The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 05.23.18

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.   

 

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 05.16.18

What if I told you that the pharmaceutical industry has very little to do with the epidemic of opioid drug overdoses and deaths in America?  What if I told you that escalating opioid deaths have very little to do with bad prescribing practices?   What I told you that these deaths stem more from drug trafficking from China than from overproduction by giant corporations?  What if I told you that government efforts to restrict opioid prescribing is a disaster for genuine pain patients?  And finally, what if these increased pain-killer drug deaths ultimately reflect the culture of despair afflicting our youth?   I can guarantee you new insights into these issues from one of my best-informed guests, Richard Lawhern, PhD. 

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 05.09.18

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.

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 05.02.18

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!   

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 04.25.18

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. 

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 04.18.18

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.

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 04.12.18

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.

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 03.28.18

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!  

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 03.26.18

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. 

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour – 03.15.18

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.