Ann Kreilkamp – This 85-year old psychiatrist, is long recognized as “the conscience of psychiatry for his damning critique of lobotomy and electroshock in the 1970s. This critique ignited reform in the psychiatric profession. His work has also provided the foundation for critiques of both psychiatric diagnosis and Big Pharma medications.
In court, the tide may be turning against psychiatric-drug damage.
A recent jury decision, in which Dr. Peter Breggin testified as an expert witness, highlighted the extreme danger of the drugs.
The civil case was filed on behalf of a boy diagnosed with autism, who was then dosed with antidepressants and anti-psychotic medications (Risperdal and Zyprexa).
The boy developed two conditions, called tardive dyskinesia and tardive akathisia. Dr, Breggin’s website (www.breggin.com) depicts these conditions:
“Tardive dyskinesia describes a group of persistent or permanent movement disorders caused by antipsychotic (neuroleptic) drugs including Risperdal, Zyprexa, Invega, Abilify, Geodon, Seroquel, Latuda, Fanapt and Saphris. In addition to typical tardive dyskinesia spasms and twitches of his face, eyelids, and tongue, the youngster developed a severe case of tardive akathisia involving torturous internal agitation that drove him into constant, unrelenting motion.”
Tardive dyskinesia can most definitely indicate motor brain damage. (See Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry)
In this civil suit, the Chicago jury came back with a judgment against the treating psychiatrist, Howard Segal.
The jury award was $1.5 million. (Angel v. Segal, State of Illinois, Circuit Court, Cook County. Law Division No.09L 3496)
Nightmares, out-of-control aggressive behavior, extreme sadness and passivity, confusion, hallucinations, mania, brain damage, suicide, homicide—these are just a few central effects of psychiatric drugs.
Read the staggering statistics reported by Robert Whitaker, the author of Mad in America: “The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.
“This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.”
My exploration started in 1999, as I covered the Columbine school shooting.
I was already familiar with the pioneering work of Dr. Peter Breggin and his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. I knew the drugs were toxic and that some of them could push people into violence.
It emerged that one of the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, had been on Luvox, a violence-inducing drug, an SSRI antidepressant.
This, of course, was very troubling, because children and adults all over America were taking these antidepressants. And in Dr. Breggin’s book, I saw a summary of a review-study on Ritalin, done in 1986 by Joseph Scarnati. Ritalin, far from being a “soft” drug, was essentially speed, and it carried with it significant dangers.
It could cause hallucinations, aggressive behavior, and even psychotic breaks. Several million children in America were taking Ritalin.
What I came to call a “Johnny Appleseed specter” loomed over America. If psychiatrists dispensed enough of these drugs, seeding the population, we would be in for random shootings and killings and suicides on into the indefinite future. And psychiatrists were, in fact, handing out these drugs like candy. No one at the FDA or any enforcement government agency was ringing alarm bells.
In the wake of Columbine, I wrote a white paper, “Why Did they Do It: School Shootings Across America,” for The Truth Seeker. It gained wide online attention. The report mentioned other instances where children, on psychiatric drugs, had committed murder and suicide.
In the ensuing years, I became much more aware of the influence of drug companies in this Johnny Appleseed operation. They had, in fact, struck a deal to rescue the sinking profession of psychiatry. The arrangement was simple and potent: Big Pharma would bankroll psychiatric conferences and education, prop up flagging journals with advertising money, and generally promote the repute of psychiatry, in return for a certain kind of research:
The ability to separate components of a machine, to increase the efficiency and power of each component, to link up all the elements in smoother ways; this is one of the hallmarks of the technological society.
And when the current machine is superseded by a new one, the process of improving efficiency starts all over again.
But a human being is not a machine, because consciousness is not a machine.
The rise of what has been called industrial psychology, or scientific management, tries to overcome that “flaw.” This is described well in Scott Noble’s film, Social Engineering in the 20th Century (posted at YouTube).
For example, the modern factory assembly line, in which workers did multiple tasks and functioned as skilled artisans, was overthrown in favor of a system in which each worker performed the same severely restricted, specialized task over and over again. A machine making machines.
And not just in America. In Russia, in the early stages of the revolution, worker-owned companies were on the rise. But that development was too conscious, too participatory. Lenin imposed his top-down version of human machines making machines, all in the service of constructing a super-state.
In the same way, the rise of psychology and psychiatry reflect the impulse to treat the mind as a machine. The expanding concoction of so-called mental disorders are arbitrary attempts at categorizing human thought, desire, and behavior as diseases.
To understand even a little bit about real psychiatry, versus the false picture, you have to know that someone running around the streets naked and screaming has nothing to do with a mental disorder.
If you can’t grasp that, you’ll always have a lingering sense that psychiatry is on the right track. It isn’t, and never was. Not from its earliest days, and not now, when it has the full backing and force of the federal government behind it.
Psychiatry is the kind of all-out fraud few people grasp.
In a moment of weakness and exhaustion, Allen Frances, the most famous and honored psychiatrist in America at the time (2000), understood part of it. He told Gary Greenberg of Wired Magazine, “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”