The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD and Ginger Ross Breggin
Their efforts stopped federally funded racist projects involving
psychosurgery, eugenics, and other means of behavioral control
A New Film
The Minds of Men, a new film by Aaron and Melissa Dykes, provides an in-depth look at government sponsored projects aimed at control of the mind and behavior. Featuring Dr. Breggin in its final two segments, the film presents new footage and new FOIA information that tells the story in more detail than any other source. The number of viewers is quickly approaching 1 million..
A New Interview with Dr. Breggin
Aaron and Melissa Dykes provided Dr. Breggin with their entire interview of him, only portions of which appear in the film. The interview is appearing on Dr. Breggin’s YouTube Channel in eight individual parts. Dr. Breggin talks with feeling about what motivated him to build the anti-psychosurgery campaign that ended up taking on the psychiatric and neurosurgical establishment, including some of the most powerful physicians in the world, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. He describes personally evaluating the tragic condition of supposedly cured patients and his discovery of the racist and political motivations driving some of the leading proponents of advanced psychosurgery involving remote control experiments on unwitting human beings.
Introduction
Psychiatry has a long history of acting as an instrument for psychological, social and political control. When behaving in this manner, organized psychiatry is not meeting the needs of the individual as much as it is controlling the individual in the interest of “society” in the form of the government or other social interests.
The history of the state mental hospital system and involuntary treatment, for example, only gave lip service to helping the patients, who typically became life-long inmates who died at an early age. In the beginning, the state hospitals served multiple purposes, including keeping the homeless off the streets, providing custodial services for families who would not or could not take care of their own family members, and replacing the poor houses for people living in poverty.
The contemporary widespread diagnosing of children is a subtler form of social control that suppresses children rather than providing them with what they need to fulfill their basic needs in the home, school and family. Instead of reforming our educational system and improving family life, we drug our children into more docile states. For more information about social control and youngsters see the Children’s section under Special Topics and Children’s section under Scientific Papers, and well as several of Dr. Breggin’s books, including Toxic Psychiatry, Reclaiming our Children, Talking Back to Ritalin, and the Ritalin Fact Book.
The large-scale medicating of the elderly in nursing homes, often leading to dementia and premature death, is another example of using psychiatric diagnoses and drugs to control people. Drugging seems to governmental and private insurers to be more efficient than providing more effective human services, including better staffing, volunteer programs, pet therapy, and myriad other caring approaches that are proven to improve the quality of life of the elderly. See Dr. Breggin’s book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, the Second Edition.
However, in the materials presented in this section on Psychiatry as an Agent of Social and Political Control focus on government-supported programs of monstrous proportions that have been vastly under-reported and little discussed within the professions or the public.
Dr. Peter Breggin in the 1970s worked for several years to stop the resurgence of psychosurgery. Many of the leaders were using genetic, biological and racist arguments to justify its resumption, and received federal funding, some of it covert, by stirring up racial and political fears. His activities involved working with Congress to stop psychosurgery funding and creating the Psychosurgery Commission that declared that psychosurgery was experimental and not suitable for clinical practice.
With his wife Ginger Breggin he then worked extensively in the 1990s to stop a huge multi-agency federal program aimed at finding genetic causes of violence in inner city children. Their efforts again involved the United States Congress and many African-American leaders and groups.
These successful reform projects are described in detail in Peter and Ginger Breggin’s book, The War Against Children of Color (1998). The book also devotes a chapter to the role psychiatry played in a massive eugenic murder plan that paved the way and created the blueprint for the Holocaust, a subject which Dr. Breggin researched and publicized both in the US and at the first medical conference in Germany devoted to medicine under Hitler.
Further documentation of these extensive reform efforts based mostly on media reportage can be found in the book, The Conscience of Psychiatry: The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD.