Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications [Hardcover]

Dr. Peter Breggin has quite a controversial book here, never one to shy away from the difficult or contentious issues as his previous books will attest to, the subject matter here will have you hooked. At first glance Breggin appears to be a maverick of the psychiatric world but on closer inspection we find a man who has dedicated his life in fighting for something he truly believes in. Risking all, he has literally put his life on the line to bring this information into the public domain.

Breggin believes that anti-depressants do not work, and actually add to the depression contributing unwanted side affects and creating a dependency within vulnerable people. Sleeping pills and tranquilisers are both highly addictive and toxic resulting in some horrendous case studies. Indeed most psychiatric drugs are given some mention in this book and the evidence that follows each case is both disturbing and hard to ignore. Breggin believes that psychiatric medication has the potential to " spellbind " people and alter their mood and behaviour so drastically that they literally freak out and commit atrocious crimes including murder and more often than not suicide. Each case study contained in this book has been meticulously researched by Breggin himself. And although all are American cases one wonders how long it will be before more local stories are made public.

All the main players in the pharmaceutical industry are investigated here, I wont name names or point fingers, it's in the book. The legal cases contained are extremely unnerving, while a drug company has never admitted liability they proceed to pay billions of dollars in compensation and legal fees in an effort to suppress information. Black box warnings are manipulated to give the impression of a safe drug while doctors and other prescribers of these drugs have their loyalty attained through funding or coercion.

I've always been sceptical of the GP who prescribes a certain drug and writes me a prescription with the drug company's logo emblazoned across his pen ! I found this book to be both extremely factual and gravely disturbing. And although I agree that medication must play a role in some patients treatment program, I think we must stop the reckless prescribing of unnecessary pills. Breggin is to be commended for his well researched and clearly written expose of the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry and his bravery does not go unnoticed. The question must be asked " Why do drug companies spend so much money and go to such great lengths to deny a problem that does not exist ?" It just doesn't make sense. So maybe there is no smoke without fire after all........

A great book that pulls no punches. Having spent 13 years on 'anti-depressants', and suffered from the many side effects described in this book, it was refreshing to find someone who can see that its the drugs that keep you depressed. We live in a world where profits are more important than people, and the drug companies would happily have us all take drugs for one thing or another.

This is a very important book, as one can tell because it is always the most important books that virtually no sod reads! Yet you can be sure that tons of people are reading the latest tendentious mental health movement tract encouraging that we drug more children, that we consign more social lepers like myself to a lifetime of pharmacological and psychiatric slavery.

One of the most salient points made in the book is that the unifying principles of all psychiatric treatment paradigms is that their real function is to damage the brain, to suppress our spontaneity and creative potentiality, to abuse and leave the individual drowning in despair, perplexion and consternation, in the mess of his/her own discombobulated mind. Yet as Thomas Szasz so rightly pointed out in one of his most sage observations, before the ritual destruction of human beings comes the ritual destruction of truth and language, so that brain damage and a wanton act of criminality and violence is labelled as 'therapy', intolerance of human differences as 'compassion' and 'humanitarian intervention', and all the other verbal indicies of the arrogance, hypocrisy and effrontery of those in power. Pierre Bourdieu once made the very piquant observation that through our language, 'one seeks not only to be understood, but also to be believed, obeyed, respected...'. In this sense, language betokens the interests and desires of those in power, and cares heehaw for the truth.

One was particularly disturbed by the details Breggin imparts about the leverage the psychopharmaceutical complex has over research into the efficacy and harmfulness of drugs, and about the miasma of greed, dirty self-interest and careerism insidiously pervading the halls of psychiatric institutions, and how psychiatrists and physicians have become little more than ventriloquist dummies operated by the putrescent hands of the greed-filled scum at Big Pharma, directly responsible for what Breggin describes as the 'biggest epidemic of brain damage in history'.

The chapters on one of the great atrocities of the age, the ADHD debacle, are filled with tragic stories of children suffering from tardive dyskinesia and other extrapyramidal symptoms; of children experiencing the morbid ideational processes associated with taking antidepressants and stimulants; of children committing suicide to escape the minatory hallucinations associated with the psychopharmacological effects of amphetamines. These de facto child abusers and their hordes of verminous followers must be stopped. Yet the sheer volume of support for this slaughter of the innocents (that I'm sure would make Herod very proud), is redoubtable.

Such is the formidable Tartuffery of these debased moral specimens who approve this slaughter, that some have even accused Mr. Breggin of contravening the medical-ethical principle; 'first, do no harm'! What kind of transvaluation and inversion of some of our most cherished, indispensable values must have occurred for it to be men like Mr. Breggin who should upbraid themselves! I think such 'people' should learn to distinguish between the only metaphorical harm that words can do, and the very literal harm that psychiatric 'treatments' actually do.

Never mind, and just remember, these people can't conceal their lies forever, and posterity will judge them as the odious worms and butchers that they so transparently are.

I myself have experienced an acute dystonic reaction to Stelazine when I was 19. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I hadn't been informed of this, so this only augmented my terror. The problem is the sheer solipsism and ignorance of the people who manufacture, promote, peddle and prescribe these drugs. They are so invincibly, awe-inspiringly ignorant and arrogant in equal measures, they simply have no insight into what it feels like to experience for seven hours non stop, as I did, the feeling that you are being compelled by the drug to break your own neck, with of course the attendant akathisia and general feeling that your bloodstream has been sullied with some purulent liquid.

When will the psychiatric establishment, the government and the media acknowledge that the drugs that make up the psychiatric armamentarium are far more harmful than many of our illicit substances. The position that they aren't has long since been rendered untenable. Supposedly, marijuana and LSD, for which there are no known deaths, are more harmful than drugs that kill you and screw up your extrapyramidal system, and much more! How can a drug that kills you, yeah, be less harmful than one that doesn't kill you? Surely it issues from this that it at least has more potential for harm?

One of the reflexive rejoinders to the arguments made in this book is that association does not imply causation, to which I would reply that you would say that, wouldn't you? These people might want to remember that our language can't conceal our prejudices and on this issue, our moral compromises. Of course, some of the conclusions reached are contentious, but that there is for example a temporal association between the taking of these drugs and the acts, and that there were rarely any events antecedent to the taking of these drugs, adumbrating the commission of these violent actions that might discredit Breggin's thesis, is incontestable. Also, that the akathisia and morbid and paranoid ideational processes can at least lay fertile ground for the commission of certain behaviours and that the pharmaceutical industry and those prescribing are negligent is aptly illustrated in the book.

Also there is the fact that evil operates best when it is unconscious, so that the metaphorical anosognosia and involuntary intoxication in operation here impede the ability to exercise self-control, because it is much easier to control yourself when you know that a drug is at the root of what you are experiencing, as I have experienced. Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove that the drug can literally determine your actions.

One of the most intellectually stimulating points made one thought was the way in which psychiatrists rationalise the iatrogenic effects of these drugs by claiming that the drug unmasks the disease, or that the withdrawal effects are a mere recrudescence of their disease, you know, anything to avoid culpability and anything so cumbersome as expiation for their crimes. These people are impervious to reason, and as Breggin points out, whilst these people formulate their self-serving, self-exculpating sophistries, more and more sacrifices (often child sacrifices) are offered up to propitiate Big Pharma and psychiatric deities.

Onto my criticisms, I find the excessive indulgence in anti-drug propaganda a bit yawnsome. As far as Breggin is concerned, everything that drugs do to you is bad. I get far too much pleasure out of smoking marijuana and taking LSD to concur on this issue. As an aesthetic epicurean, I categorically reject this belief on the grounds that I find it more conducive to the enjoyment of art, and it is these experiences that offer alienated and tormented indivduals some transcendence, some escape from the nightmare of existence.

Another criticism is the diffuse lens he often uses to describe life, and the portrait of the case study individuals and their families as transcendently holy, pure individuals. I smell a lie. As Schopenhauer so rightly pointed out, four-fifths of humanity are worthy only of contempt. I find it hard to believe anyone is as angelic as Mr Breggin sometimes makes out.

The book really degenerates into the embarrassing though when Breggin concludes with some guidelines for good living, or whatever it is he's getting at. He says that we should all find romantic love for example. Yeah, tell that to the elephant man! Love is the privilege of a lucky few in a world where some people are born with the qualities that will make them prepossessing to other humans. Some people aren't. The world is far more cruel and our species far more wicked than Breggin's world-view suggests, and his principles for living struck me as utterly worthless and expressive of an ignorance of perspectives. Nevertheless I have nothing but admiration for the man.