian rights activist Don Weitz put my attention on how Russia, just like the old Soviet Union, continues to use psychiatry to suppress its political opposition. Thanks, Don, for putting the spotlight on this ongoing atrocity.
In my first book on psychiatric drugs called Psychiatric Drugs: Hazards to the Brain (pp. 23-35), I wrote about the political use of psychiatric power to crush dissenters in the Soviet Union. The entire book is available used on Amazon.com.
I have excerpted some of the critical book pages demonstrating how antipsychotic drugs suppress vulnerable inmates by causing a chemical lobotomy. The drugs have this dehumanizing impact by blocking the main neurotransmitter system to the frontal lobes. They similarly suppress animals and normal volunteers, as well as political dissenters. Thus, the drugs do not “cure” or even “treat” emotional problems or “mental illness.” Instead, they crush the feelings and destroy the willpower of any higher animal or human. I have described this effect as “deactivation.”
This primary lobotomy effect makes these drugs useful in nursing homes, authoritarian foster care homes, prisons, mental hospitals, and totalitarian states. In those settings, as I most recently document in Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, antipsychotic or neuroleptic drugs make inmates and other people apathetic, indifferent, docile, and easier to manage.
Although rarely aimed at political dissenters in the US, coercive psychiatry performs many political and social functions. It drugs children into conformity instead of improving their family and school lives. It drugs the elderly into submission and early death instead of improving their quality of life in more caring and humane facilities. It afflicts the poor disproportionately instead of dealing with the demeaning effects of living in poverty. It makes the disabled and unemployed unable to complain. Overall, psychiatry helps to stifle genuine reform in society.
I want to add a grateful note to the many thousands of people who so quickly have begun to view our Frequent Alerts. I love being in touch with you! Thank you!
If you come to the Raleigh Conference starting July 25, please let me know that you learned about the conference on Frequent Alerts.
Peter R. Breggin, MD
