By Peter R. Breggin, MD
April 16, 2013

As I predicted in my blogs on Naturalnews.com and on my website, the left and the right have indeed found common ground in wanting to increase the power of psychiatry and the mental health establishment with the goal of preventing gun massacres. But as I've also warned in my reports, psychiatrists have no special ability to identify potentially violent offenders. Even more striking, they have no drugs that prevent violence, but they prescribe many drugs that can cause violence, including antidepressants, benzodiazepines, stimulants, and antipsychotic drugs.

By Peter R. Breggin, MD
March 19, 2013

There have been recent calls for a national Mental Health Registry, and then additional calls to link such a registry to gun licensing. In the dreadful wake of Newtown, both the left and the right and the current US federal administration are demanding that we tighten mental health statutes to make it easier and even mandatory for health care providers including psychiatrists and psychotherapists to incarcerate people on suspicion of perpetrating violence.

By Peter R. Breggin, MD
January 19, 2013

Huge efforts have been made by the pharmaceutical industry to prevent the public and the health professions from knowing that antidepressant drugs can cause violence and suicide.

Joe Wesbecker had threatened his co-workers in the past, but had never been violent. In 1989, Wesbecker was placed on Prozac (fluoxetine). One month later, he became agitated and delusional. Suspecting Prozac as the cause, his psychiatrist stopped the antidepressant. Two days later, with most of the drug remaining in his system, a heavily armed Wesbecker walked into his former place of work in Louisville, Ky., where he killed eight people and wounded many others.

By Peter R. Breggin, MD
January 18, 2013

The history of psychiatry has been one of egregious abuses against its patients. The several-hundred year history of the state mental hospital system is proof of that. Until the states found the giant lockups too expensive and began arbitrarily throwing the inmates out, millions of people were deprived of their liberty and all human amenities, humiliated, abused, and finally tortured with treatments like lobotomy, insulin comma, and shock treatment. The only reason we don't have thousands of lobotomies being perpetrated yearly in America today is that I took several years out of my life to fight against organized psychiatry to stop the return of psychosurgery in the early 1970s.

By Peter R. Breggin, MD
January 14, 2013

For the first time ever, and for a brief moment in time, two knowledgeable and highly credentialed public figures have commented on the fact that psychiatric medications cause violence and must be considered suspect in the case of the Newtown shooter. But then, as if it never happened, and as if psychiatric drugs could not possibly be implicated in violence, the issue was dropped by the media.