Dr. Peter Breggin summarizes effective counseling methods for depression and the truth about the adverse effects of SSRIs and anti-depressant medication. For more information see Dr. Breggin’s website section Dr. Peter Breggin’s Antidepressant Drug Resource and Information Center for prescribers, scientists, professionals, patients, and their families.
I'm an ECT and psych med survivor. I have a brain injury as a result of the ECT done to me a few decades ago, and my body was left the worse for wear in many ways, but I am free from medications and focused on living life now. I read Dr. Breggin's book many years ago and was moved to tears when I found my personal story captured in one of the patterns described in the book. Trauma, led to SSRI, led to SSRI reaction, led to bipolar diagnosis and all the complications and side effects that flow from that.
It's taken a lot of time and I still have things I'm processing about the time that I was caught under the spell of psych meds (medication spellbinding is such a great term) but I have fared better than many people who have found themselves in situations similar to mine.
Thank you to Dr. Breggin for speaking out about the harms that come from these medications and for being a tireless advocate for those of us who were injured because we naively trusted a doctor to know what was best for us.
I do wonder - if Dr. Breggin has any thoughts about how to judiciously trust healthcare professionals for those of us who've been so harmed? As much as we may all wish perfect health forever, there are some things that require a doctor's help - but how does one return to balance and know the appropriate time to seek support/help after being so mistreated?
Never had a problem dealing with people as I am usually very upbeat and middle of the road.. At 29, I experienced a situation, which put me into a mental hospital. My husband went berzerk and got violent with me...and could have killed me. I calmed him down and went into the bedroom ; and just didn't want to come out. I had no money, two children, and nowhere to go.. I stayed in the bedroom for 3 days. Then my husband came in and took me by the hand; and out me into a very strange mental hospital. I remember in detail all about this and it happened 61 years ago. I wrote about it in a book that was published in 1995. My husband wanted me on drugs, because he liked having a sick wife and he wanted total control over me. it made him feel like a strong man...and he was a very sick man. There are other men like this too. He forced me to stay on drugs for years and it is a miracle that I still have a mind. I stayed with him for 21 miserable years, before he let me go. He did not love me, but he was all about image....and did not want his parents and others to see his marriage failed. I learned how a sick marriage can create emotionally unstable children. i would not advise anyone to stay in a bad marriage. However, I have no regrets...life is about learning and I sure learned a lot. Drugs are not the answer. I got into the study of nutrition, because of a sick child, but also, because I wanted to do all I could to remain mentally stable in this bad situation. I studied Dr Abram Hoffer's books in the 1970s and many other books on nutrition for the mind. I had plenty of time to study, because my husband was rarely home. I know quite a bit about drugs, because I was put on some very dangerous ones. I prayed to the Creator: "Please protect my brain."
I wonder if Dr Breggin has any advice for the mom of a 16 year old dealing with anorexia? I've reached a point where I no longer trust most therapists and don't know which direction to turn. I spent 30 years of my life going to different therapists and psychiatrists and taking their meds. It took me a very long time to come off of them and can honestly say they never helped but hurt me in many different ways.
Is there any type of therapy he recommends specifically for eating disorders?
Tried various antidepressants for years . ( now o have numb sexual feelings) My cousin was sold the “ new& improved “ shock treatment therapy in the? early 2000’s. She’s been on disability since! She’s early 50’s & memory problems ( before the jabs, made everything worse.)
My friend's son went a bit wild as a teenager, sniffing glue, smoking pot and ended up arrested with others for stealing and crashing a car. Only one injured was him, left at the scene. He was locked up and his mother thinks someone maybe assaulted him sexually. He had a breakdown incident and his parents didn't know what do but call emergency services. Long story short, only way to receive 24/7 care was to put schizophrenic label on him. He was put into secure mental hospital and given drugs. 30 years later, he's allowed out for weekends to his mother, now he's late 40s. Then he's allowed into warden live in place with others who are street drug users, eventually getting his own 1 bed pad. He's only allowed out of the hospital if he's injected monthly with this drug which has bad side effects, like painful muscle spasms, so docs have kindly prescribed Parkinson's and anti anxiety drugs too! His life was taken away, murderers who kill serve less time, and of course, if he refuses his "treatment" they can take him back into the secure medical unit indefinitely. It shouldn't be allowed to happen to adolescents, his parents trusted the doctors. The only people he knows are those in similar circumstances and none fit into regular society anymore, including himself.
These days they're finally talking about drugs that have a huge safety profile and work well for depression. The irony is that they're old drugs! (Just like ivermectin, another wonder drug)
One new drug with ridiculous costs because they patented it by combining it with Wellbutrin (bupropion)...
But essentially the dextromethorphan is the off patent drug that does the job (it's in cough medicines).
Here's the best version, and keep in mind the auvelity drug uses 45mg when these are 30mg each. So 1 to 2 per day would match it without the bupropion garbage.
It makes me think of what the trouble is with the world today. What is it? According to another doctor, it is this:
‘‘the desperate desires that men have to make other men accept their views. That was and has been the trouble with the Occident since the downfall of paganism. It was the scandal of the Christian church — and I say it with reverence for the many noble hearts who have lived in and brightened that church with their lives. The great fault of men from the time of the downfall of Rome in all the European countries, and in these two continents of ours, has been the desperate effort of men to force others to think as they do — in religion, in politics, in society, it matters not what.
It is this which has lighted the pyres of the martyrs. It is this which has sent murdering, marauding bands out for the killing of other men. It is this which has made and signed treaties, and imposed them on nations. It is this which troubles us today. You see it everywhere. You see it even in countries at peace. You see it in our social relations among ourselves. Western men and women do not seem to be happy unless they are trying with more or less success to impose their will upon others, their thoughts, their ideas of what is right: the way the world should be run, the way things should be done, and especially the way other people should believe and feel. When you realize how greatly we value the sanctuary of our own hearts, the freedom of our own lives, and our right to think freely, you can see how tragical the consequences always are.
Why, I have seen the same evil strain running even through the minds of theosophists who seem to think that other theosophists are all on the wrong path because they do not accept their opinions — theosophically, this is simply repeating the same old evil desire to make the other fellow think as you do.
Now, try as you may, you cannot completely succeed in this. You can kill men, you can shackle their bodies, you can defile and distort their minds and their hearts. But you cannot enchain the human soul. It will break free. And then the same old tragedy is repeated. It is pathetic; and the pathos of it lies mainly not so much in the great human suffering brought about, but in the immense loss to humankind of the treasures repressed and defeated in the hearts and minds of others. Think! what is more beautiful than for a man to study the mind of his friend or his fellow, to bring out what is there, to see it grow, to see unfolded the treasuries of thought? This is productive. The other is destructive. The one enriches the treasuries of human thought and human feeling; it brings about gentleness and peace and mildness in men's dealings with each other. The other brings about hatred and suspicion and a seething resentment and urge to throw off the slavery of imposed beliefs, ideas, or forms.
Do you know why all this happens? Simply because people, most of them, are unensouled. I do not mean they have no souls; but their souls are not active, are not working, are not productive. They are asleep. Thus men and women mostly live like human animals; in fact, worse, because animals are governed more or less by an instinct which holds some measure of respect for other animals. But men have planning and tricky minds, and when planning and tricky minds are endowed with reason, we have tyranny, religious, social, political, any kind. We have, I say, tyranny: the attempt by minority, or by majority, or the one upon the many, or the many upon the one, to impose ideas and thoughts and modes of conduct to which the others must submit — and we call that the "freedom of the Occident"!
Freedom! One of heaven's most blessed gifts and the one that we have most outrageously abused, for we have considered that to gain freedom is the causing of other men to accept our beliefs, is the obliging of other men to accept our institutions and our ways of doing things. And the result: the crushing down of the flowering of millions of human souls which otherwise would have produced abundantly, brought forth nobly their contribution to the enrichment of our common human treasury.
Am I revolutionary in these ideas? Never. For that would be just myself trying to repeat the moral crimes I speak of, trying to impose my views upon others. Evolutionary? Yes! Appealing to human hearts and minds always to remember that they can never be ultimately happy, or produce their best, or allow their fellowmen to produce their best, if they fight others. It never has worked. It never will. It is against the laws of human nature. It is against all the laws of psychology, both the higher and the lower. It is a man's duty to obey the laws of his country. No matter what country it is, no matter what laws it may have, as long as he lives in it he should be obedient to its laws. But let him in his own life be an example of an ensouled man, and if he die a martyr in the cause of the world will hear of his example and it will be, as the old Christian said, "the seed of the Church"; for it is a curious fact in human psychological thought, that even though a man die in a poor cause it is a seed of propaganda.
The greatest wisdom in human life as taught by the masters of wisdom is sympathy for the souls of men, and making your own life an example of what you preach: justice, brotherly love, sympathy, pity, compassion, helpfulness, refraining from doing any unjust act to whomsoever it may be. Your example will be followed by others because you will stand out like a beacon light on a dark night.
That is the ideal; and I shall always hold it before me as an ideal. For I have found, and I found it even in my boyhood, that the most interesting thing in human association, in human relations, in the give-and-take of daily life, is the bringing out of what the other man has within him, wants to show, wants to express. It is fascinating; and the quickest way to kill that, to check its growth, is to impose your ideas on him. For then you kill something wondrously beautiful; you bring about the destruction of the noblest thing in human life instead of sympathetically aiding in its flowering. It is a crime to do this. Contrariwise, if you can bring out what is within a man's soul you can enrich him and yourself, both. And this is the essence of real leadership. It means leading the hearts of men; bringing out the best in others, so that they themselves come to love the beauty thus brought forth and become fired with enthusiasm. To impose ideas on others is tyranny.
We are living under a rule of force; there are forcible repressions everywhere. You know what that means in mechanics; similarly does the crushing of the aspirations of the human soul, the forcing down of what must come out some day, produce explosions. Can you wonder that the greatest men who have ever lived have taught us that the way to peace and happiness and growth and prosperity and riches and all the good things of life is love and justice? Love for the souls of men, sympathy for the souls of men; doing not unto others as you would not that they should do unto you — this negative form is the wiser one. Doing unto others what you would they should do unto you — "saving the souls of men" — is a rule which admits of the abuses of ignorance and fanaticism.
Treat others — put it in the positive form if you like — treat others as you want others to treat you, and by and by you will grow to see the flowering of their and your ideals. A man who does this is an ensouled man: one in whom the qualities of the soul predominate; who loves because love is beautiful; one who, enriching the life of his fellows, enriches his own life; one who treats others generously and gives to others the first chance. This is not only chivalrous, but also it increases one's own power and strength, for it requires willpower to do this continuously. It is a process of ensouling oneself ever more. The greatest men in the world have been the most ensouled in this sense. They are those whose hearts have held the most love, whose minds have been the keenest, the quickest, the strongest, the manliest; whose ethical sense has been the most subtle, the most quick, the firmest. They are those who have refused to impose their will upon others, but instead have led forth the beauty in the souls of others.’ Dr. G. de Purucker
Just a note, there's a growing awareness of the occult groups infiltrating the freedom movements and more. The scientologists, UFO cult followers are part of it. Wondering what you are seeing Peter. I suggest you watch Matt Ehret's recent interview and discussion with Mathew Crawford on Canadian Patriot Channel. Go to Rounding The Earth on Substack on Mathew Crawford's mapping. It's like a Lego's construction to make sure they have access and insight in every group. Bitchute Channel Canadian Patriot 1776. Title includes Scientology and Neo-theosophy.
I'm an ECT and psych med survivor. I have a brain injury as a result of the ECT done to me a few decades ago, and my body was left the worse for wear in many ways, but I am free from medications and focused on living life now. I read Dr. Breggin's book many years ago and was moved to tears when I found my personal story captured in one of the patterns described in the book. Trauma, led to SSRI, led to SSRI reaction, led to bipolar diagnosis and all the complications and side effects that flow from that.
It's taken a lot of time and I still have things I'm processing about the time that I was caught under the spell of psych meds (medication spellbinding is such a great term) but I have fared better than many people who have found themselves in situations similar to mine.
Thank you to Dr. Breggin for speaking out about the harms that come from these medications and for being a tireless advocate for those of us who were injured because we naively trusted a doctor to know what was best for us.
I do wonder - if Dr. Breggin has any thoughts about how to judiciously trust healthcare professionals for those of us who've been so harmed? As much as we may all wish perfect health forever, there are some things that require a doctor's help - but how does one return to balance and know the appropriate time to seek support/help after being so mistreated?
Peter and Ginger,
Thank you for everything you do to educate regarding about the world of psychiatry and psychology.
Like all other professional ‘experts’....the good ones like you are far and few! God bless all your efforts!
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P.S.. Want to help America and keep up with real news that will give you HOPE?
Click on Lex Greene’s name for excellent archives…
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Without honest elections in America…exactly what kind of country do you think we have?
Donate to Mike Lindell and the NORTH AMERICAN LAW CENTER!
Never had a problem dealing with people as I am usually very upbeat and middle of the road.. At 29, I experienced a situation, which put me into a mental hospital. My husband went berzerk and got violent with me...and could have killed me. I calmed him down and went into the bedroom ; and just didn't want to come out. I had no money, two children, and nowhere to go.. I stayed in the bedroom for 3 days. Then my husband came in and took me by the hand; and out me into a very strange mental hospital. I remember in detail all about this and it happened 61 years ago. I wrote about it in a book that was published in 1995. My husband wanted me on drugs, because he liked having a sick wife and he wanted total control over me. it made him feel like a strong man...and he was a very sick man. There are other men like this too. He forced me to stay on drugs for years and it is a miracle that I still have a mind. I stayed with him for 21 miserable years, before he let me go. He did not love me, but he was all about image....and did not want his parents and others to see his marriage failed. I learned how a sick marriage can create emotionally unstable children. i would not advise anyone to stay in a bad marriage. However, I have no regrets...life is about learning and I sure learned a lot. Drugs are not the answer. I got into the study of nutrition, because of a sick child, but also, because I wanted to do all I could to remain mentally stable in this bad situation. I studied Dr Abram Hoffer's books in the 1970s and many other books on nutrition for the mind. I had plenty of time to study, because my husband was rarely home. I know quite a bit about drugs, because I was put on some very dangerous ones. I prayed to the Creator: "Please protect my brain."
I wonder if Dr Breggin has any advice for the mom of a 16 year old dealing with anorexia? I've reached a point where I no longer trust most therapists and don't know which direction to turn. I spent 30 years of my life going to different therapists and psychiatrists and taking their meds. It took me a very long time to come off of them and can honestly say they never helped but hurt me in many different ways.
Is there any type of therapy he recommends specifically for eating disorders?
Tried various antidepressants for years . ( now o have numb sexual feelings) My cousin was sold the “ new& improved “ shock treatment therapy in the? early 2000’s. She’s been on disability since! She’s early 50’s & memory problems ( before the jabs, made everything worse.)
I'm noticing depression, anxiety and personality changes in many of the 'vaccinated'...
is it neuroinflammation and micro-clotting?
I'm currently just starting part two of your book on Guilt Shame and Anxiety, finding it helpful and plan to publish a review when I'm done.
Thank you for your incredible work.
My friend's son went a bit wild as a teenager, sniffing glue, smoking pot and ended up arrested with others for stealing and crashing a car. Only one injured was him, left at the scene. He was locked up and his mother thinks someone maybe assaulted him sexually. He had a breakdown incident and his parents didn't know what do but call emergency services. Long story short, only way to receive 24/7 care was to put schizophrenic label on him. He was put into secure mental hospital and given drugs. 30 years later, he's allowed out for weekends to his mother, now he's late 40s. Then he's allowed into warden live in place with others who are street drug users, eventually getting his own 1 bed pad. He's only allowed out of the hospital if he's injected monthly with this drug which has bad side effects, like painful muscle spasms, so docs have kindly prescribed Parkinson's and anti anxiety drugs too! His life was taken away, murderers who kill serve less time, and of course, if he refuses his "treatment" they can take him back into the secure medical unit indefinitely. It shouldn't be allowed to happen to adolescents, his parents trusted the doctors. The only people he knows are those in similar circumstances and none fit into regular society anymore, including himself.
These days they're finally talking about drugs that have a huge safety profile and work well for depression. The irony is that they're old drugs! (Just like ivermectin, another wonder drug)
One new drug with ridiculous costs because they patented it by combining it with Wellbutrin (bupropion)...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577655/
But essentially the dextromethorphan is the off patent drug that does the job (it's in cough medicines).
Here's the best version, and keep in mind the auvelity drug uses 45mg when these are 30mg each. So 1 to 2 per day would match it without the bupropion garbage.
https://www.amazon.com/RoboTablets-suppressant-Dextromethorphan-Tablets-Diameter/dp/B09C2RM8G6/
Ketamine at home therapy. It works similarly as the dextro.
https://www.betterucare.com/
Sounds like a golden trumpet! Very admirable.
It makes me think of what the trouble is with the world today. What is it? According to another doctor, it is this:
‘‘the desperate desires that men have to make other men accept their views. That was and has been the trouble with the Occident since the downfall of paganism. It was the scandal of the Christian church — and I say it with reverence for the many noble hearts who have lived in and brightened that church with their lives. The great fault of men from the time of the downfall of Rome in all the European countries, and in these two continents of ours, has been the desperate effort of men to force others to think as they do — in religion, in politics, in society, it matters not what.
It is this which has lighted the pyres of the martyrs. It is this which has sent murdering, marauding bands out for the killing of other men. It is this which has made and signed treaties, and imposed them on nations. It is this which troubles us today. You see it everywhere. You see it even in countries at peace. You see it in our social relations among ourselves. Western men and women do not seem to be happy unless they are trying with more or less success to impose their will upon others, their thoughts, their ideas of what is right: the way the world should be run, the way things should be done, and especially the way other people should believe and feel. When you realize how greatly we value the sanctuary of our own hearts, the freedom of our own lives, and our right to think freely, you can see how tragical the consequences always are.
Why, I have seen the same evil strain running even through the minds of theosophists who seem to think that other theosophists are all on the wrong path because they do not accept their opinions — theosophically, this is simply repeating the same old evil desire to make the other fellow think as you do.
Now, try as you may, you cannot completely succeed in this. You can kill men, you can shackle their bodies, you can defile and distort their minds and their hearts. But you cannot enchain the human soul. It will break free. And then the same old tragedy is repeated. It is pathetic; and the pathos of it lies mainly not so much in the great human suffering brought about, but in the immense loss to humankind of the treasures repressed and defeated in the hearts and minds of others. Think! what is more beautiful than for a man to study the mind of his friend or his fellow, to bring out what is there, to see it grow, to see unfolded the treasuries of thought? This is productive. The other is destructive. The one enriches the treasuries of human thought and human feeling; it brings about gentleness and peace and mildness in men's dealings with each other. The other brings about hatred and suspicion and a seething resentment and urge to throw off the slavery of imposed beliefs, ideas, or forms.
Do you know why all this happens? Simply because people, most of them, are unensouled. I do not mean they have no souls; but their souls are not active, are not working, are not productive. They are asleep. Thus men and women mostly live like human animals; in fact, worse, because animals are governed more or less by an instinct which holds some measure of respect for other animals. But men have planning and tricky minds, and when planning and tricky minds are endowed with reason, we have tyranny, religious, social, political, any kind. We have, I say, tyranny: the attempt by minority, or by majority, or the one upon the many, or the many upon the one, to impose ideas and thoughts and modes of conduct to which the others must submit — and we call that the "freedom of the Occident"!
Freedom! One of heaven's most blessed gifts and the one that we have most outrageously abused, for we have considered that to gain freedom is the causing of other men to accept our beliefs, is the obliging of other men to accept our institutions and our ways of doing things. And the result: the crushing down of the flowering of millions of human souls which otherwise would have produced abundantly, brought forth nobly their contribution to the enrichment of our common human treasury.
Am I revolutionary in these ideas? Never. For that would be just myself trying to repeat the moral crimes I speak of, trying to impose my views upon others. Evolutionary? Yes! Appealing to human hearts and minds always to remember that they can never be ultimately happy, or produce their best, or allow their fellowmen to produce their best, if they fight others. It never has worked. It never will. It is against the laws of human nature. It is against all the laws of psychology, both the higher and the lower. It is a man's duty to obey the laws of his country. No matter what country it is, no matter what laws it may have, as long as he lives in it he should be obedient to its laws. But let him in his own life be an example of an ensouled man, and if he die a martyr in the cause of the world will hear of his example and it will be, as the old Christian said, "the seed of the Church"; for it is a curious fact in human psychological thought, that even though a man die in a poor cause it is a seed of propaganda.
The greatest wisdom in human life as taught by the masters of wisdom is sympathy for the souls of men, and making your own life an example of what you preach: justice, brotherly love, sympathy, pity, compassion, helpfulness, refraining from doing any unjust act to whomsoever it may be. Your example will be followed by others because you will stand out like a beacon light on a dark night.
That is the ideal; and I shall always hold it before me as an ideal. For I have found, and I found it even in my boyhood, that the most interesting thing in human association, in human relations, in the give-and-take of daily life, is the bringing out of what the other man has within him, wants to show, wants to express. It is fascinating; and the quickest way to kill that, to check its growth, is to impose your ideas on him. For then you kill something wondrously beautiful; you bring about the destruction of the noblest thing in human life instead of sympathetically aiding in its flowering. It is a crime to do this. Contrariwise, if you can bring out what is within a man's soul you can enrich him and yourself, both. And this is the essence of real leadership. It means leading the hearts of men; bringing out the best in others, so that they themselves come to love the beauty thus brought forth and become fired with enthusiasm. To impose ideas on others is tyranny.
We are living under a rule of force; there are forcible repressions everywhere. You know what that means in mechanics; similarly does the crushing of the aspirations of the human soul, the forcing down of what must come out some day, produce explosions. Can you wonder that the greatest men who have ever lived have taught us that the way to peace and happiness and growth and prosperity and riches and all the good things of life is love and justice? Love for the souls of men, sympathy for the souls of men; doing not unto others as you would not that they should do unto you — this negative form is the wiser one. Doing unto others what you would they should do unto you — "saving the souls of men" — is a rule which admits of the abuses of ignorance and fanaticism.
Treat others — put it in the positive form if you like — treat others as you want others to treat you, and by and by you will grow to see the flowering of their and your ideals. A man who does this is an ensouled man: one in whom the qualities of the soul predominate; who loves because love is beautiful; one who, enriching the life of his fellows, enriches his own life; one who treats others generously and gives to others the first chance. This is not only chivalrous, but also it increases one's own power and strength, for it requires willpower to do this continuously. It is a process of ensouling oneself ever more. The greatest men in the world have been the most ensouled in this sense. They are those whose hearts have held the most love, whose minds have been the keenest, the quickest, the strongest, the manliest; whose ethical sense has been the most subtle, the most quick, the firmest. They are those who have refused to impose their will upon others, but instead have led forth the beauty in the souls of others.’ Dr. G. de Purucker
Just a note, there's a growing awareness of the occult groups infiltrating the freedom movements and more. The scientologists, UFO cult followers are part of it. Wondering what you are seeing Peter. I suggest you watch Matt Ehret's recent interview and discussion with Mathew Crawford on Canadian Patriot Channel. Go to Rounding The Earth on Substack on Mathew Crawford's mapping. It's like a Lego's construction to make sure they have access and insight in every group. Bitchute Channel Canadian Patriot 1776. Title includes Scientology and Neo-theosophy.