The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

Today was Open Lines Friday where my audience becomes my guest and listeners call in to comment and to ask questions.  Today my callers focused on recovery from medications.  What do we need for ourselves to enhance recovery after we’ve been off psychiatric medications for months or years?  How long does recovery take?   How much exercise is enough?  What about counseling or diet? Guest callers contributed good ideas, encouragement and inspiration.  Remember that the show is live every Wednesday at 4-5 pm on www.prn.fm.  The phone number for calling the show is 888 874 4888; but the show itself is heard on line at www.prn.com. 

Today my audience was my guest and we had many wonderful callers.  Many were informative, some were challenging, and several were deeply touching as people shared their struggles and I tried to offer comfort and direction.  I am getting to like this  format better and better.   I now have a dedicated email for the radio show, www.bregginlive.com.   Listen to this hour and email me how you liked it and how it might be improved.  This is becoming my new direction.   I’ll continue to have official guests; but my audience is now my best guest.   You can listen to the Dr. Peter Breggin Hour, every Wednesday at 4 pm NY Time, on www.prn.fm.  You can call in toll free with 888 874 4888.   And check out the new PRN app. 

This was open mic hour where you, my marvelous listening audience, get a chance to tell your story and to ask questions.  Today we had many very uplifting stories and many interesting and important questions.  I offer the best I can in the way of advice, direction and encouragement.  Although I've often taken calls like this on other people's radio shows, this was my first show of its kind.  It was such a success with so many callers that I’m planning another purely call-in show for Wednesday August 29, 2018 at 4 pm NY Time.  As always call in to 888 874 4888.  I love doing this and I hope you will love listening and calling in.    My current plan is to offer an open microphone on the last Wednesday of every month and maybe more often depending on your participation.  Thanks for being such a great audience!  

Where are all the young psychiatrists?  Well, they are beginning to express themselves.  My guest is psychiatrist Pinar Miski, MD, who teaches my live on-line course, “Why and How Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs,” which you can find onwww.breggin.com.   Pinar brings serious clinical experience as a psychiatric consultant on medical wards and also as a person knowledgeable in the field of nutrition.   She offers a caring, straightforward and sound approach to helping people that may help you rediscover your faith in yourself.  It may even put some healthy chinks in the psychiatric armor.  This was Pinar's first radio show ever and it was 5/5 stars.

My guest today is Dr. Ayo Maat, a pastoral counselor and unrelenting activist in Chicago’s inner city.   In a far-ranging discussion we look at what people living in poverty and disability in the inner cities really need.  We also describe our mutual efforts in the 1990s that successfully stopped a racist eugenic federal program in the United States, including Chicago.  Some of what you discover may be surprising as we learn from Dr. Maat ‘s extensive experience as a reformer confronting discrimination in many areas of life including race, poverty, and mental disability.  Her heroic life as a reformer is inspiring.   Also, remember that we are now taking callers live every Wednesday at 4 pm NY time at 888 874 4888 and that you can email your thoughts about the program to bregginlive@hotmail.com.

My guest is product liability attorney Steve Sheller.  Steve is unquestionably one of the strongest, most effective and most feared attorneys in the world—a threat of giant proportions to unscrupulous drug companies.   In a fast-moving show, we focused on the horrific nefarious activities of the drug company J & J (Johnson & Johnson) and its subsidiary Janssen, as well as the drug industry in general.  The issues ranged from J & J’s Risperdal causing tardive dyskinesia as well as enlarged breasts in boys to their infamous talcum powder causing ovarian cancer.   We looked at how drug company money spreads corruption throughout society.  We explored the government interventions that seem necessary, including finally sending drug company executives to jail when they are proven to have committed criminal activities.      Ironically, when I got off the radio, I opened an email from the journal JAMA Psychiatry, and at the top is an advertisement for a fake science conference, "Advances in the Neurobiology of Mental Illness," presented by the New York Academy of Sciences.  It is sponsored by Janssen and by Johnson & Johnson.  What a fearful sight: Janssen and its parent company J & J collaborating with the NY Academy of Sciences and the AMA's psychiatric journal.   Even the billions of dollars that Steve has caused them to forfeit has not stopped the drug companies.  The Pharmaceutical Empire has made itself  unstoppable--for now, anyway. 

My wonderful listening audience, thanks to you our first Open Mic Wednesday on the Dr. Peter Breggin Hour was a great success.  I had announced it three days earlier on my Frequent Alerts and the moment the hour began at 4 pm New York time the phone lines lit up.  I took half-a-dozen great calls from India, Canada and across the US.  Questions like “Is schizophrenia curable?” and “Do bipolar people have to keep having manic episodes if they don’t take drugs?” as well as “How do I help my son sleep?” brought thoughtful and hopeful exchanges.  A Chicago colleague I hadn’t heard from in decades stimulated enlightening reminisces about how Ginger and I led the successful fight to stop the racist, eugenic Federal Violence Initiative in the 1980s.   PRN did a truly professional job of handling the calls smoothly and keeping the show in a great rhythm.   I will soon announce another Open Mic Wednesday.   Keep up with the Dr. Peter Breggin Hour and our other activities by joining the free Frequent Alerts on www.breggin.com.  Thanks, Peter

With our new and more interactive radio program format with news, commentary and callers, today my guest is Wayne Douglas, cofounder of Benzodiazepine Awareness Day which is going on around this world on this very day.   Wayne's infectious enthusiasm keeps you on the pioneering edge of what global leaders are doing to confront the harm being done by psychiatric drugs.   In his life, Wayne illustrates what one individual can do to help improve the world!

Welcome to the second show in my new format with special features and callers.  My guest Pam Popper PhD is the best, most science-based nutritionist I have ever known and a great person as well.  The show goes back and forth between nutrition and psychology in a lively conversation with the most truly informed and ethical nutritionist you will ever hear on the air.  Among the topics, What is the connection between mental health and nutrition?  Are there helpful vitamins and supplements?  What's the financial cost of eating right?  Pam's nutritional knowledge has greatly improved my health, the health of my family members, and the health of my psychiatric patients.   Listening to this could increase your health beyond your imagination.   

This show introduces a new, exciting and varied format, bringing you, the listener, into much closer communication with me and our audience.   First, I am taking callers for the first time.  Call 888 874 4888 between 4 and 5 pm on Wednesdays.  Second, I have an email where you can send questions and suggestions for the show at any time.  The email isbregginlive@hotmail.com.  I cannot answer by email, but selected questions will be aired and every suggestion will be appreciated.  In addition, there are special features each week, including suggestions for a better life and Breaking News and Information.  My website, www.breggin.com, will offeer links to the stories that are covered on the radio.  Today was the first reformatted show and it will be replayed next week when I'm traveling.  My great guest is Michael Cornwall, PhD, one of the most kind and thoughtful people in the field of psychology.  The two of us answered questions from callers in this the maiden voyage of my new and more stimulating format.  Great guests, great callers, and a wonderful audience!  And now you can communicate with me  and ultimately with our audience by calling in or by email.  I am more than delighted with this initial effort to bring me and you, my audience, into closer communication with each other. 

My guest, Peter Kinderman PhD, is an articulate leader in British psychology who is having a positive influence on psychology, psychiatry and the politics of mental health--achievements that could not yet happen in the US.  Peter works within the system in a way that could not yet occur here within our professional organizations, universities or federal government.  Hear about some good trends in mental health in Great Britain and Europe that are ahead of the US.  Peter Kinderman spreads hope and shows new directions!

Patrick D. Hahn is a genuine scholar of the history of psychiatry who leads us through the turns and twists of psychiatry's struggle with its untruths from the Nazi doctors led by Ernst Rudin to the field of psychotherapy led by Sigmund Freud.  It's an endless tale of ignoring what people really suffer from--abuse and rejection in growing up, followed by abuse and rejection in most of what passes for mental health treatment.  This is a very thoughtful hour about psychiatry and psychoanalysis that everyone should know about and rise above.     

I wish everyone in the world could listen to this hour.  I learned a huge amount.  Yet it’s a topic many find unbearable because it requires rethinking ourselves and society.  My friend and colleague Jeanne Stolzer PhD explains the transformative importance of the first few years of life.  Did you know that infants nursed into early childhood grow up much smarter, healthier and happier?  Did you know that mothers who nurse have little or no post-partum depression and instead thrive mentally and emotionally?  Did you know that a mother's milk is unique and never the same from moment to moment, hour to hour? Want to know why?  Jeanne is a true scientist and she has the data on this and more for a truly radical and informative hour of conversation.  If you listen, you are guaranteed to be informed in a new way about who you are.  You will be stirred into thought about how far human society has gone away from what sustained, nourished and informed us for 99.9999% of our evolution.

Kim Witczak is the consumer representative on the FDA’s psychopharmacology committee.  That’s the mostly “professional” group that recommends for or against new drugs to the FDA.   Other than Kim, the regular participants are mostly drug company flacks.  When you read that the FDA’s committee approved a drug 11-1, the one dissenter is probably heroic Kim Witczak.  No one can give you better insight into what goes on in the regulatory agency.  Learn about the latest menace recently unleashed on neurological and psychiatric patients, already causing hundreds of deaths!   

My wonderful audience, I hope you listen to this show and share it.   Psychologist Bob Foltz and I talk about what really matters in helping relationships and how important they are in every aspect of our lives.  Sharing what I know about relationship is where my own work is moving because I feel it’s the most important issue in every one of our lives--how we relate to each other, whether in professional therapeutic relationships or in friendship and family life.  As Bob reminds us, we can best measure the satisfaction we have in life by the quality of our relationships.  Fame, wealth or success in fulfilling our ideals as contributors to society can build our self-esteem and make us proud, but it cannot make us fully satisfied and even happy with our lives; only wonderful personal relationships can do that.   Even in formalized therapies, it is the caring relationship that ultimately matters.  My goal is the liberation of people-helping-people from the confines and corruption of professionalism and to make the know-how of relationship and helping one another available to everyone.