There are heroes: Peter Breggin
www.breggin.com
By Jon Rappoport
"I met a charming man today. Highly educated, a
conversationalist of the first order, but with an underlying toughness,
which I like. A tiger with very high IQ. But a friendly tiger who enjoys
other people. To say he's an excellent researcher would be a vast
understatement. I can't explain how all these qualities center in one
man. Also, there is a sense he has great empathy. I suspect some of this
comes from living with his wife, Ginger. His name is Peter Breggin."
(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
In the flood of the Information Era...
Heroes come and depart, with the news cycle. They were here for a moment, blazing across the sky, and then they faded.
They made a stirring mark, they achieved a great feat, and then they were consigned to the shadows.
But there ARE heroes. And despite the fashions of the moment, they REMAIN.
I met Peter Breggin 25 years ago. He was speaking before a
group in Los Angeles about a project he had helped stop; a sinister
university experiment to do invasive brain surgery on criminals and
"pre-criminals" as a "cure."
There is no way I can detail all of Peter's accomplishments. A
doctor and a psychiatrist, he has led a courageous struggle to expose
his own profession down to its fraudulent roots. If you think that's
easy to do, from the inside, think again.
Through his work, he has shown us that the whole basis of
modern psychiatry---mental disorders caused by chemical imbalances in
the brain---is an unsupported and convenient speculation, designed to
market toxic drugs.
His 1991 classic, Toxic Psychiatry, laid bare the devastating effects of the drugs.
In the same time period, Peter testified, as an expert
witness, in the famous Wesbecker case, a lawsuit against Eli Lilly, the
manufacturing of Prozac. Peter presented compelling evidence that Joseph
Wesbecker, who had gone on a shooting rampage after being put on the
drug, was pushed over the edge by Prozac.
In fact, as Peter has shown, the effort to develop and market
hundreds of dangerous psychiatric drugs stemmed from an agreement
between the profession of psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies. Faced
with a rapid decline in business, psychiatry needed a major boost.
Pharma provided funding, and psychiatric researchers began inventing
scores of new "mental disorders," for which the only treatment was the
drugs.
Yet, none of the present 300 official disorders has a lab test to confirm its existence.
Recently, Peter and his wife, Ginger, have pioneered Empathic
Therapy. Peter writes: "An empathic approach allows a therapist to use
the healing power of professional therapy relationships rather than the
mechanical or chemical manipulation of the brain. The goal of therapy is
to help clients maximize their ability to be empathic and loving toward
themselves and others, to live ethically, and to become autonomous and
self-determining in the fulfillment of all their chosen goals and
ideals. In contrast, biological psychiatry views people as objects and
suppresses their feelings with brain-disabling treatments, thereby
interfering with the development of empathy and love, and the ability to
take rationally determined actions based on sound values."
Those words should be posted in tall letters in every therapist's office.
As a friend, Peter has meant a great deal to me. Over the
years, he has encouraged my investigations into psychiatry and
interviewed me several times on his radio show, so I could present my
findings.
He has illustrated that the battle for the truth is a marathon, and we must be prepared for the long term and the long haul.
Several years ago, while I was working as an associate
producer on the documentary, American Addict, I told the director, Sasha
Knezev, to just put Peter on camera and let it roll. Peter is a genuine
star, in the best sense of that word, and audiences in his presence are
treated to the magnetic quality of his depictions of truth vs. lies.
Peter takes that real-life human drama to rare heights and depths.
What happens to the individual in the grip of a corrupt
institution, versus the true potential of the individual, is at the
forefront of Peter's concern.
He has never surrendered, never given up the ghost, and he never will.
With Empathetic Therapy, he is training a whole new
generation of therapists to, first and foremost, care about people. This
is the heart of healing.
With this brief article, Peter, I salute you and thank you
for your decades of tireless and brilliant work. You hold a torch and
you light the way.
We dream of heroes, and we should. But we also need to recognize the living heroes, here and now, who are among us.
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