Peter Breggin Quotes

I think the first thing parents need to start doing is absolutely refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of children in school. Schools should not be mental hospitals. Parents should say that the only tests they want their children to have are those respecting their academic subjects and nothing else.

Hillary [Clinton] even said that, whether or not teenagers want treatment, they have to get it. So it’s involuntary treatment.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism.

Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts.

Parents must refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of their children in school.

The destructive impact of psychiatry upon our civilization has been given far too little attention, and the role of psychiatry in Nazi Germany almost no attention. It is entirely possible that without psychiatry the holocaust could never have taken place.

The miracle drugs (neuroleptics) cause the worst plague of brain damage in medical history.

[ Alfred Kinsey] was sexually abusing those children and had sex abusers working for him to stimulate the babies.

[Our children] have been taken away from us by the psychiatric mental-health system. They’ve been taken away by the educational system, by the government, and by many different forces.

Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.

The N.I.M.H. spent multi-millions of dollars on [Ritalin studies], and they’re going to do the same thing now with little kids. And despite the millions spent, the N.I.M.H. study wasn’t even conducted according to accepted scientific procedures and is basically worthless.

The man Hillary [Clinton] introduced at the meeting goes so far as to say that no amount of trauma to children – or poor parenting or anything in their lives – causes them mental disorders. He says it’s all biological and genetic and should be treated by drugs.

In part I’m just mystified. Here’s a woman, Hillary [Clinton], who wrote a book about it takes a “village” to raise children. It wasn’t about a book about “it takes a pill.” There’s a “double think” that the modern person often has. Anything that’s called “science” is accepted as an absolute and sweeps reason away.

Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.

I would like to write my next book about what happened to critical intelligence in America and how it’s been undermined by these really shallow ideas about human life and nature.

There is nothing worse that you can do to a human being in America today than give them a mental illness kind of label and tell them they need drugs and these children are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old being treated in this manner.

In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.

Love is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict.

I come from a liberal tradition. I’m Jewish. My dad was a liberal. What I’ve found is that people who see themselves as thoughtful, caring, educated and informed have swallowed psychiatry as the way.