Brain Hijackers - The Dehumanizing Truth About Psych Meds, Methylene Blue, and Profit-Driven Crimes of Psychiatry

Christian Elliot 

All right, hello, everyone. Welcome to today's show. It is my delight to have one of my living heroes, Dr. Peter Breggin on the show. And for those of you who have not heard of him, I guess I'd describe him as one of the bravest and most intelligent people I have ever met. So he is a lifelong psychiatrist and author. He's written, by my count, at least 20 books. He's been an expert witness in more than 100 court cases related to the damages done by psychiatric medications.

 

He has his own show on America Out Loud and is a prolific writer on Substack with his blog called Breggin Alerts, Exposing Global Predators, where he writes about all things health, COVID and freedom. And I don't think you'll find a man with a more impressive resume, yet he is very humble and caring and down to earth. And he's basically the man I want to be when I grow up. So, Dr. Breggin, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm delighted to have you here.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You look very grown up and you look very intelligent and I suspect you have quite a bit of courage. Actually, for the people that you like that we're close with, mentioned Catherine Austin Fitz and you mentioned Lee Vliet and to interview those people is to be brave in itself. So I'm sure you're doing a good job for us out there in the world.

 

Christian Elliot

Well, thank you very much for those kind words. Well, I'm as interested just in what got you into psychiatry as what kept you in it. So before we get into today's topic about the dangers of psychiatry, just talk a minute about who Peter Breggin is. I'm embarrassed to admit I have some clients who don't know who you are. If you don't mind, I'd love for you to start maybe with the story of kind of being the wide eyed 18 year old who was getting permission from the hospital superintendent to work with the institutionalized people that most had just written off.

 

Maybe tell us that story or anything else about.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, I'm going to start now that I'm 89 years old, I'm going to start earlier even, because I had this really astonishing early life career ⁓ that came out of the blue and it started when I was 12. Up to that point, I'd been sad and depressed. I'd been raised by a nanny who was forced to leave when I was five. And, ⁓

 

I was just slightly bewildered, but I look at a picture of myself in that sixth grade yearbook and I've got this big grin on my face. In the yearbook, I'm elected president and ⁓ they say I'm very witty. And that was the beginning out of the blue that I might be somebody in some way.

 

And that never ended. I was president of the homeroom and that was the class, but then sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, was president of my freshman class, my sophomore class, vice president of my junior year, editor of the newspaper, I had wonderful friends. I looked really successful and I was dreadfully sad inside. And I did a lot of reading on my own and

 

I was very aware of this was in a very Jewish community. It was a new Jewish community coming into a Christian community out on the South shore of Long Island. Hewlett, Woodmere, Lindbergh, the five towns. All the people around me who were friends were Jewish. And then we had other friends. It was how it just separated out in those days. Quite interesting to think back to it.

 

The young people I knew were, as a group, the brightest I would ever meet. I mean, they were all just full of stuff and they were interesting and exciting. We were friends. And I was a defender because Jews generally, although certainly in our class, they were tough Jews because half the class was Jewish and some of them terrific athletes, somewhat of an athlete. But I was a defender of...

 

Anybody who messes with my classmates, all 5'4", 135 pounds.

 

to the extent that nobody messed with my friend. And part of it was rooted in a sense I got very early when, and I've talked about this on the air before, so I like to think of new ways to talk about it. But basically I was watching a family movie when I was nine years old at the theater, my mother and father were with me, I had no idea what we were gonna see, and movie now, Tone News, put on.

 

Christian Elliot

Thanks.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

the invasion of Europe and the liberation of the first exterminations. First films out.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And I had no idea about this. none of my friends in this broad, we never talked about Holocaust. Our parents didn't want us to know, don't think. Growing up, even into high school, nobody talked about it. I can remember a single conversation.

 

And it was overwhelming to watch this, dead Jews in piles, dead Jews hanging on wires and stuff like that. And then it became a double whammy. My not very empathic uncle married into the family had been a liberator of one of the camps. He loved the war. He loved telling me stories of people getting shot and killed.

 

all these kinds of things. He'd risen up from being like a storekeeper to an officer in the army and he had those qualities and they really came out. I don't think he was ever fully filled again, but he showed me photographs that he took of a torture chamber in vivid detail that I've never disclosed to anybody else, not even my wife. And I think that those two things

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

built in me a choice. Am I going to be scared or am I going to be mad? Am I going to be frightened or am I going to stand up for myself? What am I going to do when the day comes? And I had nobody to talk to about it. So this connects directly to my freshman year at Harvard. I was into an honors program at Harvard. mean, I was really good coming from a public school. And

 

It was American history and literature. I no idea. It's really ironic because that has really helped me in what I do now and looking at politics. But I only had two years of that because I eventually went pre-med. But a friend of mine asked me to come out and volunteer at the State Mental Hospital. His brother had started a program there, Harvard Radcliffe Mental Hospital Volunteer Program. We had people from other schools like Brandeis driving in and going to the State Mental Hospital.

 

different cars, know, they're all under our program. And eventually I would lead the program for a couple of years and have an impact on organized psychiatry to some extent and write-ups in big newspapers, magazines, write-ups in mental health programs, not necessarily about me, but about our program. And there was a picture of me somewhere in the Saturday evening post.

 

kneeling beside a patient holding her hand on the women's violent war. Metropolitan state hospital. So way back then I was involved, but the striking thing was that the minute I got inside, and maybe even from the outside, but the minute I got inside the state mental hospital, it was an extermination concentration. The images, the smell, my uncle told me about the stench, the stench of the

 

Christian Elliot

Mm. Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

these things is little worse than any movie you've ever seen of the snake pits. It 1954. It would take another year or so for the antipsychotic drugs to come in. So the patients still showed feelings. So it was really, many of them were battered by shock treatment, by lobotomy, by insulin coma poisoning. And so I started working in the worst hell in America, the State Medical Hospital.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

the worst expression of psychiatry, the state mental hospital. Later I would learn that the Holocaust actually grew out of psychiatry in the state mental hospitals. And I wrote a scientific paper on and delivered it not in Germany, at the first medical conference in Germany ever on medicine and third Reich. I became so knowledgeable and I wrote a good article about it. ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And that organized psychiatry started murdering its patients. It was planning it before Hitler had any power. They were planning how they could murder their patients. They could just set it up right. And they called it useless. They called patients useless eaters. I didn't know at the time, but it's a part of socialism. It's a part of collectivism. It's part of the government to want to depopulate people.

 

This was also tied in, course, to anti-Semitism. But here, they didn't even do the Jews. They didn't give euthanasia to Jews. didn't deserve it. They gave euthanasia to their own populations. Couldn't bump back and forth here, but it all ties in, I hope, with the big paintbrushes. And so I started to see what was going on. And for whatever reason, mainly because maybe because I had been depressed pretty much.

 

totally until age 12 and then only mildly or moderately or up and down or something thereafter until ginger. In my forties, I really found happiness. It's really interesting. I was always, you know, doing things. And part of why I want to tell people about my successes, because I'm also telling people how much I was suffering inside, but it wasn't like I was ineffective. I was ineffective with my love life, not with the rest of

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, and that is rich context. didn't know much of any of that. And to hear the part about, I heard about the part about the hospitals and how you made a big difference there, but you just preemptively answered my next question, which is just where did you get your pain tolerance for standing up against big systems and what keeps you going? And I can already sense the answer to that now just from hearing that story. Is there anything else you want to add to that?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

What do you sense?

 

Christian Elliot

I just sense that you as a kid, had your own appearance of success yet feeling empty or feeling like you weren't measuring up. And then you see that in the faces of other people. Then you see the Holocaust. Then you see institutionalized, essentially depopulation. see hospitals are supposed to do. They're opposite of it. And it's the conscience came alive, it sounds like.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

The conscience was already alive and that's part of the being sad and depressed. One or two wonderful professors of psychiatry, ⁓ most of them have to be so corrupt to participate in this system, but one was Thomas Szase, S-Z-A-S-E. And Thomas used to say, if you weren't suicidal as an adolescent, you weren't a sensitive human being.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow. That's one way to put it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Um,

 

um, yes. And it sort of built into me, I'm absolutely alone dealing with the Holocaust in my head and I'm going through all the alternatives and out of that comes, nobody will do that to me. I'll die, kill them first, get killed, whatever it is. No one will humiliate me like

 

wasn't so much afraid of death, was like, so humiliating. I never realized that before. I wasn't thinking about they'll kill me, it was like, they will never do anything.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Yeah, was a shot at your dignity that you wouldn't

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Yes,

 

Yes, I actually got a chill just thinking about that. I realize that till now. And to this day, don't fear death in particular, but I sure don't want anybody messing with my dignity, myself, loved ones, and so on. So there's this kind of mix that evolves. And the program, I was so successful in it.

 

I was giving lectures as an undergraduate. had my first publication in a Yale review of some sort, a university for paper I gave on volunteering. My first book started to be written and I would eventually come out as a co-author, but they would sanitize the book that I started. book that I started was State Mental Hospital's Hellholes and we brought love into it.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And there was neither the hellhole nor the love was in the sanitized book that came out. ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

Right. That doesn't have as many drugs.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

So I went into psychiatry to reform it. Why not? I'm 18, 19 years old when I get involved. I'm discovering that these, people that, well, I knew this the minute I walked in that the patients were no different from me. That's one thing that I knew immediately. And I can't tell you why that was other than my own sadness.

 

But maybe I got touched with empathy by God. I'm not sure how this all works, honestly. We're really thinking about it, me and Ginger, a lot lately. We've been married 42 years now. We're thinking a lot about our blessings and our good fortune and how does this all happen? Why are we alive? How do we stay from being killed? And interesting conversation in the evenings. But I...

 

You know, I've been on radio and, God, I even was on a voice of America in high school for an editorial. wrote praising the UN. read it on ⁓ voice of America. was naturally left wing as any good young person is. And so, and I was naturally being rewarded by it. Yeah. Getting out of voice. No idea what your politics are, but, ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

I actually thought I could go into psychiatry in some way and reform it. And there were wings of psychiatry. I didn't know they'd all be dead in five years or 10 years the most. One wing was like a communist wing, a left wing, where you explain mental illness by illness in the community, by illness in the society. And there were people talking about that. Then there were people who were less political, but they talked about community psychiatry.

 

We have to improve our communities. Then there was psychoanalytic psychiatry where you had to understand people. There were branches. And I went into psychiatry thinking that I was going to do some combination maybe of community and psychoanalytic or something, but I'm going to make a big difference in psychiatry, I thought. ⁓

 

I'm not sure how much I have stopped more or less lobotomy then from there on we have to kind of wonder, but I have been working at it and lobotomy is going to come back soon as I'm gone. I want to have them saying, we just got to get rid of him or.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow, okay, well for people who don't know, you're one of the reasons why frontal lobotomies are now not happening. So for people who don't know where

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Rarely, rarely, they hide them now.

 

Christian Elliot

Okay, we'll tell people what one is because I think when we get to the term chemical lobotomy, it'll mean more to the listener.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Yeah, and I've talked enough about myself specifically. ⁓

 

Psychiatry had its only revolution in the 1930s. The revolution was they realized that if they damaged the brain, they could make their patients docile. That is the only revolution we've ever had in psychiatry. And all the endpoint of all psychiatric treatments is docility. It's a blessing if you're in the hospital to the nurses.

 

And sometimes it's a blessing to your family if you've been very difficult or they're very violent. And sometimes it's a blessing to yourself because you think you're not suffering.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

But it's never because you've been made more powerful. Psychiatry never makes you more powerful. It never makes you able to think better. It always messes with your brain. And it has to be distinguished from psychotherapy, which is no longer done by psychiatrists. The psycholinoidic wing is gone. So they don't even teach you to talk. They teach you you can't talk to schizophrenia.

 

Christian Elliot

Really?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Yeah, the exact opposite.

 

Christian Elliot

You can help them as with a chemical intervention at this point? ⁓

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Constantly,

 

yes. And as fast as possible. In the emergency room, preferably, until they can never come.

 

Christian Elliot

Okay, so frontal lobotomy, for my understanding of it, there's a probe under the eye that goes up into the brain, is that right?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

That's one way, that's one avenue. So in the 30s, we get electroshock treatment. Everybody knows what that is. I think you blast your brain, poor patient's brain, you sent them into a coma with convulsions. You do it in the old days with just enough electricity to cause that. Nowadays, why they claim it's safer, you do it with

 

eight to 10 times the electricity needed to cause the coke. It's built in a machine. You can't even do the lighter amounts. So you give a person enough electricity to mimic an extremely severe blow on the head from smashing your head into the windshield of your car. And then you are knocked out and you have convulsions. Maybe you always have them with electricity. You have convulsions, makes them worse.

 

So not only is your brain injured, it's going flatline for a time and then convulsing or going flatline in some weird combinations. It's awful. Into that picture, a man named Moniz, M-O-N-I-Z in Portugal in 1938 decides that he's going to open the heads of his patients. Is Moniz a psychiatrist?

 

I'm trying to remember what he exacted in vegetables, he's more like a neurologist, and to open their head surgically and slice and dice the front of the brain. And he invents an instrument that's sort of curved with a wire, like a dicer, and he dices into the front of the brain. This particularly what's called the prefrontal cortex.

 

Now, the free frontal cortex is in front of the frontal lobes and it is the surface area, that's the cortex, the surface area, and it's where the finest-tuning things take place of civilization. The whole frontal lobes is like the embodiment of civilization in us. It is... ⁓

 

It's the largest lobe, it's gives us in comparison to say monkeys or dogs or apes, bulging forehead.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Walter Freeman really liked this a lot. He was a brutal psychiatrist. Everybody respected him or feared him. He was an America, so he took this home in He did 5,000 of these and he did them like a monster. He would get a little 10-year-old girl in his office, tell mom she needed a lobotomy on the first visit, give her shock treatment to knock her out.

 

and take a dirty ice pick and slip, this is last time you'll hear me be like this today. Don't stop listening. Take a dirty ice pick, slip it around the eyeball and punch it through the very thin bone behind the eye and swoosh it.

 

Christian Elliot

Gosh.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

a monster. And then he would do shows at state hospitals around the country. He was never confronted, never threatened till I came along. Which is quite bizarre as far as I know. He never had a lawsuit against him until I came along. And he would do a show sometimes like a glad, you know, like a bull guy, you know, tormenting the bull in the ring. He'd put

 

two ice picks at once and swish him around. People know that he barely wipes them between the patients wheeled in and out.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

one split second of that ice pick, one split second, it revically changed a full human being into a shambles.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm. Yeah. What a process. Well, so that that's the that's what a lobotomy is friends. And when you hear him describe as we go on what a chemical lobotomy modern psychiatric meds are now you have a context for that.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

All modern psychiatric meds, all psychiatric meds, starting with the very most powerful ones that originally were invented, all psychiatric meds tamper with ⁓ and either over activate or suppress nerves that go throughout the brain. Some of them focus on the main pathway to the frontal lobes. And those are

 

the so-called anti-psychotic drugs. They're not anti-psychotic drugs. They do the same thing to a normal animal or chimpanzee as they do to people. They take away your ability to be yourself, to be energized, to be loving, to be caring, to be hateful. Maybe not to be angry, so you can still get angry, I think. It's a lower phenomena. Judgment's gone, self-insight is gone.

 

You can communicate and sometimes sensitively and I've done it with patients to whom that has been done, but it is so sad. It is so incredibly sad to try to do it. It's like a tragedy. You're like in a tragedy. It's like you're helping a soul come through a damaged brain. It's what it feels like. It feels like, see you there, I see you there, but they can't get out.

 

This is in fact what happens to many patients who are routinely on a on a presence on stimulants, mood altering drugs, people who love them. And this could be somebody here talking to now, somebody who's just on routine psych drugs. You may not even know that you're not quite there, but if you've got a drug that

 

Christian Elliot 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

is changing your brain. is not helping your brain. It's making it a little less functional. You can recover. I've written a book, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, and you don't want to stop your meds automatically because it's too dangerous. And I'll tell you more about the book and the principles later if we get a chance. But right now we're talking about the horror. ⁓

 

I'll give you a very simple example from myself. Benadryl is used in psychiatry a lot. It's used because it impacts certain areas of the brain that the psychiatric drugs impair. And they're sometimes used to try to reverse things that the drugs do because it's doing the same thing but differently to these regions. So benadryl is a big antihistamine, which are

 

where some of the, one of the, just to tie it together, a lot of the anti-psychotic drugs are derived from antihistamines originally. I would take a Benadryl because I have had ⁓ some asthma, it's almost gone now, really is gone now, and ⁓ allergies, some allergies, mostly gone now. And ⁓ the, I would take it at night and then I would get up in the morning and I would get irritable with ginger.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

as I withdrew from the Benadryl in the morning. Or was still toxic or both. Because she could be toxic and didn't withdraw. And I get irritable with it and she say, honey, I didn't do anything wrong.

 

Christian Elliot

That's the Benidigville talking, darling.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

and I would say something, yes, that's right. She wouldn't do it grim. She wouldn't make fun of me. She'd say, I think it's the panetrope. And I'd say,

 

I'd do some insight, but I'd be a little foggy coming out of the Benadryl and I'd say I'm sorry and work on it. And then the second or third day, I got it. And I've never taken Benadryl.

 

Christian Elliot

Good for you. talk to us about the part of the brilliance of the pharmaceutical companies was that two word phrase chemical imbalance. So we're talking about the concept of a chemical imbalance. Is that a strictly a marketing thing or is it just a well?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It's a goddamn fraud.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

They'd never, they God, how they didn't want me in a courtroom talking about this stuff. I wouldn't say a goddamn for it. I'll say it's totally untrue. It's a marketing ploy. The only imbalance that actually occurs in the brains of people who are going routinely to psychiatrists is the first drug dose. That's a violent biochemical imbalance induced instantly.

 

Christian Elliot

That.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

As soon as it gets into your bloodstream, then it crosses the barrier of the brain. The brain is crafted to be protected from trauma by a skull and by some water there that gets into the brain and some other things, and by private circulatory system.

 

sort of says, hey, I'm the brain. I'm not going to relate to all the junk you put in your circulatory system. And I'm not supposed to. So you got to get through the circulatory system. The moment a neurotoxin enters, and all psychiatric drugs are neurotoxins, and they knew it in the beginning. Now they don't teach it anymore. It's still true. They give the same drugs and they don't say it's a neurotoxin.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Once it gets through the blood brain barrier, it is going to routinely wash over all the neurons in the brain, wash through the all, you know, it just goes everywhere. It's a fluid in a biological soft process. So now some drugs will be more attracted to one place or another, but they're going everywhere. The frontal lobes are huge. Any drug that's...

 

affecting the brain is going to affect the frontal lobes directly or indirectly. Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter system to the frontal lobes, but serotonin, I'm sorry, but yeah, but serotonin goes everywhere. So if you just look at two different drug groups, you look at the anti-psychotics and what was quickly learned back in 1950s when they discovered was

 

they stop up some basic system, they didn't know it was dopamine, in the basal ganglia of the brain, just like a disease they recognize called large... lethargic encephalitis. I think I'm the only doctor who ever wrote a full paper on this and delivered it in statement, suppose, that there was this disease they knew of, lethargic encephalitis.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It spread around the world at the end of the ⁓ Spanish flu and then disappeared. It's a kind of a mystery disease, still not sure exactly what caused it. Most people think it's a virus, but it doesn't have the same infectious qualities. didn't. But it made people lethargic and apathetic. And then it affected the part of the brain below the frontal lobe, it's called the basal ganglia, where coordination takes place.

 

where whether you can reach properly and speak properly, anything that involves any voluntary muscle, whether you breathe properly, it's all coming out of there. And that got disrupted. And they'd have huge neurological conferences, this flu-like syndrome that made people apathetic, gave them all these weird things, sometimes made them psychotic, sometimes killed them, sometimes didn't. I've got textbooks on.

 

And the doctors don't even know it existed. And they saw that and they said, when we give Thorazine, the first big drug, Thorazine, you still can get that in an emergency room in particular, if you're looking a little nutty, a little scary.

 

on.

 

that you get all the same symptoms.

 

And so they said, and they wrote this, we could, we realized we could cause virtually an epidemic of this kind of lethargic encephalitis by just giving out the medicine. Well, within one year to two years, every single state hospital in the world was subdued by Thorazine, Haldol, and they're still being given to people and derivatives of it like Abilify,

 

Invega, Zyprexa, Seroquel you'll take for sleep. There's a whole raft of drugs. can Google dopamine blockers. You'll find some things that are used for nausea. They're dopamine blockers that all of them, they can all cause this array of distortions. And now on television,

 

You'll see them making money from drugs that are used to control TD. You see this on television. They're horrible drugs. I would avoid them even if you have TD, unless you're an extremist. Because TD can disable.

 

Christian Elliot

TD is what for people who don't? Hard. Okay.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

of dyskinesia, delayed

 

dyskinesia, because the dyskinesia usually takes 30 days or more before it first appears. It can appear with your first dose. I've been in legal cases, done a lot of legal cases. and the things they do to prevent me from having any more legal cases are amazing. They must be buying off lawyers around the world. I mean, it's quite amazing.

 

Christian Elliot

Okay, well, let's rewind history a little bit too because you recently did a great interview with dr. Lee Vleet about the dangers of methylene blue and one of the things I didn't know is how old it is so talk about the history of that a little bit and how it was and You've even made the comment. It's used as a base for medicines today So talk to us a little bit about the dangers of that or anything

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, I became very concerned. I like to think of myself as a member of the loosely affiliated Health Freedom Fighters.

 

Christian Elliot

and we're glad to have you.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And by the way, this is the first group I've been as happy to be in as I was with my Jewish friends in high school. And they're all Christians. Zedis Elanko, who is one of the people who did an introduction for my book, COVID-19 and the Global Priders, one of the few Jews who's just taking strong stands. He died. They didn't tell him he died. He just fought through cancer to keep working.

 

But that Christian group I'm in now is the happiest group I've ever been in. mean, and so, and my wife's Christian, and my mother who we have living with us for nine years is Christian. So I have a new personal religion. I'm a Jew who thinks Jesus was the greatest prophet of all.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Interesting conversations for sure.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Am I? Isn't it? my God. Doesn't it?

I'm not a, what do they call the Jews? Yeah, I'm not a messianic. That's a different thing. I'm actually a Jew who believes Jesus was the greatest rabbi of all time. And I'm happy to have the Christians promoting him because God certainly has wanted that or wouldn't have happened in such a grand way. And of course the Jews eventually rejected him because, you know,
 

Christian Elliot

Messianic, too.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You know, competition, I mean, he was such competition.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah,

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

When

 

he became part of the, boy, this going far afield? Then when he'd be, but it's having fun. Then when Jesus, then when Christianity becomes part of the Roman Empire and the Jews have to make this big choice, so they can stay with Jesus, join the Roman Empire, that's very confusing in the first couple of hundred years after Jesus. And so you get the leaders, the elite just doing what they always do. They take over, they set the rules.

 

and they set the opposition and the Jews and the Christians, I don't know why they even kept us in the Bible, but they did. They put us in the Bible with them. But the separation occurs and the leadership on either side dooms itself.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, that's a whole different can of worms I can get into too. I just recently traveled to some of the Holy Lands. my. Well, let's go back to Methylene Blue then. So that is the...

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

So I got concerned that my almost entirely Christian friends were promoting Methylene Blue, making money from their, not their pharmacies, but their stores, because you don't need a prescription for Methylene Blue. And they think, and many, many people I discovered thought Methylene Blue was new and amazing.

 

But what really bothered me and still does is that leading companies are selling it that are supposed to be alternative medicine and who told me they would never sell anything that was a pharmaceutical even. They may believe it's not a pharmaceutical, it's the mother of all pharmaceuticals, Kathleen Brewer explained it, it's literally the mother of them, but too toxic to be FDA-proof.

 

Christian Elliot

And it predates the FDA because it was 1870s, right, when it came out?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

That's right, I think it might have been 1876 when that was discovered. It was the first chemical, people believe, history's hard to know, but people believe it was the first chemical made in a lab and applied to medicine.

 

And because of some effects that it has on the mitochondria, which is to enforce a greater uptake of oxygen, it could be used as an antidote to something called methemoglobin E.

 

I don't want to bother the audience about this very narrow concept, but basically if the blood cells were poisoned by any number of drugs that could poison them, the mitochondria could pump up and make a better utilization of what oxygen there was. This is seen as a miracle.

 

It's not empirical. It's an abnormality created in mitochondria functioning, which happens to help you if you've been poisoned and you need the mitochondria to deliver an abnormal amount of oxygen. You see, that's the truth. But what you hear is, this is a miracle. Well, it's an abnormality that happens to coincide, and that's it. But what everybody is ignoring is that that's not the main effect of the drug.

 

And it never was thought of as the main effect, but it did get approved as by the FDA without testing for safety or efficacy, just grandfathered in. They did the same thing with electroshock. That's how evil the deep state is. They grandfathered in electroshock treatment to save an effect that repeated blows on your head till you get killed. ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah. ⁓

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

I think what happened is that in itself, methylene blue was so neurotoxic to the brain, neuro brain toxic poisons that they never could directly use it. because you know, the pharmacy people, want to use something no matter what. And the idea that it was too high, some of the people twist this, I can understand that, but

 

They twist things and say, well, the FDA didn't approve it because it was too good. New drug, too good. No, old drug, so bad that even the FDA couldn't approve it for general use. Because, as the FDA points out, even with its limited use as an antidote to poisoning, it could kill you with a serotonin syndrome. What is serotonin syndrome?

 

If you jack up the neurotransmitter serotonin too much with almost any antidepressant, certainly all the commonly used ones, the SSRIs, jack up serotonin, it can get way out of control and you can get a severe hyperactivity of your brain that results in your muscles tying up while you may shake, your brain losing its function and you have a hypertensive crisis and you can die of a heart attack.

 

of hypertension, cave in your brain, really a kind of cave in your heart. And so the FDA has this on its website. I think I'm the first person in our whole group of whatever, how many hundreds who have found it because they don't even know enough to look. This is my area. In addition, methylene blue, which you can get over the counter from too many places, jacks up everything that's called a monamine.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Oxidase and MAOI. MAOIs are known for controlling serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, EPINEPHrine so that you don't get hurt by them. You know, it's a control mechanism. Monamine oxidase. It's supposed to

 

stop it from getting out of control by its oxidation processes. That's maybe simple enough. So it's supposed to inhibit, it's called an inhibitor, it's supposed to inhibit the ox, inhibit the things that are stimulating, serotonin, dopamine, all of which can make you crazy, epinephrine, all those things can drive you into a psychosis, mania, and so on.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And indeed, it was early identified as an MAO inhibitor. And so what they did was they thought to themselves, the psychiatrist, if we tinker with it and make it less poisonous, they to make it less poisonous, we'll give it as a stimulant. It'll make some people less depressed. They'll feel less depressed. We'll get a new stimulant. We'll get a new

 

The we can sell though is anti-depressed. That's what we'll tell people. is not just a stimulant. Anti-depressed. Glory to B.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And what happened is we had a series of MAOI drugs. The first two were so bad that they actually threw them out of the FDA. The other three that are still around are almost never used because they're so dangerous. And if you make the mistake of eating the wrong food or taking the wrong drug and they combine, you can die of a serotonin syndrome. Now,

 

Since it's not in common use, the MAOI, one way to find out, and it's never been studied deeply, well, I do have some studies, but I'm not gonna bother with them today. I've written all about this on our... Okay, let me just tell folks, go to Breggin go to Peter and Ginger Breggin's substack substack. Emergency notification, this is where I wrote, emergency notification, cold.

 

Christian Elliot

Got your blog post about it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Methylene blue is highly neurotoxic to your brain and mind. Subtitled comment. Methylene blue is a monamine oxidase inhibitor, MAOI, as such it is one of the most toxic agents ever used in medicine and psychiatry and the mother of the most dangerous drugs used in psychiatry.

 

Christian Elliot

There you go, people. Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning that because several people have reached out to me asking my opinion on methylene blue and I just have never studied it enough to feel comfortable having an opinion. And then I saw you and Dr. Vliet talk about it and like, finally, I can, people I trust that would know what they're talking about. So thank you for talking about that. And one of my understandings is you could prescribe any psychiatric med that you want to, but you don't prescribe any of them. Is that right?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Me get to that in a minute and I'll finish this up. Now, the FDA did start study these things. So there is an official FDA label for Parnate, which is one of the MAOI inhibitors. And basically they all do the same, but the studies are different. So sometimes it's a little different than what they happen to notice. But this is under psychiatric disorders.

 

the dangers of MAOI inhibitors for psychiatric disorders. It's for the psyched up. The first one, and that means it's the most common one, excessive stimulation slash over excitement. Second, manic symptoms slash hypomane. Next,

 

agitation, next insomnia, next anxiety, then confusion, disorientation, loss of libido, nervous system disorders, dizziness, restlessness, akathisia, which is a horrible inner torment, akinesia, which is sort of stuck and unable to move, ataxia, which is unable to walk, myoconic jerks, which are big jerks.

 

tremors, hyperreflexion, reflexes around the control, muscle spasm, paresthesia, numbness, memory loss, the opposite, sedation, drowsiness and on, and blood pressure elevation. And what's not in that list, because that's the psychiatric disorders, is serotonin syndrome, which looks like this, but which is a flagrant neurological disorder that can lead to death, but it's in that direction. Now, if you know anything about drugs, you know

 

This is practically identical to methamphetamine. And the official chemical name of methylene wool is methyl dioxymethamphetamine.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Yeah, so that whole list of symptoms you just read are from these MAOI inhibitors. Yes.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It is a classic and called this in the FDA literature, MAOI inhibitor.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, and that's the base for so many of the psychiatric meds of today.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, what happened is yes, first of all, as I noted first, it became the first antidepressants, the first MAOI inhibitors, but they had to be tinkered with. You couldn't mess with this thing. And when they finally did mess with this thing, nobody uses them anymore. Nobody uses drugs, the drugs that you can buy over the counter, methylene blue and that.

 

even freedom fighter organizations are forcing on you and even freedom fighters themselves in their testimony making money. And some of them are real freedom fighters. Making money is actually so bad that it has never been able to be jerry-rigged into a drug that psychiatrists would want to use. And if you're on it, and by the way, let's say you're taking it and you happen to...

 

to eat just a little too much or maybe just enough of something with soy in it. Or drink a beer. Yeah, you read my stuff. Or drink a beer. Or eat any number of a dozen or two dozen foods. Or if you happen to be on any other drug, like any, almost any psychiatric drug is gonna interact with this. Because almost any psychiatric drug

 

Christian Elliot

drink a beer?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

is messing with at least one of those four neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, norepinephrine. It's a disaster. Don't do it. Don't risk it. And my friends who are doing this and selling this, I still haven't been openly criticizing you. Please, for God's sake, stop before God taps me on the shoulder and says, Peter, you gotta do it. You gotta name these names.

 

Christian Elliot

Yep, I don't want them to have to go through that, thank you for warning them. ⁓

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

I don't

 

want my friends to have to go through that.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, well, I mean, but talk about the supposed benefits. What are people actually experiencing when they're talking about all the ways they feel better?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, it was interesting because one of our really greatest of greats, God, I won't even mention his name. He gets on the air and is bragging that he only took one half the dose of the drug he sell, methylene blue. And it made him feel like he had every energy in the world. And he was like, this and this and this, all happened in half an hour. And then he gets other people.

 

People will know who I'm talking about if they listen to him. He's like maybe the most heroic figure in freedom and especially in taking on globalism. And then he has a friend come up and say, hey, did you experiment with it? And oh yeah, I took it a half an hour ago. How do you feel? It's wonderful. I feel like I'm running while I'm sitting still.

 

Christian Elliot

gosh.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin (49:26)

I feel like I have more power than ever and I'm thinking better. I guarantee you, they're not thinking better. They're thinking more grandiosely. It's part of the awful state you get into. And people tell me it's all about the dose and that's what these people do when they defend themselves. the dose. No, no, that's big doses are dangerous. First of all, no, it's the routine dose of MAOI that does it. But secondly,

 

You can't say a dose is safe. You have people on television demonstrating it's making them near crazy and they don't even know it and they jump around and look like weird people on television. It's the dose is sufficient to have an effect. It's potentially ruinous to your mind.

 

Christian Elliot

Having a trip are more so a...

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Thank you for that. That's right. These people are on a stimulant, weird trip. I have criticized Bobby Kennedy. We have pictures of him taking what's probably methylene blue, and he's never said no. And other people have said on the air, know Bobby and he loves his methylene blue. And ⁓ Bobby is also encouraging, giving veterans hallucinogens and MAOI life.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

drugs did now do new things in medicine. It's not no Bobby, you I'm going to confront and RFK and this is dangerous. This is very bad.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Well, and I'm thankful that somebody's courageous enough with the reputation you have to say something. So thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you. It's great. Yeah, well, it's like a lot of topics. Sometimes I'm like, do I want to get back into that and take some more arrows or have people just come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're an idiot? Like, yeah, sometimes you just have to stand in the fire. And I look to people like you who've done it and say, it's worth it. And I'd rather do right by my conscience and say something than just.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

did have to make a decision.

 

Christian Elliot

puts it on my hands. So I appreciate you doing that.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

talk generally about it. Thank you. Let me talk generally about the drugs. want to finish in here for now. In general, you can feel good with a psychiatric drug if it jacks you up and that makes you feel better. If it jacks you down and that makes you feel better. Or if it makes you indifferent, that is you don't get lower or are you getting different, which I think is

 

Christian Elliot (51:46)

Okay, you got it? Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin (52:11)

potentially, worst of all. And so people go on these drugs and stay on them because they're getting some sense of times of feeling more excited or feeling not so overwhelmed, but a little depressed or getting numb. Now the final common pathway, and by the way, this is my stuff. Other people don't see this obvious. It's in all my books.

 

It's in Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal. has everything I'm talking to you about it in the first half. It is the best book. If you really can't afford a book that's priced like a medical book because it's put out by medical publisher because I wanted that ⁓ power behind one of my books, can read a chapter about it in Medication Madness, but don't just come off your drug. It's too dangerous. Much, much too dangerous. Much, much too dangerous. It's what I do a lot of.

 

come on, it's very very dangerous. Because the brain, that's part of what I want to tell you. So you're, one of the most common things that happens, whether it's chronic blow on the head, chronic illness, chronic exposure to any drug from alcohol, marijuana and other things, is you become less engaged in life. You just lose your heads and you don't know.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Early in Prozac, had a patient come in. It was a very sophisticated spiritual man with his wife. And she brought him in and they came together and she said, my husband's on this Prozac. I, maybe she read my, one of my earliest books, almost a million copies, talking back to Prozac. ⁓ I was the medical expert for all the combined suits against Eli Lilly for Prozac.

 

A federal judge empowered me to go look, me only, to look at the secret and the materials inside. That's another whole story filled with fraud, deception. It's just amazing stories. this person came, I couldn't have written Talking Back to Prozac without having had that appointment because it gave me the opportunity, some of it paid, to dive into the list.

 

to interview people at the FDA. I was a clinical expert for all these little soaps.

 

He told me that he was comfortable on purpose.

 

his wife said, honey, don't even greet the dog.

 

she talked about the loss of consortium in love.

 

And it took my colleagues a long time to recognize that practically every one man or woman on drugs begins to quote, lose libido.

 

or at least have some dysfunction. But because psychiatrists and physicians are in the lead, they miss the big point. They lose the capacity to love. They don't lose it, they can get back. And you don't even know it. You forget that you once looked at your wife, and at least sometimes it was just like 20 years ago, and you'd just been out of happiness and you can't believe, know.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You remember that you thought God must have arranged it. How could this woman love me? how could I love her so much? It goes. It's not there anymore. I don't think there's a drug that doesn't take it away. But psych drugs are aimed at crossing your blood brain barrier and being especially potent. if they don't affect your frontal lobe, they have to affect your frontal lobe so they wouldn't even be a psych drug.

 

But when they affect your frontal lobe, the first thing that gets compromised is like when I would get up in the morning recovering from a combination of toxicity and withdrawal from taking an antihistamine.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow. Is that what you refer to as medication spellbinding? This idea that you just took your

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You're helping me with this interview. Thank you.

 

Christian Elliot

Welcome. Yeah, run with that term or define it for people. What is that? ⁓

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, it's a term I invented because doctors don't want to see it. I shouldn't have had to invent it because we know from alcohol, we know from marijuana, we know from smoking cigarettes, things we see in front of our faces, that the effects, the bad effects on people aren't recognized by the people. It's not just that they're lying to themselves because they need the drug so bad. That's what I probably thought before I learned more on my

 

Oh, not from the textbooks, but seeing people, working with people as a therapist. Because you've got to be working with people. mean, the psychiatrist no longer even talk to their patients, barely. They talk to the nurses, they talk to the patients. It's a disgrace. They don't even talk to the social worker who's treating the patient who sent them to it. It's just a force. It's assembly line drugging. But if you...

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

get to talk with the people, you realize they're not engaged with you like they must have been in the past. If you do family therapy like I love to do, my favorite thing is helping people love one another, ⁓ you hear from the husband, so many women around that drugs, antidepressants in particular, you hear the anti-psychotics, all mood stabilizers, all stimulants. This is why teachers like kids on stimulants. Disengage.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, they're easier to manage, I suppose.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

easier to manage and the children on many of these drugs, but particularly on the stimulus, they get OCD. So they do what they're told obsessively, but they don't learn more. learn less. They will get so obsessive that they might be sitting in class and taking such notes that they even tear the paper with their pencil. Well, one story of the kid whose dad asked him to go out and rake the lawn and when the kid didn't show up, he went out.

 

And he was sitting under the tree making sure he caught each leaf. Wow. So, well, you see the same thing from addicts to stimulants. They'll go up on the roof of the house and start washing at risk of life, be washing in on the roof or something. A lot of obsessive, it's from something that's done to that area called the basal ganglia that people don't know enough about. It's below the front lobes, the effect.

 

Christian Elliot

Man.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

So we're making our kids zombie-like. And I actually, when I write about this, I find my zombie-like syndrome in the American textbook of psychiatry from about 20 years ago that they took out. But they used to say, and the children get a zombie effect. Well, it's a lesser zombie effect you're seeking. It's an extension of what you're seeking. You make them zombie.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah. Yeah.

 

One bad part of people, they think that the medication is what is helping them function. They don't recognize that it's keeping them from functioning. that

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

That's right, exactly right.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, that's right. I had a girl.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Tamakazi pilots function on stimulant drugs. It's just give them their amphetamine and take it as a ritual and it would help make them obsessively focused on what

 

Christian Elliot

Dang.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And in fact, Afghanistan, they did that with some Canadian pilots and they accidentally bombed their own people. That's a true story. I'll have to look that one up again and remind myself of the story. But that's a true story.

 

Christian Elliot

Man, yeah, I had a client years ago who was a hundred pounds overweight and she wanted me to help her get the weight off because she couldn't win the argument that that was healthy or that her family liked it or it was good for her career. But she was on one of these medications and her want to was gone. She literally did not care that she was overweight and there was no leverage point anywhere. My window ended up, whoa, if somebody doesn't want to work to get off these, I don't know that I can help them.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

This is what the antipsychotic drugs routinely do to people. They make them obese. The SSRIs fool people because they have a stimulant effect often, not always. And if you get that stimulant effect, you lose weight for the first few months and then you get the same effect, the chronic effect. So obese, it's trap. ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

the

Hmm.
 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And you mentioned the medication spellbinding. So people can't get out of their position because their frontal lobes are harmed enough to not be sensitive to their plight or motivated to get through it. But a loving partner can sometimes break through that. They can break through it. I've seen loving partners understand even that they've been living with 10 years of craziness and it's not the woman they married.

 

man they married, it started with the drugs. ⁓

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

So you say one of the things I appreciate about your work or just find so endearing is how much you genuinely care about the human condition and hearing you talk today, can sense it. So yeah, I've heard you talk before just about kind of the point of suffering or the value it can have and giving space to wrestle with hard things and instead of medicating or suppressing our feelings like this. So talk to the listener a little bit about that.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, I shouldn't have to read myself, but I don't want to miss it. I have five principles that I try to live by.

 

Christian Elliot

Oh, you're doing good. You're at preempting where I was going to wrap up. That's great. going. not yet, but you can read them now. They're so good.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And I've tinkered on this ever since I gave the original rendition in a book called Wow I'm an American, which is really appropriate to now. The very title of the book, Wow I'm an America, cost me ⁓ my lifelong friend, agent, a buddy from my beautiful Jewish group in high school, became eventually my agent.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And he wouldn't handle a book that said, wow, I'm an American, because he was a progressive New Yorker. And he didn't wake up proud to be an American. With my introduction, it's just how bad it had gotten. But here, first, and I'll explain each one a little bit. This is not a bad place to be right now. First, dare to trust in a loving God. That's the last one I put on because I was embarrassed about it.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And then I realized it takes a daring for an intellectual, know, I'm an intellectual, think a lot. I've written many scientific papers. bolster all of my discussions with you today are in scientific papers on my website and in all of my books, my, no, not all, but in the books about drugs. They're in there.

 

I realized I was daring to trust in the love of God. That my wife was saying, God loves me, and I had to dare trust him.

 

Christian Elliot

It is, and she's so good for you.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Is that a vase?

 

Well, listen, we ⁓ were both so wounded, often because of family and as often because of ourselves, that we both had two marriages before this one. We both had divorces, and we both were scared to death of how much we loved each other at first sight. And I, for one,

 

after falling in love with her. They'd saw her again for 10 years. That's how scared I got. And I noticed that in my clients. I often recognize when they fall in love because it's the skin they don't want to talk about it they want to brush it off. And finally God, had to be God, put me together in another part of the country, 3,000, 2,000 miles away from where we met and just stuck us together by a friend who was an ex-girlfriend in line. And I met her and I asked her to marry me because I'd grown up.

 

That day, I had courage and that day she said yes.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow, good timing.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And so I say we've been covertly in love for 10 years and we've been married for 42. So one of the things she did, yeah, want people to, I wanna encourage people to love each other. One of the things she did, do you remember the movie? It was a black woman who was an angel and a beautiful white woman who was an angel. And the black woman was like really robust and strong. I wouldn't call her beautiful so much as just amazing and full of life. And they were angels.

 

Christian Elliot

I've not seen this. Okay, keep going.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Touched by an angel. That was the series. And it always ended in this way, with one of the angels, and I apologize for saying that other woman wasn't beautiful. Actually, she was not my classic beauty.

 

Christian Elliot

There you go. Fair enough.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

But the other woman possessed standard classic ordinary white woman beauty. ⁓

 

I don't want to be in a hole. Not that I haven't found Blackburn very beautiful. Including my nanny who raised me and gave me my spirit, handed me my Christian underlying spirit. So complicated. But it would always end with something Ginger decided I needed. And that is as God's appointed angel, she would

 

Christian Elliot

Right.

 

There you go.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

stand up to me when I was sad. And she would put a flashlight behind her head because she didn't have the radiance of her film, an artificial light, and she would shine it up through her auburn hair and say,

 

God loves you. Wow. And I know it because he taught

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

After a while, and Ginger would look at my life with me, the outrageous fights I got in that I could have been destroyed in and that I won, except for when I started, I lost. And again, I was protected. I lost a fight because was stupid. I was so bad at basketball. I was really fast. I would steal a ball as a track guy and I run down and I missed the layup, you know? And I was so frustrated that I actually took a swing and

 

the opposition guy in his own school on the way out. Whoops. Never started a fight before. I staggered and fell without his touching me. When I reached up to get up, my arm was under the iron fence. Remember those old iron fences? got a railing that's low and I'm completely stuck. I'm looking up at a guy who's now sitting on me, who's maybe 40 pounds heavier. And he looks at me, stands up and says, jerk.

 

and walks away. So I would tell Ginger these stories about the big guy, the fiercest guy in town who attacks me. I managed to get him and force her, before we even knew about these things, but I was kind of studying it. I forced him to tap out.

 

Ginger says to me, you were protected. My God, he's got these things for you to do. That's ridiculous. That would be narcissistic. That would be stupid. I just went the secular Jewish route and progressive route, which I think goes with it. And I couldn't avoid the data, the data, the data of when they really tried to kill us and we survived.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

They went into our house, went right in the middle of, in the middle of my starting to be deposed for the Eli Lilly trials. And I'm not blaming Eli Lilly, it could have been any number of drug companies. Now I know it could have been the deep state. I didn't know that because they're protecting all of this. know, somebody managed to get into our basement.

 

where a previous person we didn't know but who came to fix the basement had not cemented in the place either the exhaust from the furnace, a very old oil furnace, or the exhaust from the gas heater.

 

And someone had come in later as I was constructed and took them out and hid them in the corner. He came upstairs, his plumber was working on his, know, your stuff's been removed. Ali was very sick. I was sick. We were going to doctors. Ginger was sick. But my office was above ground and Ali and Ginger were right above the basement where they were all the time. And Ginger just has been, you know, talking to me.

 

this. We'll protect it. Do you realize they tried to take your license away but you protected me honey because they tried to take my license away and they set up a committee of lawyers, my friends, my friends lawyer, friendly lawyer. They got together with me and I said Peter your license is being attacked. It was for remarks I made on Oprah Winfrey, not a patient.

 

It was that I told people on Oprah Winfrey allegedly to stop taking their meds, which I never did even. I told them don't start taking.

 

Christian Elliot

Hm, which is different.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin (1:11:03)

It's vastly different. said, she asked me at the end. I got along really well with Oprah in those days. That changed later and she didn't keep calling me back. But I think it changed because I think she went on Prozac. She started to lose weight and look good. think she was, the last show I had with her, she tracked me, which was ridiculous because she so supported me. She supported me during the attack on my license and stuff. ⁓ There was a change.

 

That's very dramatic, very dramatic change. I'm whispering because it's so sacred. know how to talk about this. ⁓

 

So they went after me for my, oh, what Oprah did was at the very end of the show, she said, Peter, what if you go to a doctor and a new doctor and they want it and they start writing a prescription for medication, what do you do? Well, I 30 seconds, I said.

 

Put it in your pocket. Prescription. They didn't call them in, did

 

Don't take the drugs, but don't argue with the doctor. It's not safe as a thesis psychiatrist.

 

and go find a psychotherapist or any kind of doctor who really likes you and makes you feel good on the first visit.

 

It's like shopping for a best friend. Basically what I said. Must look a little different. And so, oh my God, did they go after me? The APA worked with an astroturf group called NAMI who brought the suit against me. People were dying all over the country because of me. They could never find one person that was hurt by me. But that was only allegations. Well, got a committee. My friends got a committee together and they said, Peter,

 

Here comes the angel, change your business. He said, Peter, you have to slow down. Do not turn this licensure attack into a reform fight. Be legal. Now, this was actually especially dangerous in Maryland, as I would find out, because they vet

 

Christian Elliot

Mm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

these charges through the AMA Committee on Ethics of the state of Maryland. And I had been tearing new spaces for the AMA on what they were doing. And the state mental hospitals, the guy was really the commissioner, a different title. He wrote a special letter saying, I'm watching what you're doing.

 

Got ⁓ on discovery.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, you threw that.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

They said be really cordial, Peter. Don't make trouble for yourself.

 

So we get ready to go to the AMA committee. We know, we stopped and we assessed. We're scared thinking of how I make a living. Thinking, you know, I can really fix these guys if I go to law school. I could start all over again in a new way. I got great background being a lawyer. great doing a lot of stuff, you know. I'm thinking to be brave. And Ginger starts calling reformers around the country and asking them.

 

Christian Elliot

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

What do they think? I would never do anything like that. There was a great pediatrician who made, think they might have even taken his license away. She got into a few people and she looked at her own experience doing PRs, a great PR and other things that she had done. And she comes to me and she says, honey, we got to whack them so bad they'll regret it for the rest of their lives.

 

Christian Elliot

So I love playing, you're playing offense instead of defense, or what it sounds like.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Well, yes, but really, because she said, I've been told the only kind of people that join these committees are fascists. They want to get their colleagues and be mighty, punish people. This is not safe. She said, I want to go to the press.

 

Christian Elliot

There you go. That's one way to do it. You turned it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

Well, and now you see it was 1980, late, late eighties, and it's a different press. It's much, much better press, infinitely better press. So, um, even though it was bad. So Oprah has me back on. She is determined to support me. She has me back on and her chief persons openly calling me to talk to me and say, we're not backing down on your doc. And, um,

 

Christian Elliot

Yes.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

So I do a show on Oprah, it's not about this. And I come back and I come home, hi honey, I come in and she's sitting at my office desk and she says, wait,

 

good. I've got, and it's the biggest science writer in the country, the news for the guy from New York Times who wrote Emotional Intelligence. God, what's this?

 

Christian Elliot

I don't know that one.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

James, are you in the next room?

 

He's on the line with the most important science writer in the world. Literally, nobody close.

 

And she says to him, my husband just arrived and he wants to talk to you. And he says, I don't want to talk to your husband. Tell me more. So I don't even get to talk to him at some point. And Dan Goldman, Dan Goldman.

 

And he comes out with a very balanced piece that suggests it's a freedom of speech issue and not even a medical issue. But it's a kind of balanced, you know.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm, nice.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And then Ginger gets every major newspaper she calls to cover this thing.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow, there's your angel, yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And then...

 

Yeah, this is about angels, folks. I'm gonna end the show. I want you to think about your own life, And I only got through, for God's sakes, the first principle of trust in a loving God. That's all I'm talking about. I'll tell you quickly in a couple of minutes and then I'll be done with the other principles. But let this show inspire you. So then we go to the medical meeting of the...

 

You know, the fascists of the medical society, the Maryland Medical Society called the ethics group. And they won't let Ginger in. And I say, I'm not coming. Well, we don't let one. And I said, okay, well, I'm gonna appear. You can come in with your lawyer. I said, I'm not coming. So they backed down. I come in with Ginger on my left and my lawyer on my right. And in the middle, while the chairman woman clearly,

 

Thanks so much.

 

And the only psychiatrist among the 20 people or so, only one psychiatrist, we had not been alert enough to check him out. I assumed he was bad.

 

Um, but I didn't check him out. Maybe I was afraid, maybe I was too busy.

 

And in the middle of it, a butcher looking psychiatrist who is an orthopedic surgeon or an OBGYN, I forget what's, he says, and doc, I've listened to the whole transcript and you said these drugs damage people's brains.

 

I said, do you know what target this kinesia is, No.

 

I look at the chair.

 

probably avoiding the psychiatrist and I say, madam, may I give a seminar on brain damage from psychiatric drugs, a brief one, 10, 15 minutes, so that you will understand my motivation and go into the public because doctors don't know the truth. And the psychiatrist pipes up, yes, I'm for it. He was a family therapist, he was an old timer. He was back in the days when...

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Alex, you treated patients. And ⁓ so I did. So it's over. And she says to me, okay, Dr. Reagan, we're going to recommend that no charges be brought against. But I warned you.

 

Christian Elliot 

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

That's up to the committee of, it's up to the Maryland medical licensure people. So don't go to the press anymore. Bing. And so my lawyer says, great, we're going home.

 

And once we get to this little room when we're finished, going home, Ginger says, I'm not gonna give up our free speech. Our free speech ahead of our medical licenses, we've been together three years, it's already our medical license.

 

Christian Elliot

Yep.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And she says, I have the phone number of eight home numbers. It's nighttime now. I have eight home numbers of the press and they're waiting to hear what happened. She said, I don't think she told, she don't want to bother me. And I've got a whole purse full of quarters. I want to go to the hotel, to the bank of phones and start calling.

 

Christian Elliot

That payphone day is nice.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Yeah. I said, okay. And our lawyer, you know, he was such a wimp out. God bless him. He was a nice man. I think he quit doing the law. He actually was the head of the local ACLU.

 

No, their lawyer, who was a big lawyer with these. But anyway, I don't want to implicate or even identify. So we went to what they'd call, they'd give their little explanation, then they would have me on. And New York Times carried a second story. The Baltimore Sun, who was with us, waiting outside for us, did a big story.

 

The AP carried the story all over the world. The Washington Post, their science writer wouldn't even talk to us. But she found another reporter. The other reporter carried it. And they not only exonerated me, they apologized at length the likes of the

 

state medical licensure people. They thanked me for my contribution to medicine in the state of Maryland. And then a man I didn't know who was their medical committee head person gave an interview saying it was a freedom of speech issue and never should have been brought. Do I have an angel or not?

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, it's like you two were brought together just so that your mission could continue on some level beyond all the benefits of it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

what

 

she said from very pretty early on, pretty early on. And I think what completely, I mean, when I found out she hadn't finished college, my first thought was go to college. And she, she went to college and she, she got so many credits for work that she started as a junior for the work she'd been doing previously.

 

And then she wrote a paper for a graduate school paper. This is her first semester. And she won the award for the whole university for the best graduate paper in social sciences. And she said, think I'm going to stay home and take care of my daughter, Annalee.

 

Christian Elliot

Wow. And here you are ever since. It is. It's a remarkable story. I appreciate how you've woven it and kind of bookended the sciency part of it with just who you are, what drives you.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

something.

 

Let me finish

 

with the principles. I've probably lost my notes, but I should be fine. So the first principle to remind you is dare to trust in a loving God.

 

Christian Elliot

Go for it.

 

I've got them here if you want them.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

The next principle is take responsibility at all times. Boy, I mean at all times. So if you and your wife are having an argument, take responsibility for yourself and help her then take responsibility for herself by seeing your image. Do not put a responsibility on your loved ones. Take responsibility in every way you can.

 

The third one is ⁓ express gratitude for your gifts and opportunities. And I do that, I do it all the time.

 

And the next one is Stand firm for freedom.

 

And the final one is become a source of love.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, those are great. I captured those when I saw them on your site. I'm like, I don't know that I could come up with better ones. They're just so good.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

thinking

 

about it since I was a kid, somehow or other, it's just what I was meant to think about things since I was a kid. And I said as a kid that if I believed in God, I'd probably be a rabbi. And now a rabbi is just a teacher.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah. Well, you became an advocate for when you found all the people that you didn't have one and you saw so many people that didn't have one. And that just obviously put a fire in your belly into perpetuity to stand up for the people that are unseen or the people that don't have an advocate.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And then when COVID hit, I was in a really good position because both Ginger and I now had all the expertise because she's got it all about the drugs, enough to surprise me with new things I haven't thought about in every area, any area. And then she smiles and says, well, you know, I've been in training for 40 years. Very good.

 

Christian Elliot

You absorb a lot. She obviously didn't.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

She's just amazing, she's just amazing. ⁓

 

I'm thinking about.

 

It makes me anxious sometimes when I talk about what we have because there are enemies. And once in a while I say this and I'm going to say it, hurt us badly enough and you will make martyrs of us. So help me God, there are millions of people that love Gingerbread Man or Peter.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

and hurt us. You tried once, twice. I've talked about it. People will be alert. Really hurt us. For my age, it's euthanasia. want to see Ginger have another 20 years. ⁓ And you will martyr us. So help me God. Anyway.

 

Christian Elliot

Well, I'm confident your work is going to outlive you and inspire so many people. we will, I'm the next generation here to carry the torch and to make sure that we take this disgusting system that has an anti-human agenda in many ways and turn it into what it could have been that actually cares for people. So, yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And it's about the whole world, folks. Now the corruption, I watched it grow. The whole world is in a state of corruption that it was never in before. And it's largely because it's like the danger. So you develop an atomic bomb, you can use it for atomic energy and meet all energy needs, or you can blow people the hell with it, or you can make the world uninhabitable with it.

 

It's the same thing with communication. It's the same thing with everything that we have in this modern world, ability to ship things, our ability to communicate instantly, our ability to get materials anywhere in the world. It's great for disasters, but it also opens the way for emperors to want to the world. And we really are facing corruption on a level of people who want to rule the world. And that is what I look at in the global predator.

 

COVID-19, the global prayers, we are the prayer. We're both, and I are both authors. I'd made me do the writing, but she does so much to inform me, inform the research. And we published that book. She made a publishing company and published that book. She didn't just go get somebody to help her do it. She became the publisher and she published it. And...

 

Christian Elliot 

Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

45 minutes after, because we knew we were turned down by one of the most radical publishers in the country after accepting it, said, now I don't want it a day later. So we got a sense of just what we're really now beginning to face. And so we were already threatened by YouTube that you better be nice or we'll throw you off. So we start, we were nice when you knew the book was coming out. There were no more caution, no more warnings.

 

And ⁓ when the book came out published by Ginger under the name of ⁓ Lake Edge Press, ⁓ her publishing comment, not mine, her publishing comment, I went on YouTube and announced it.

 

We had a huge audience, 45,000 back then in 1981. And they took us down in 45 minutes per minute.

 

Christian Elliot

This certainly is not 1981, in 2021 you mean?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

21, 21, I'm sorry, 22, thank you, I make that mistake a lot. 2021, they took us down literally in less than 15 minutes, because when I went to look it up, we were gone.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I had a video, my last interview, we put a clip on YouTube and they ⁓ slapped us with a, can't post again for three months. Just like, course, it was on autism and the possibility that you could recover from it. And that's verboten on YouTube, you're not allowed to.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And what was it on?

 

Hey

 

folks, I've helped people recover from a serious autism, at least one person, I didn't get to see too many, who went on to have a great life. And I've helped others, children like that. And you know how I did it? I helped the parents love and discipline them. The parents did it. I barely saw the kid that...

 

Christian Elliot

Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

in this small community I live in who went on to live a wonderful life. I barely saw him because I told him that his parents changed and he worked with his parents. It was going to get better. And his parents agreed. Don't buy this line. Bobby pushes it like crazy. I think he gets a lot of money for a public candidate. Yes.

 

Autism is a disorder, even by definition of psychiatry, the DSM, the diagnostic manual, they want everything to be biologic. They can't attribute autism to genetics or biology. They just can't find anything.

 

Christian Elliot

it's not. It's something

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It's not. I believe it is a deeply learned issue of socialization. And the man who invented the concept said, it's new, 1950s, Canner, Leo Canner, Canner, Leo Canner, Canner, said, C-A-N-N-E-R, said, everyone I'm saying practically who have children who will just stop relating to them are not

 

much raising their children or somebody else is raising their children. Most of them are a couple of two working professional, highly intelligent people. You outline the whole thing and that's exactly the parents who were responsible enough, take responsibility to say, we were both in school training like crazy to be hard power professionals.

 

And I said, Dad, will you see him at least every weekend from now on? Special time, he knows his coming. He said, you better. And will you two work with me on loving each other, loving him and setting boundaries?

 

Because that was the first thing I did. The kid came in actually worse than just autistic yet. was hallucinated and stuff. But he was diagnosed autistic and was going to get drugged. And I said, lemon on him right away. I said, son, it's not in your best interest. Act crazy. Come sit down here. He said, Nothing is terrible for you. Come sit down here. And he sat down. And I said, you don't have to be like this. We're going to help you.

 

Christian Elliot 

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

And he did, as this happens, he actually pretty much had a normal conversation with me for an hour. But if it's an adult, can happen, that things. Boy, it keep going back and forth for a long time.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, I can imagine how many times you have practiced the skill of talking to people who others just don't know how to get through to, and that's amazing.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

I've really been working on it and now, and I'm gonna be very abstract, I have clients who don't speak and I see them on the phone with a family. They barely don't speak or they don't much speak.

 

and I'm learning to.

 

engage people who basically don't want to be there, but they'll show up over there. And we're not forcing them. And I talk with the family members.

 

Christian Elliot

Hmm.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

And they listen.

 

Christian Elliot

That's an interesting way to do therapy. love it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It

 

is, you know, it's about showing people that they matter. I mean, I can literally yell across the room, hey, and I'd love to see you again. That was great last week. last two minutes we had. you know, you get fond of people if you learn about people and they're decent enough to show up.

 

Christian Elliot

Great.

 

Mm-hmm. That level. Yeah.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You don't even have to really work at a barrier.

 

Christian Elliot

No, because we all want to be

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

there

 

because they're already somehow there. That wouldn't be true about, know, hip there or vouching, you know, it's ⁓ true about the people who come for help even if they're coming reluctantly and somebody's holding their hands, know. So there's hope out there, ⁓ Dare to have hope, I might add to this.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah.

 

Yeah, please do. And that's a good maybe note to end on. But anything else you want to say to the listener, anything we didn't cover that's burning in you that is important, let people know where they can find you?

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Love is ageless.

 

Instead of running out as you get older, you get wiser and you can love each other.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, there go.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You know, I was so infatuated and out of my mind about this woman, Ginger, practically at first sight, I thought, man, that was it. That's why I got so scared. But there's other levels. There's other levels where you got to bring in God or you won't know what's going on. I really think for me, that's true. And I don't force that on my clients, but...

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, well I think.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Most of my clients are Christians because of who I am. Now they're, they're Christians who believe in freedom. We're often, at least they believe in our principles, even our leaders in the movement or anything. So they're, really happy to be surprised to hear that. Sure. Why wouldn't God be here in this room as well as anywhere else?

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah. And the love frame is important. There's the dare part of your intellectualizing God, but it's a leap of faith to dare to, could that possibly be true? And if God is existing and he's loving, that changes everything. somehow that-

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

feeling much better. Could that be just fake? well, maybe. I feel better. Right. I mean, it's like you get better.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, yeah, because you're resonating with the one relationship you're made for, the primary one, and the rest comes from that. So I love it. Man, it's been an honor spending time with you today. I know I kept you over, so I appreciate it.

 

Dr. Peter Breggi

But this is a beautiful interview. I love it. Well, thank I'd like to put it up, you know, send us a copy. You're going to edit it, Mark?

 

Christian Elliot

No, I don't know that I need to. ⁓ people have so many different parts of it. And that's that's the beauty of an kind of arranging interview. And we can do another one on other topics.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Don't know.

 

Yeah,

 

let's at another time, if it fits with you, it may not. If it fits with you, my next book is really going to be on hidden empires, which are really right there to see in front of your nose, your face, who are trying to destroy us. They're trying to destroy, as all empires have always done, and I don't know anybody else has ever faced this as directly as me.

 

All empires thrive on destroying freedom and destroying love. That's what the book is about. Trump is facing empires. Some of them are really subtle and some of them are in your face. And I'm writing about that. It's not a mystery. I'm writing about it on the website now. I'm on Substant now. ⁓ that's what I want to...

 

Christian Elliot

and sub stack.

 

All right, well, we'll reconnect for another.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

When the

 

book comes out, we'll surely call it.

 

Christian Elliot

All right, that sounds good then. All right, well thank you so much for spending time today. It's wonderful. have links for all you guys.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

It's been delightful to meet you. Maybe someday you'll be passing by in upstate New York. Delightful to meet

 

Christian Elliot

I'd love to meet you in person.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Watch

 

this guy if he tuned in for the first time.

 

Christian Elliot

Yeah, come check me out. Deconstructing conventional. I got a whole bunch of other cool people like this guy that I've talked to. So good having you. All right, thanks.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

You know some of my best friends actually. know some, Christian, you know some my best friends.

 

Christian Elliot

I'm so glad to hear that. I'd like to meet anybody else that's your best friend I would be happy to meet.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin 

Okay, we'll think about that. We'll look into that.

 

Christian Elliot

All right, sounds good. Thank you so much for the time today. Bye.

 

Dr. Peter Breggin

Bye.