Peter Breggin Quotes

Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.

The miracle drugs (neuroleptics) cause the worst plague of brain damage in medical history.

Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.

I was asked by the National Institute of Health to be their scientific discussant on the effects of these drug [Ritalin] at a big conference they held. Beforehand, I reviewed all of the important literature on the issue. Even with experiments on animals. When they're given these drugs they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. We make good caged animals with these drugs. And we make good caged kids by knocking their spontaneity out of them. And, Michael, the other thing is that these drugs enforce obsessive behavior.

The destructive impact of psychiatry upon our civilization has been given far too little attention, and the role of psychiatry in Nazi Germany almost no attention. It is entirely possible that without psychiatry the holocaust could never have taken place.

There is nothing worse that you can do to a human being in America today than give them a mental illness kind of label and tell them they need drugs and these children are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old being treated in this manner.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism.

In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.

Love is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict.

In some cases it is identical because methamphetamine is one of the F.D.A. drugs allowed for children. The three basic stimulants now are amphetamine, methamphetamine, and then Ritalin, which are all in the same class and Schedule Two drugs along with cocaine, the most addictive drug as recognized by all the world's drug agencies.

[Our children] have been taken away from us by the psychiatric mental-health system. They've been taken away by the educational system, by the government, and by many different forces.

I think the first thing parents need to start doing is absolutely refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of children in school. Schools should not be mental hospitals. Parents should say that the only tests they want their children to have are those respecting their academic subjects and nothing else.

I think that's a major reason. Instead of turning in their own lives to philosophy, religion, love, family life, or nature, they think of psychiatry; and today that means the "pill" as an ultimate answer. Also, if you have a desire for social control, "benevolent" control and "benevolent" authority, then again biological psychiatry offers a tremendous opportunity.

If you've heard Hillary Clinton's recent remarks on Ritalin and other drug use on children, you'll find the usual nauseating demagoguery. She appears to be urging Ritalin caution; but, if you listen carefully, she's calling it a miracle drug: "A Godsend for emotional and behavioral problems, for both children and their parents." She insists her efforts are not an attack on the medical treatment of children's emotional well-being because the drugs are very, very "useful."

I come from a liberal tradition. I'm Jewish. My dad was a liberal. What I've found is that people who see themselves as thoughtful, caring, educated and informed have swallowed psychiatry as the way.

In part I'm just mystified. Here's a woman, Hillary [Clinton], who wrote a book about it takes a "village" to raise children. It wasn't about a book about "it takes a pill." There's a "double think" that the modern person often has. Anything that's called "science" is accepted as an absolute and sweeps reason away.

Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts.

The N.I.M.H. spent multi-millions of dollars on [Ritalin studies], and they're going to do the same thing now with little kids. And despite the millions spent, the N.I.M.H. study wasn't even conducted according to accepted scientific procedures and is basically worthless.

[ Alfred Kinsey] was sexually abusing those children and had sex abusers working for him to stimulate the babies.

The man Hillary [Clinton] introduced at the meeting goes so far as to say that no amount of trauma to children - or poor parenting or anything in their lives - causes them mental disorders. He says it's all biological and genetic and should be treated by drugs.

I would like to write my next book about what happened to critical intelligence in America and how it's been undermined by these really shallow ideas about human life and nature.

Hillary [Clinton] even said that, whether or not teenagers want treatment, they have to get it. So it's involuntary treatment.

It's going to get even worse if Hillary [Clinton] follows her plan that I describe in Reclaiming Our Children. But even now in many, many schools the nurses are giving out more drugs than were given out in children's mental hospitals when I was in training. You can go into a school today and find that ten or twenty percent of the boys are on drugs given by the school nurse. I just recently visited a school where over half of the children were being given drugs.

Parents must refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of their children in school.

Following the school shootings, Hillary and Tipper Gore, as well as their husbands, got together for the first White House conference on mental health. Because of her interest in mental health and her own problem with anti-depressants, Tipper had been made the expert, the psychiatric consultant to the president, duly designated.