The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

My guest is Chuck Knapp, MA, cofounder of Windhorse Integrative Mental Health in Boulder, Colorado.  He and his group bring kindness, thoughtfulness, and a rich background of experience to helping people otherwise labelled “chronic” by contemporary institutions.  Windhorse is one of the best-kept secrets in the field for people and their families who have suffered in the prevailing mental health system.   While not excluding people who want medication, Chuck explains that Windhorse will treat people and their families who wish to avoid or to withdraw from psychiatric drugs.  Like all the best therapeutic approaches, especially for profoundly wounded people, it tailors treatment as much as possible to the family.  Of course, you must explore and evaluate Windhorse for yourself--I have no personal or professional experience with it--but I honor the soundness of the family-oriented principles, combined with respect for the individual, that it seeks to implement.

I open this show with a manifesto:  That the actions of people helping people can and should lie outside the conventional designations of psychiatrist, psychologist, or even counselor and therapist, and these activities should not be subjected to government control and licensing.  I believe that humans and humanity have survived throughout our evolution with helping relationships, including helping each other with all kinds and degrees of emotional struggles.  I briefly describe my new course that will be available early 2019 in which I will focus on people learning to help each other, whether they are psychiatrists or former psychiatric patients, or people who are functioning well or barely at all.  We are all the same in that we struggle to have a good life, and all of us can do our best to help one another.  Today’s guest Daniel R. Berger illustrates my manifesto.  He has training  in counseling and he knows more about conventional psychiatry that most psychiatrists do; but he has not been captured by professionalism. He acts on his Christian beliefs by being his own kind helper, a man who breathes his Christian faith into everything he does, from his trenchant and highly informed critique of modern psychiatry to his Biblical approach to helping people with even the most serious emotional overwhelms, including psychosis.  I hope this hour with me and Daniel Berger will further open your mind and heart toward a better a life, and to a vision of how much better off the world will be without mental health authorities and professionals capturing the field people helping people.

My guest and colleague Caroline Leaf PhD is reaching millions of people around the world with a message that your brain does not control you and instead you control your brain and to a great extent your body and your environment. From hard science to philosophical speculation, Caroline and I share an inspiring conversation.  She leaves in shambles the claims of the Pharmaceutical Empire that your head is filled with chemicals that can and should control you and, beyond that, she makes a strong argument that we have free will.  She emphasizes how these ideas give hope, motivation and guidance to people who want to improve their lives. Caroline's life and work embrace the clinical to the political and religious.  You will benefit from getting to know Caroline, much as I am doing!  

Replay from 7-1-15   About my newest book, Guilt, Shame and Anxiety:  Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions.  These self-defeating emotions are primitive instincts built into us by evolution, but we can achieve emotional freedom from them. 

In the hour preceding this particularly great hour of my own radio show,  I watched myself flicker across the screen of a Dr. Oz television show titled “Is There a Link between Psychiatric Drugs and Violence?”  Oz gives me a few seconds to say that the FDA confirms that antidepressants cause “hostility and aggression,” and then cuts me off as I’m going to continue that the FDA also specifies “violence” in the Medication Guides for antidepressants.  So today’s Dr. Peter Breggin Hour opens with me passionately, and with some frustration, expressing my limited satisfaction and enormous disappointment in the Oz show.  But in many ways it was a highpoint in my reform work, because Dr. Oz raised the issue of psychiatric drug-induced violence in the title of his show and at one point held up a lengthy list of mass murders involving psychiatric drugs—a sight that will stick with millions of viewers. Then, as glorious fate would have it, my guest for my own show on this day is Thomas Moore, one of the world’s premier experts on the scientific study of adverse drug effects, and the author of key studies on violence induced by prescription drugs.  Our dialogue is packed with information.  This is a don’t-miss hour.

Replay From 04.20.16 Kelly Brogan MD is a shining star of a psychiatrist!  You will want to know her!   Coming through the establishment, she broke free to treat patients the way she would want to be treated, and from there, to a deeper understanding of life from the menace of the psychopharmaceutical ideology to the worth of what we both call psychospirituality. You are guaranteed to benefit from spending time with her.

Leah Ashe PhD and I “sit at the kitchen table” so-to-speak and have a lovely conversation about the knowable and the unknowable in life, starting with our relationship to food, and to then to the animals that most of us eat, and then to each other and the unknowable and knowable we find in and with each other.  I enjoyed this surprising and unexpected conversation that went everywhere except where we had planned.   It left me more comfortable than I am when trying to apply reason and science to everything to find an answer.  It felt more real than drawing conclusions.  Come join Leah and me meandering about life at the kitchen table.  It was a good, enlightening experience for me and perhaps for you, too. 

Would you like to eavesdrop on a conversation with a pediatrician who is rational, kind, thoughtful and informed while he talks about how he helps children and parents in his practice on a daily basis?  What pediatrician Tom Ryan, MD teaches us about helpful communication is applicable to every aspect of life.  He and I discuss a broad range of difficult subjects, starting with how to help distressed and even “autistic” children and their families without psychiatric drugs.  We even get into difficult questions surrounding vaccines and the harm they may or may not do.  This is an hour well worth it for anyone interested in childhood and parenting or simply in communication.   I also give an update on the relationship that the Florida shooter had with the mental health system and Dr. Ryan adds his own informative observations on what might have happened to him. 

Andrew Thibault’s new film Speed Demons, available on Amazon.com, is a major contribution to understanding the murder and mayhem perpetrated under the influence of psychiatric drugs.  It is beautifully filmed, profoundly empathic, and very informative.  Although focused on prescribed amphetamines, we learn about the overall cover up of psychiatric drug-induced violence.  In our wide-ranging discussion today, what struck me most poignantly was how Andrew had to go to court to force the FDA to handover the case reports sent to the agency concerning homicides on psychiatric drugs.  Andrew had discovered the existence of hundreds of these reports while reviewing the available FDA summaries and now wanted to see the actually reports.  These reports are usually readily available and the FDA is supposed to give them to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On the radio today,  Andrew informs us that the FDA admitted in its presentation to the court that it had not “evaluated” any of the reports, even though it knew that many related to highly publicized mass murders.   If a supposed watchdog agency is not examining a huge pattern of medication-related violence sent to it in hundreds of reports, what is it doing?   It is covering for the drug companies.   Andrew is a great example of one person successfully taking on a giant industry and should inspire all of us.  

Here is the show summary:   Dr. Bruce Perry, neuroscientist and child psychiatrist, coauthor of Born to Love and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, presents the latest science on the interface between brain biology, empathy, and the provision of genuine help. A unique and very informative discussion.  This is a replay from my interview with him on 12.12.12 but Dr. Perry's important work on trauma and therapy is timeless.  His planned appearance for today was snowed out on my end and he will be rescheduled soon--but don't miss this replay of an important show by this great researcher and clinician.

Psychologist Howie Glasser created the Nurtured Heart Approach to therapy and education, and really to life.   Children, especially those with great perceptivity and energy, quickly discover that they get more time, attention, and intensive relating by being difficult than by being easy. Often we tend to ignore children until they do make trouble!  Howie’s approach is to help children to appreciate and expand  the good and even great things that they do routinely and often unknowingly in their relationships.   (It also works for adult relationships.)  Howie and I have known each other for years and the hour itself has a good energy you will enjoy. 

My guest, journalist MK Mendoza, provides one of the most heartfelt, original and important hours I have experienced on the air.  One year after her father’s death, she speaks out in public for the first time about what it is like to be a family member of someone labelled mentally ill who was then destroyed by psychiatric treatment.  From the age of ten until now, she has struggled with what was done to her father, to her whole family, and to herself by the lies and destructive treatments that are now all-too-familiar, including involuntary hospitalization, ECT and drugs.   More vividly than any I have known, she speaks about the toll within the family over conflicts about psychiatric treatment, choosing sides, scapegoating, and blaming, and finally guilt and shame.  MK is not complaining; she is planning—filled with ideas about actions to take.   Listen to MK, spread the word, take inspiration from her, and get in touch with her.    

Andrew Sercombe from Great Britain works outside the establishment in his own business as a “therapeutic coach.”  He brings enormous enthusiasm, spirituality, sound values and practical psychology to his high impact, short-term approach to helping people find and pursue what they want in life.  To those of us accustomed to a slower more leisurely pace, Andrew will be both challenging and inspiring.  Andrew destroys conventional ideas about psychotherapy in ways that I believe will encourage genuine progress.  At the same time, he applies and confirms sound  psychological insights.  I think this is the future of helping people—outside academia and professionalism where an enormous variety of approaches compete in an open marketplace.  I was provoked to rethink time-tattered concepts in this enjoyable conversation.

Tony Stanton, MD is a child and adult psychiatrist who has been in the field almost as long as I have, and like me from the beginning knew that drugs were not the answer.  For more than two decades, Tony ran a program in California that took the last resort children of the state, those who had “failed” everywhere else, often in broken families with parents in jail.  He successfully helped them to come off their multiple medications and to gain a sense of worth and their place in the community.  Safety, engagement and predictability, along with empathic listening, are the principles Tony promotes.  Tony has transcended his profession to become a beacon of wisdom and understanding.  He can help you to have a more fulfilling start to your New Year.  

Probably the deepest, most far-ranging discussing on “personal responsibility” you will ever hear, beautifully shared with my guest in a single hour. Brian Russell, a lawyer and psychologist with wide-ranging interests, focuses with me on what it means to take responsibility for living a rich, full, principled and loving life.   Politics, religion, personal relationships—nothing is off bounds in our attempt to understand and apply this critical principle of successful living—that we must never flinch from being in charge of ourselves and the outcome of our lives, while doing so in a positive manner.   No more complaining, no more moaning, no more giving up!   No more eating ourselves up with hate and resentment!  Instead, we work to be grateful for life, while learning how to live by taking personal responsibility for ourselves. This hour can change lives.