An
Interview with the "Conscience of Psychiatry" Dr. Peter Breggin
Peter
R. Breggin, MD, has been called "The Conscience of Psychiatry" for
his efforts to reform the mental health field. A Harvard-trained psychiatrist
and former full-time consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr.
Breggin has also been a consultant to the Federal Aviation Agency on the
adverse effects of psychiatric drugs on pilots. Dr. Breggin's private practice
is in Ithaca, New York, where he treats adults, couples and families with
children. He is the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than
twenty books. In this interview, he discusses his most recent book, Psychiatric
Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their
Families.
Rosenberg: Since the debut of Prozac in the late 1980s, there have been
many books about aggressive "biological psychiatry" which has lured
so much of the population to take psychoactive drugs. But your new book seems
to be the first to address how to get people off these drugs.
Breggin: The only other professional book I am aware of that addresses
withdrawing from the drugs is Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To
Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, which I wrote with co-author David Cohen,
who is a professor at Florida International University. This book, Psychiatric
Drug Withdrawal, is also my first book to seek to get prescribers and other
professionals to take a look at these drugs, the harm they cause and how to
approach withdrawal.
Rosenberg: I would imagine that some will not appreciate the treatment
model that you recommend in which the opinions of family and non-prescribing
therapists are given equal weight to the prescribing psychiatrist. In a recent
radio show you refer to this older, authoritarian model as prescribers being on
a "medical Mount Olympus."
Breggin: The "person-centered" approach that I propose, team
collaboration with a person's family, other caregivers and therapists, is the
best model for drug withdrawal. The days of therapists seeing their job as
ensuring medicine "compliance" and not venturing their own
therapeutic opinions are ending. Most well-trained and open-minded prescribers
now see the benefits in this.
Rosenberg: Your book shines a flashlight into the dark fears that families,
caregivers and therapists have but don't often express that if a patient is
taken off their psychiatric drugs they will kill themselves.
Breggin: Yes, people are scared. But families need to know that no
psychiatric drugs are associated with reduced suicidality and many have strong
warnings about causing suicidal behavior in their FDA-approved labels. There
is
a risk of suicide when a person is withdrawing from these drugs which I discuss
in the book. Too often these mental reactions are termed a "relapse"
of the condition the drugs were prescribed for--when they are actually a result
of the process of going through withdrawal. This is obvious because when the
withdrawing person is returned to a higher dosage level, the symptoms quickly
disappear, sometimes in an hour or two. These risks are why the involvement of
the family and caregivers is so important.
Rosenberg: There are several terms in your book that might be new to
readers: CBI, the "chronic brain impairment" that results from years of
being on psychiatric drugs, "spell-binding" in which someone does not
realize their true impairment on a drug as if they are under a spell and the
"non-emergency principle." The last term addresses some of the fears
therapists might have when people withdraw from psychiatric drugs. Can you
please explain?
Breggin: The non-emergency principle reminds therapists that your
patient's emergency is not your emergency. When you react to a person's
emotional crisis with alarm you escalate the situation--
Rosenberg: --like a toddler who falls but doesn't realize she is hurt until
she sees her mother's face--
Breggin: Yes. If a therapist is caring and comforting, the patient does
not have to end up in the ER on psychiatric drugs. When the therapist remembers
the non-emergency principle and does not make the emotional crisis his or her emergency, the
patient can achieve insights from the experience. But when the therapist hands
the person off, he or she is reinforcing that the patient can't be dealt with
without hospitalization and drugs.
Rosenberg: That makes sense but aren't there situations in which a
therapist is overwhelmed, afraid or powerless?
Breggin: I have been seeing patients since 1968 and I have resorted to
voluntary hospitalization on only a few occasions. In that same period of time, I have never had a completed
suicide among my patients and only three patients have attempted suicide, two
of them way back in 1968. I always remain accessible by phone and just knowing
this also helps patients in an emotional crisis.
Rosenberg: You state in Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal that the epidemic of so
called bipolar disorder and mania is largely caused by the drugs themselves.
Certainly bipolar disorder, once called manic depression, used to be rare and
was not the major disease that TV ads call it today.
Breggin: With very rare exceptions, all the children and teens that I
have seen diagnosed with mania or bipolar disorder have either been improperly
diagnosed or their disorder was caused by an antidepressant or stimulant drug.
In adults I have evaluated, most mania or bipolar disorder cases have resulted
from exposure to antidepressants.
Rosenberg: You give four scenarios in your book of how an inappropriately
prescribed drug leads to other drugs until a person is on a cocktail of
dangerous drugs for no rational reason. I think everyone has met someone who's
received one psychiatric drug and then a cascade of follow-up drugs"
Breggin: The first case is the scenario in which a child is put on ADHD
drugs to which sedatives are added for sleep, then antidepressants, then mood
stabilizers as each drug exerts negative side effects. The second scenario is
someone whose antidepressant is followed by a benzodiazepine tranquillizer,
then by a mood stabilizer, then an antipsychotic--again treating each drug's
side effects. In the third scenario, a person is given anxiety drugs which are
followed by stimulants because of the oversedation and sleeping pills because
of the overstimulation. Then, the person might be given Alzheimer drugs because
of the drug-induced cognitive problems and diagnosed with bipolar disorder or
"adult ADHD." Finally, there are the people who suffer psychotic
breaks when they are young and are put on antipsychotic drugs, likely, for the rest
of their lives to which other drugs are added to treat the side effects.
Rosenberg: Some of the drugs you write about, especially the antidepressants,
are linked to suicide and even homicide in published reports. But you also
write about subtler effects of these drugs in which people become so apathetic
and disengaged, they are not present in their own life. A woman in the book did
not cry the entire time she was on an antidepressant even though she had plenty
to cry about.
Breggin: A universal symptom of brain injury whether from a football or
other traumatic injury, drug and alcohol addiction or psychiatric drugs is loss
of the zest for life and indifference toward people whom you previously cared
about. Children on these drugs lose their spontaneity--that which makes them
children--and what's called better behavior or attention is actually a version
of obsessive/compulsive disorder, like fixation on the computer screen. The
same thing is seen in chimpanzees given these drugs--they "behave"
very nicely, not trying to interact with their neighbors and not grooming
themselves. Kids are made into similarly good caged animals.
Rosenberg: It is obvious these drugs and drug cocktails are a financial
phenomenon, with drug companies themselves admitting their
dangers once the patent has run out. What is more shocking is why the medical
establishment allows what is almost a patient heist and clearly supports it.
Have you experienced a backlash from doctors or Big Pharma when going up
against these drugs?
Breggin: Anything you can imagine has happened to me in the four decades
I have opposed the psychiatric drug establishment. In the 1980's the National
Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI, tried to get my medical license revoked and
were supported by the American Psychiatric Association. However, I had a complete victory and
it led to publicizing my reform work on a new level.
Rosenberg: NAMI was investigated by Congress for undeclared Big Pharma
funding. Alan Schatzberg, the former APA president, was simultaneously consultant
to seven pharma companies and on Sanofi-Aventis' Speakers Bureau, according to
the APA's Daily Bulletin in 2010.
Breggin: Yes, I was among the first to blow the whistle on what I call
the Psychopharmaceutical Complex.
Rosenberg:
It
is obvious from your book that to withdraw people from these drugs requires
tremendous resources which are not always available. In addition to the
dedication and endurance of the patient, the family, caregivers and therapists
will be involved for months and even years. It's clear that patients are given
drugs they cannot easily or ever quit and are not necessarily aware of this in
the beginning. Though you state these alarming facts in your book, you do not
seem unusually angry.
Breggin: When I was younger, I was very angry about the legions of people
abused by the psychiatric profession. But the spiritual state of anger is not
where I want to be and I do not wish harm to the prescribers giving out these
medications. When you look at people like Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther
King, who are my personal heroes, they present loving models who were connected
to God and not vindictive. Anger keeps us rooted in ourselves instead of
thinking of others, which is what I try within my limits to do. END
Peter
Breggin, M.D.
Psychiatric
Drug Withdrawal
A
Guide for Prescribers, Therapists,
Patients
and their Families
352
pp., Softcover
ISBN-13:
9780826108432
Springer
Publishing Company
Martha Rosenberg's first book, Born with a Junk Food
Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health is now
available as a
hardcover and ebook. Widely reviewed in Europe and the US, the book is
available in bookstores, libraries and online.
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