The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

I start this hour by describing an extraordinary attack on my free speech that is currently unfolding surrounding the Michelle Carter suicide-by-texting trial.   Please keep track on my Frequent Alerts on www.breggin.com.   Then Stefan Ecks, PhD, provides us with information that no one else in the world possesses.  It concerns the marketing and consumptions of medications, including psychiatric drugs, in India and other less developed societies. His fascinating information gives insight into the workings of Indian society and also into the dangers of free-for-all marketing almost without regulation.   For those of us believe in a relatively free market, it is a grim reminder of what happens when industries and “professionals” are controlled neither by shared ethics nor by regulation.  

Robert E. Wubbolding, EdD is a practitioner of Choice Theory and Reality Therapy developed by psychiatrist William Glasser, who was a close ally and a friend of mine in his later years.    Bob is doing a great job worldwide spreading Reality Therapy.  He shares with me his wisdom and experience about how to help people from coaching to intensive psychotherapy, and also about the personality of Bill Glasser.

Marriage and family therapists Kermit Cole and Louisa Putnam  do a wonderful job sharing experiences as family therapists.  They have the unique perspective of a couple who works as a team in helping other couples.  They bring a broad social perspective.  They are also remarkable in their lifelong devotion to psychiatric reform and their leadership in key reform organizations such as Mad in American and The Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care.   Their way of life is informative, admirable and fulfilling. 

Kim Olver, psychotherapist and William Glaser Institute director, talks with us again and in more depth about psychotherapy—the basic principles, how to relate to people we are helping, and how to train people to help others.   Both of us believe that mental health services can be delivered better and much less expensively by training good people to be therapists without requiring extensive prior schooling and professional degrees.   By making training and certificates more easily available, many people could become fine therapists, providing services at much lower costs as trainers or coaches.  You can meet Kim Oliver, Bob Whitaker and myself at a Kim’s conference next week, July 26-July 28, 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina.   Our Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy is cosponsoring.   For more information, go to www.breggin.com and click on Upcoming Events on the drop-down menu.

Terry Lynch is an Irish GP who became a psychotherapist and now devotes himself to helping people through his practice, his books, and his courses for professionals and the public.  On the air on my radio show today, I listened to him amazed at how similarly we see the human struggle and how to help people with it.  He puts important ideas into words that mirror my own thoughts, only said more clearly, and with a lovely Irish accent.  If you care about people and about understanding their struggles, this show will inspire, entertain and educate you. Thank you, Terry!     

My guest Dr. Michael Guy Thompson is creating a radically innovative home for people with serious emotional suffering in San Francisco.  Called Gnosis Retreat, it breaks completely with the medical model and views distress as a part of being human.   Michael and I talk about friendship and love in recovery and in life.  We examine the necessity of helping people “off the grid” to  avoid government and psychiatric interference.  The problem is not the “high cost” of good approaches because some of the best like Michael’s are the least expensive.  The best help often requires relatively little professional involvement and no expensive options like doctors, drugs and hospitals.  The supposedly high costs of mental health care are not about the services needed by struggling people.  The high costs are about feeding the bloated Pharmaceutical and Medical Empires.  

A wonderful hour with psychotherapist Michael Cornwall as we talk about helping people in “extreme states.”   These are people, in Michael’s words, who get “medically cursed” instead of helped.   We explore the true nature of extreme states and helping these people without diagnosing and drugging them.   Extreme states can lead to new growth and learning.  But artificially inducing them with psychoactive drugs like LSD, in my view, is too dangerous an approach; and I emphasize the risks of treating them with marijuana or its active substances.   Michael is so experienced, so dedicated, and so genuine, it is a pleasure to share him with you. 

My guest is British Aristocracy. Luke Montagu is the heir to Mapperton, the finest manor house in England, and is slated to one day become the Earl of Sandwich. But it has not been a charmed or fairytale life and antidepressants almost destroyed him. Instead of retreating into dreams of becoming an Earl, Luke has become one of the most compassionate and caring people I have had the honor to interview on the Dr. Peter Breggin Hour. He puts efforts in supporting the spirituality of the Dali Lama and in developing and distributing programs to teach compassion and forgiveness in schools. Beyond that, he manages to devote himself to the seemingly diverse task of bringing scientific sanity to psychiatry and mental health. I enjoyed and benefitted from having an hour with Luke Montagu. You will, too.

Kim Olver is a coach, counselor and director of the William Glasser Institute.  My organization is cosponsoring a great conference with her July 26-29, 2017, including a full-day workshop on July 26 with me and Bob Whitaker (www.breggin.com, click on Upcoming Events).  The show with Kim focuses on what people really need to have good lives and then progresses to how a person can become a well-trained certified counselor or coach without going through too much unnecessary and often corrupting education.  Training counselors and coaches is basic to delivering decent drug-free mental health services.  What is a counselor? What is a coach?  Do they need any advanced education other than a certificate from a good training program?   All this is basic to the directions we must take to provide relatively inexpensive, high quality emotional and psychological help.

My guest Pam Popper, PhD, ND, believes in informed medical decision making and this has led her to partner with me in delivering educational materials and now clinical services aimed at making science-based nutritional, mental health, and medical services widely available.  Together, we aim at vastly increasing the available of both the information and the services that people need for healthier minds and bodies.  We also preview our upcoming joint conference on nutrition, medicine and mental health November 10-12, 2017.  For those of you who know me, this must sound like a major expansion of my interests and purposes—and it is!  Come along with me and Pam on this adventure!

“The FDA does more to legitimize drugs than to monitor them!”  That’s what I conclude while talking with my guest, courageous Kim Witczak, who lost her husband to a Zoloft suicide, and who has gone on to be a Consumer Representative on FDA Advisory Committees.  Kim is your eyes inside the FDA and every show with her is enlightening.   

Did you know that ADHD kids have smaller brains?  The esteemed British journal Lancet and 80 plus authors say so, and the media has spread the news.   We must be grateful to my guest, Michael Corrigan, EdD, an educator and researcher, for debunking the study, and looking at what is really going on with this fraudulent diagnosis.  Claiming that ADHD children have smaller brains fits into a long history of racist and misogynistic claims about white men have larger brains.   It is ironic that the article claims to de-stigmatize ADHD by reassuring young people that they have smaller brains causing their problems in school.  If you were a child, wouldn’t that make you feel dreadfully stigmatized and even cheated by life?  As for me, as I confessed on the show, I have a smaller head, and therefore probably a smaller brain, than most people. My guest tells me on the air that he had the biggest head on his high school football team and hence probably the biggest brain, while when I played football in high school they could not find a helmet small enough to fit me.   My helmet was always falling over my eyes, blocking my vision while I ran with the ball.  I had to run with my head held up high to keep the helmet from sliding down, which was hazardous to say the least.  Well, at least no one told me that my small head, and presumably smaller brain, meant I had a disorder.  

Kevin Miller is the filmmaker of Generation Rx and now Letters from Generation Rx.   He and I enjoy our tour of common falsehoods sold to us by psychiatry, medicine and nutrition in our world.   For the first time in public, I talk more about my own enlightenment about nutrition, and my glorious first six weeks of plant-based eating.  Kevin and I achieve a degree of eloquence as we describe the vast web  of misinformation created by huge, financially powerful interest groups that push all the many medicines and foods that are more likely to make us sicker than to make us healthier.   Good conversation between two old friends and colleagues, and value of continuing to learn.

My guest, British psychologist Peter Kinderman PhD and I agreed to do a show that examines the politics of mental health including the overall politics of human life, society, and government.  This is the first time I have aired my own political principles in such detail on my radio talk show.   I believe in Founding Principles of America, including personal freedom and responsibility, and small government. Peter views himself as a socialist who promotes the common good through government services and solutions.  Yet we have so much in common in how we criticize biological psychiatry for obscuring and covering up the real sources of human suffering in our personal, family, and societal experiences.  Peter and I certainly found this conversation interesting if not unique.  We confront some of the most important issues in life, ones that bring us together, and ones that divide us.  We illustrate how two people can talk together about their differences and their common viewpoints, reaching toward new and better ways to think about and to organize our lives on a personal and a political level.

A positive, loving approach to helping children and adults in therapy, education and everyday life. Howard Glasser and his Nurtured Heart Approach are transforming thousands of lives around the world.  Hear us talk about how you can bring out the best in yourself and others.   Replayed from 9.23.15.