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 is no longer involved in its conferences.
Copyright 2010-2012 Peter R. Breggin, MD
Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education & Living's new project. ToxicPsychiatry.com is our daily updated news and library resource project to preserve and make available critical information concerning the damaging effects of psychiatric diagnosis and drugging.
Psychiatry is NOT a Medical Practice
by Fred Baughman, Jr., M.D., Child Neurologist
Our emotions—be they elation, depression or anxiety—are a barometer of how we are doing at the game of life. If you reject what your feelings and emotions are telling you, these signals become muddled and lose their attachment to specific failures or successes. Psychiatrists often claim depression, anxiety, and other painful emotions are endogenous—arising from within and not traceable to life events. If they don't take the time to hear a patient's life history surely they will not discover the roots of these feelings.
Intent on making disease pronouncements and on drugging their patients, psychiatrists never take time to understand their patients. Instead, they quickly apply the DSM 'disease' label, scribble a script and then go on to the next normal if troubled patient. But be certain of one thing—there are no diseases in psychiatry.
Even in extreme emotional chaos, recovery may be made and a sense of well being achieved through a long road back, with every life's hurdle needing to be met and surmounted. In any event the failures at life must, sooner or later be confronted and the hard work of life, with the assist of loved ones, family and friends, must be done, and must be done successfully—no shortcuts.
This is why the illusion of psychiatric drugs as 'treatment' is such a dangerous illusion—it never requires that those life hurdles be successfully met. These drugs are chemical poisons that always damage the brain—our main organ of adaptation—and do so increasingly with dose and time. They are pain pills for the mind—targeting symptoms and emotional pain but never a defined physical abnormality or disease as in the practice of medicine. Does this really make sense—to damage our organ of adaptation and call it 'treatment.' This is why—unlike the actual practice of medicine—there are no psychopharmacologic cures.
Psychiatry and/or psychology should stick to helping people face the struggles of life without lies about psychiatric diseases. They could then participate with loved ones, family and friends in real cures. Unfortunately, their allegiance is no longer to their patients but to Big Pharma, a reality they never divulge to patients.
Meanwhile, the drugs over time with accumulating patient-years of exposure surely damage the body and brain to the point that such damage goes from occasionally evident to permanent and truly physically and neurologically disabling. The result is invariably a net poisoning, never a cure and always does net harm, often shortening the patient's life.
The number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness has been skyrocketing from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today. It is an iatrogenic, physician-psychiatrist induced epidemic that will only mount in the future. This utter, complete fraud based on the fiction of psychiatric diseases has to stop. There is no way to reform psychiatry which is no longer separable from the pharmaceutical industry. Psychiatry is not a legitimate part of the medical profession that deals with the healing and normalization of physical abnormalities. It must be banished from the house of medicine. Until it is banished, medicine and all medical school faculties remain co-conspirators in psychiatric/psychotropic poisoning for wholly illusory, invented diseases—for profit! Given that the 'patients' are normal to begin with—disease-free—and that the drugs they are consigned to are poisons there is no conclusion to reach but that net harm invariably results.
The only reason psychiatry exists today is due to its illusions of diseases and illusions of cure and 'treatment' by extremely expensive, always-damaging drugs. Psychology and related professions should be re-invigorated, starting with the few of courage and honesty in their ranks who have not capitulated to psychiatry and the 'chemical imbalance' model.
END
For further discussion of biopsychiatry and it's dangerous and damaging effects, see the website Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry.
Psychiatry's nature cannot be changed; it can only be constrained by public outrage--Peter R. Breggin, MD
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Warning! 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 new book, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients, and Their Families.
