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June 12, 2004

Brief Bio

Portrait of Dr. Peter Breggin

Portrait of Dr. Peter Breggin

Dr. Breggin’s complete resume

Reform Work, Media and Publications of
Peter R. Breggin MD and Ginger R. Breggin

COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey

          Since January 2020 with the advent of SARS-CoV-2, the Breggin partnership has given most of their attention to the fraud and widespread falsehoods behind the Chinese virus pandemic, and the necessity of taking a determined political stand against the authoritarian and totalitarian intentions of those who are driving the COVID attack on freedom. They have written COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, a bestseller that has sold more than 62,000 copies within the first three months of its official publication on September 30, 2021.

Portrait of Ginger Breggin

          Their book has stunning introductions by three of the world’s leading COVID-19 treating physicians: Peter A. McCullough MD, MPH; Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko MD; and Elizabeth Lee Vliet MD. In addition to the three medical doctors, attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the author of The Real Anthony Fauci, has also endorsed the book as the single most comprehensive analysis of the coalition of global predators behind COVID-19:

“No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies. “ RFK, Jr.

          Dr. and Mrs. Breggin believe that their new book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, is the most important book and project of their forty years together and their individual lifetimes devoted to reform work and speaking truth to power. The writing took 18 months, often working 8-12 hours per day seven days a week, while researching and consulting with colleagues, and communicating their findings to professionals and the public.

          Their book has more than 1,000 references and 651 pages, including a lengthy chronology of events and an extensive index. Many readers praise the book as the most important in years (see the Amazon comments, for example). Although scientifically and historically documented, it is also a page-turner that tells an amazing but disturbing story. It concludes with chapters about what must done to stop this avalanche of totalitarianism disguised as public health measures to manage COVID-19.

COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey is sold in America and worldwide through all major bookstores, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-a-Million. In the U.S. only, it is sold at a substantial discount by the authors on www.WeAreThePrey.com.

Ginger Breggin’s Life-Long Reform Work

          Like her husband, Ginger is a lifelong reformer. She has been an editor of newspapers and magazines, and has a background in publishing and public relations. She has been Dr. Breggin’s partner in all his reform work since they married in 1984. She has coauthored or coedited four of his 20 books, and has helped in the development and editing of several others. In 2009, she edited and published The Conscience of Psychiatry: The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD, based on testimonials and media reports about her husband’s first 54 years (1954-2009) of efforts to improve his profession and to advocate for the rights of patients. Ginger does most of their outreach and is in touch with innumerable individual leaders and groups involved in the treatment of COVID-19 and the movement to rescue and revive freedom throughout the world.

          Since 1984, Ginger has been involved in all aspects of Dr. Breggin’s reform work. He wants to emphasize at the start that she can share credit as his partner in everything he has done since then.

Dr. Breggin’s Educational Background

          Peter R. Breggin MD is a lifelong reformer known as “The Conscience of Psychiatry” for his criticism of biological psychiatry and his promotion of more effective, empathic, and ethical forms of psychological, educational, and social approaches to people with emotional suffering and disability. He graduated from Harvard College with Honors and his psychiatric training included a Teaching Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Following his training, he became a Full Time Consultant in the U.S. Public Health Service at NIH, assigned to the National Institute of Mental Health. Since then, he has taught at several universities, including Johns Hopkins, George Mason, and the University of Maryland, as well as at the Washington School of Psychiatry.

Medical and Scientific Publications

          Dr. Breggin is the author of more than 20 medical and scientific texts, as well as popular books, including the bestseller and highly-documented Talking Back to Prozac. Coauthored in 1994 with his wife Ginger, Talking Back to Prozac has sold close to one million copies and continues to sell. Dr. Breggin’s more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific reports and articles have been published in many journals, including JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association), the American Journal of Psychiatry, the AMA Archives of General Psychiatry, and most recently several European journals, including Medical Hypotheses and Children and Society. He is known worldwide as the leading critic of authoritarian biological psychiatry and an advocate of psychosocial approaches to healing the mind and spirit.

          Dr. Breggin is on the editorial board of several journals, including the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, which is the premier medical publication concerning risks associated with medical treatments, and is published in Europe. He is also on the editorial board of The Humanistic Psychologist, an official journal of the American Psychological Association.

          Dr. Breggin has also published science-based articles and letters in newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as Reason and Human Events.

Media, Film, and Press Coverage

          Over several decades, Dr. Breggin has appeared as a medical and psychiatric expert on most major TV news and feature shows such as Oprah (six times), Larry King Live (many times), 60 Minutes, Hannity (on TV and radio), the O’Reilly Factor, 20/20, Nightline, Frontline, morning and evening news shows, and many others. His work has been covered in most if not all the major print media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, and Newsweek, as well as many European publications.

          For many years, Dr. Breggin has had his own weekly radio/TV show, interviewing pioneers and heroes in broad fields of psychiatry, psychology, medicine, and human freedom. The weekly show is now produced and shown on www.Brighteon.TV and is called “ReFounding America—and Reclaiming Ourselves.” Its focus is much more on COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle to recapture democracy and liberty in America and the world. The show is streamed worldwide on television on ROKU and, like his earlier show, continues to be heard on www.prn.live, one of the largest internet radio networks. In addition, Dr. Breggin is seen for an hour as a guest expert every first and third Monday of the month on “The Tamara Scott Show” on Mike Lindell’s new TV station, also streamed on ROKU. These two TV stations are young but growing enterprises with substantial financial backing and are rapidly becoming known by freedom-loving people around the world.

          The Breggin’s internet newsletter run by Ginger, “Free Frequent Alerts,” has more than 40,000 subscribers with an astonishing open rate in the range of 40 to 50 percent. Several of Dr. Breggin’s videos had been downloaded from YouTube in the hundreds of thousands, with one approaching one million views. When YouTube took down his massive channel within 45 minutes after he announced the publication of COVID-19 and the Global Predators, Ginger switched all his videos and shows to www.brighteon.com, where they continue to thrive.

          Dr. Breggin is frequently interviewed by independent film makers whose productions have won awards and have been seen by tens of millions worldwide. In 2018, he was featured in The Minds of Men, a documentary about mind control that has been seen by several millions of viewers.

Current Reform Activities

          Since January 2020, the Breggins have set aside most other activities to examine the real science surrounding COVID-19 and to criticize the fraudulent science used to justify the outrageous attacks on personal and political liberty throughout the world. In mid-2020, Dr. Breggin was asked to write a medical/psychiatric expert report for attorney Tom Renz in an injunction to stop the Ohio governor from continuing his oppressive, unending state of emergency with its lockdowns, mandates, and outright interferences with the doctor-patient relationships. The 100+ page report helped get the case accepted by the court, which resulted in the governor withdrawing his emergency edict. The broad appreciation of the report, its depth, and its success in court made the Breggins realize that they had already begun to draft a book about COVID-19. They did not anticipate it would take more than a year to complete with more than 600 pages and over 1,000 references.

          Since early in 2020 to the present, Dr. and Mrs. Breggin have been active every day in supporting and participating in the freedom movement to restore individual and political liberty in America, in a campaign they call ReFounding America. They are working with thousands of other dedicated people around the world, many of them lawyers and medical professionals, to tell the truth about COVID-19 and how it is being used to suppress and destroy Western democratic republics and freedom throughout the world.

          Dr. Breggin continues to see patients and to do legal work. He also frequently appears on radio and TV and, with Ginger, he writes blogs and makes individual videos. Ginger acts as researcher, coauthor, editor, producer, and contact person for professionals around the world. Ginger Breggin, along with Peter, is an invited member of several international medical, scientific and professional groups devoted to COVID-19 issues, including “The C-19 Group” cofounded by Peter McCullough MD, MPH, as well as others in Europe and South Africa. Ginger is most active in these groups, representing herself and Peter. The Breggins are also on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s informal legal advisory committee and continue to work with attorneys worldwide. Dr. Breggin does not charge a fee for any legal consultations and testimony related to personal and political liberty in this fight for the freedom of America and the world.

Congressional and Trial Testimony

          Dr. Breggin’s reform accomplishments include his approval as a medical and psychiatric expert in more than 100 trials on behalf of patients injured by psychiatric drugs, electroshock, and lobotomy, as well as involuntary treatment and related abuses. In many cases, federal or state courts empower him to investigate the internal workings and records of enormous drug companies and hospitals. Dr. Breggin has testified by invitation many times before the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke (NINDS). NIH selected him to be a scientific expert in two prestigious and widely covered Consensus Development Conferences, one on electroshock treatment and one on the uses of medication to treat ADHD. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hired him as a consultant concerning the adverse effects of antidepressant medications on pilots. He has testified at public hearings before the FDA on several occasions.

          In 2017, Dr. Breggin was the defense medical and psychiatric expert in a highly publicized case on behalf of Michelle Carter, who at the age of 17 allegedly “texted her boyfriend to death” by urging him to commit suicide. Dr. Breggin testified concerning the destructive mental effects on Michelle from antidepressant drugs and an abusive relationship at the hands of the deceased young man. His testimony had widespread coverage in newspapers and on TV, including 20/20 and a two-part HBO TV documentary.

          Dr. Breggin has also been a consultant or medical expert in several high-profile mass murder cases including the Columbine High School and Aurora Theater tragedies in Colorado. In the early 1990s, he was the single scientific and medical expert appointed by a consortium of attorneys and confirmed by a federal judge in the approximately 150 product cases against Eli Lilly & Co. surrounding murders, mayhem, and suicide potentially caused by Prozac. His tasks, among many others, included examining the company’s records for evidence of fraud in its development and marketing of Prozac, as well examining the FDA’s handling of its approval process for the drug, including the controlled clinical trials. His legal research in product liability cases against drug companies and his expert reports, medical books, and scientific articles helped prepare him for his research in COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey.

  • Large Reform Projects 1954 to the Present

          Dr. Breggin’s lifelong reform efforts now seem as if they were ultimately meant to inform and to motivate his work on COVID-19 policies and their threat to liberty around the world. Here is a summary of the larger, more highly-organized reform projects, each of them involving several years of time, that he conducted alone and then with Ginger when she joined him in 1984:

  •           The College Volunteer Program Changes His Life. Peter Breggin’s reform career began as a college freshman at the age of eighteen at Harvard in 1954 when he joined the new Harvard-Radcliffe Mental Hospital Volunteer Program. As the director in his second and third year at Harvard, he developed a unique student case aid program that exceeded all expectations by helping nearly all of its patients leave the hospital. To accomplish that he worked with the chair of the department of psychology to create an unprecedented semester-long human relations seminar for credits at Harvard College to be taken each year by the volunteer case aides while helping with their patients.
              To spread the word about the volunteer program, Peter was invited to give talks at professional conferences at Yale and elsewhere. He conceived of his first published book, College Students in a Mental Hospital (1962), which was jointly authored and finished by other students after his graduation. The program was featured in the national magazine the Saturday Evening Post and was promoted as a model for innovative mental health programs in the U.S. government’s Action For Mental Health: Final Report of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health 1961.
              At the time Peter was leading the college volunteer program, a portion of organized psychiatry still appreciated and supported psychosocial approaches and Peter worked closely with Harvard Medical School professors of psychiatry and even received a grant from NIMH while still an undergraduate.
              These experiences led Peter to take premedical courses on the career path of becoming a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, by the time he finished his psychiatric training in 1966, psychiatry had fully transformed into a branch of the pharmaceutical industry, using the fraudulent claim that all so-called mental illnesses are genetic or biological.
  •           Stopping the Organized Resurgence of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery. In the early 1970s, Dr. Breggin stopped the worldwide resurgence of lobotomy (psychiatric brain mutilation). He did so over several years, organizing many professional and activist groups and the media worldwide, and collaborating with Conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats in the U.S. Congress. In 1973, his testimony in the famous Kaimowitz case in Detroit resulted in a court opinion that applied the Nuremberg code, a decision that led to the termination of lobotomy and newer forms of psychiatric brain surgery not only in state mental hospitals, but also in the Veterans Administration (VA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
              In 1974, he testified against the mutilating brain surgery before Senator Ted Kennedy’s health committee. He also wrote successful Congressional legislation to form a government psychosurgery commission that in 1976 declared the procedure too dangerous and experimental for clinical use, vastly curtailing its utilization by individual neurosurgeons and psychiatrists.
  •           Dr. Breggin has many “firsts” as a medical expert testifying in U.S. and Canadian courts. As mentioned above, in 1972, in the famous Kaimowitz v. Department of Mental Health in Michigan, his testimony influenced a three-judge panel to invoke the Nuremberg Code to prohibit psychosurgery (in this case, with heated electrodes) in state hospital patients. Dr. Breggin was also the first medical expert in the U.S. in a winning malpractice case related to electroshock as well as the first medical expert in a winning malpractice case against a psychosurgeon, who then stopped operating at the famed Cleveland Clinic in 2002. In Canada, he was the medical expert on the winning side of the first malpractice case brought against physicians for causing tardive dyskinesia, a crippling adverse effect of antipsychotic drugs. He was also the expert in the largest settlement ever in Canada in any kind of malpractice case (all further information is sealed as part of the settlement).
  •           Successfully Pushed the FDA to Increase Antipsychotic Drug Warnings. Again working with many groups and media, Dr. Breggin forced the FDA to increase the hazard warnings for antipsychotic drugs in the Mid-1980s. The FDA was especially influenced by an hour-long TV feature by Dan Rather that Dr. Breggin inspired and helped plan, based on his 1983 medical book, Psychiatric Drugs: Hazards to the Brain.
  •           Successfully Pushed the FDA to Increase Antidepressant Drug Warnings. In the early 1990s, as one of the first to recognize the dangers of the new antidepressants in scientific articles and in two best-selling books, Toxic Psychiatry and Talking Back to Prozac (with Ginger Breggin), Dr. Breggin pressured the FDA to increase the warnings on antidepressants. One of his scientific reviews in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine was given by the FDA administrator to every member of the agency’s expert panel in their information packages in preparation for the hearing. The upgrading of the Full Prescribing Information warnings closely followed his published scientific report by recognizing suicidality as a risk and also by describing the previously ignored and potentially deadly over-stimulation or activation syndrome that includes insomnia, anxiety, agitation, irritability and mania.
  •           Stopped the Federal Violence Initiative. Led by Ginger in the 1990s, and working with the Black Caucus of the U.S. Congress and other groups, the Breggins completely stopped all funding for a large U.S. federal interagency program that was eugenical and racist in seeking to prove that inner city children were biologically and genetically prone to violence. It was called The Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which we shortened to the Violence Initiative. NIH was compelled to cancel a racist, eugenical conference on the Genetics of Violence. A number of highly biased research projects were cancelled and Dr. Breggin was invited to address a special committee at NIH that was re-evaluating all their violence-related projects because of his and Ginger’s criticism. Eventually, the sponsor of the racist program, Frederick Goodwin MD, was fired. Because Goodwin directed the umbrella agency that, at the time, supervised all mental health-related research funding, he was the most powerful psychiatrist in the federal government and probably in the world. The Breggins’ intensive, successful reform effort led to their coauthored book, The War Against Children of Color.
  •           Forced a Change in the Warnings on Shock Machines. Currently, in addition to his COVID-19 legal work, Dr. Breggin is the medical/psychiatric expert in a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of electroshock machines. In that ongoing case, his expert medical report to a California court has recently resulted in one of the two American ECT manufacturers admitting for the first time ever in a report to the FDA and in its own published warnings that electroshock can cause brain damage and severe memory loss. Dr. Breggin has been working toward this goal—and ultimately toward the abolition of shock treatment—since his first medical book in 1979, Electroshock: Its Brain Disabling Effects.
  •           Enlightening the World on the Role of Psychiatry in Bringing About the Holocaust. The subject that will now be discussed is so startling and horrific that it is useful to provide, at the start, a direct link to a paper presented by Dr. Breggin in Germany that was published as “Psychiatry’s Role in the Holocaust” in 1993 with an extensive bibliography in a European scientific journal: https://breggin.com/?s=psychiatry%27s+role+in+the+holocaust.
              As a part of his focus on both eugenical abuses by psychiatry and the Holocaust, Dr. Breggin was the first in the United States, beginning in the 1970s, to write and lecture about the massive and yet largely unknown role of German psychiatry in paving the way for the Holocaust. In 1988, Dr. Breggin was invited to make a plenary presentation in Germany at the first-ever conference on the role of medicine in the Third Reich, titled “Medicine Without Mercy.” In his presentation in Germany and in his later published paper, Dr. Breggin documented how, before Hitler came to power, leading German psychiatrists were already planning and writing about the extermination of mental patients and other genetically unfit “useless eaters.” When Hitler came to power, without any known official approval or endorsement from the Führer, leading psychiatrists quickly put into place their plans for the massive extermination of all their institutionalized mental patients, plus disabled adults and children, and individuals thought to have genetic diseases.
              Very efficiently and officially, the psychiatric leaders developed a full-scale national “euthanasia” program that in reality was mass murder. Based on the approval of euthanasia forms sent to a committee of leading professors in Berlin, the hospitals and other health facilities shipped their patients by railroad to several holding centers and then to one of six psychiatric extermination centers—Hartheim, Hadamar, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Brandenberg, and Bernberg. They were murdered in fake showers hooked up to trucks pouring deadly exhaust fumes into them.
              Hitler eventually stopped the formal psychiatric murder program. A brand new psychiatric murder center was turned into an extermination camp. The others were dismantled and the equipment shipped from Germany to Poland to start other extermination camps. The commandant of the first extermination camp was the former director of a psychiatric euthanasia center. The initial murders in the camps followed the medical/psychiatric model of justifying them with euthanasia forms and doctors were used to judge which new inmates went to work and which were killed. But these pseudo-medical practices were quickly discarded as the original masquerade of euthanasia was no longer possible or even necessary in the enormous death camps.
              Local citizens booed Hitler during one or more of his speeches at train stops in towns where patients were being killed in the local state mental hospitals and he cancelled the organized euthanasia program. Some state mental hospitals continued the murders by turning their facilities into death camps, poisoning and starving their patients to death, and in at least one case, burning their bodies in newly-built hospital crematoriums. One such hospital persisted in murdering its patients even after American troops occupied the area. Local citizens asked the American army to stop the slaughter and when two soldiers arrived at the hospital to investigate, they found that the medical director had hung himself.
              No accurate figures are available, but up to 100,000 Germans died in the name of euthanasia. Ironically, Jews were excluded as unworthy of euthanasia!
              Hundreds of thousands of non-Germans were also shot and killed in nursing homes and mental facilities in areas conquered by the Germans, with or without the participation of medical officials. Others were killed in roving trucks that pumped their lethal exhaust into their vans stuffed with people.
              The psychiatric murder program set the precedent for bureaucratically organized mass murder, including the use of trains to send the victims to extermination centers. It developed the technology of poison gas chambers masquerading as showers, even to the detail of providing fake wooden soap. The psychiatric murder program provided some of the leadership and even staffing for the first death camps. Overall, organized psychiatry’s “euthanasia” program empowered Hitler’s carefully planned slaughter of millions of Jews and other victims in the extermination camps.
              Thus, psychiatry is responsible for the first bureaucratically and scientifically organized extermination centers in the history of humankind. According to several leading medical observers at the Nuremberg Trials, the success of the organized murder of German mental patients set the stage for planning and accepting the Holocaust. One described the euthanasia program as “the entering wedge” to the Holocaust. All this is so unbelievably horrifying that you may wish to read the data and citations in my medical article whose link is provided at the start of this section.
              The Holocaust and many other factors—including the lack of scientific basis for genetic, biological, and involuntary psychiatry, and the enormous widespread damage caused by psychiatric drugs and electroshock—have led Dr. Breggin to call for the elimination of psychiatry’s biological and involuntary model. Instead, humanity needs a voluntary non-medical psychosocial and spiritual model for understanding and helping people overcome their mental, emotional, and social problems.

Awards for Dr. Breggin’s Reform Work

          Dr. Breggin has been given numerous awards of recognition for his work both in promoting freedom and supporting better, non-biological, humane and caring approaches to treating children and adults. Here is a sampling: Ludwig von Mises Award of Merit for efforts on behalf of the rights of psychiatric patients, 1987; Minnesota Mental Health Association, the David J. Vail National Advocacy Award “For distinguished service in protecting the rights and dignity of mentally disabled Americans,” 1990; Honorary Visiting Fellow, Regents College School of Psychotherapy and Counseling, London, England, 1994; Johnson Award “For Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Mental Health Advocacy” presented by the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), 1998; Visiting Scholar, State University of New York-Oswego, Department of Counseling and Psychological Services 2008; South Carolina Society of Adlerian Psychology, The Arlis J. Epps Social Interest Award “In recognition of his efforts to help the helpers respond to others in a spirit of caring and empathy. His forthright criticism of contemporary psychiatry’s reliance on diagnoses and drugs is a gift to mankind which epitomizes the Adlerian concept of social interest,” 2013; Mexican National Award of Giftedness, from the Mexican Federation of Giftedness, given “to people whose work impacts or has changed this community in a positive way,” 2016; and this one from his friend and colleague, nutritionist and reformer Pam Popper—the 2016 Wellness Forum Health, Health Advocate Award: “Thank you for your tireless efforts as a patient advocate and for being ‘The Conscience of Psychiatry, 2016.’”

          The Breggins have formed two nonprofit reform organizations with dozens of board or advisory council members who have supported their work. In the early 1970s, Dr. Breggin created the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry (ICSPP), a 501(c)3, to support psychiatric reform. Its outstanding board of directors included a Republican from the U.S. Senate and two Democrats from the U.S. House of Representatives, plus numerous leaders in psychiatry, psychology, and related fields. In 1984, Ginger took over as Executive Director and built the organization’s outreach with annual conferences, a newsletter, and a website with thousands of visitors per day in the 1990s. In 2002, the Breggins gave leadership of the organization to younger professionals and then in 2010 created another nonprofit organization, The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, created in 2010, continues to be led by Executive Director Ginger Breggin. It has a large Advisory Council that lends support to Dr. Breggin’s reform work, including 27 physicians (many psychiatrists). These medical doctors include several from Great Britain, as well others from Canada, Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, and Columbia, South America. An even larger number include representatives from the law and a wide variety of professionals in psychology and counseling. Approximately 33 hold the rank of professor. Work in this Center, including holding conferences, has been largely suspended as the Breggins have focused on COVID-19 and the growing threat to freedom everywhere in the world.

          See www.breggin.com for Dr. Breggin’s complete resume and large website about both his psychiatric reform work and his more recent work as a ReFounder of America and medical expert on COVID-19. His newsletter, Free Frequent Alerts, can be subscribed to on the website. His videos are archived on two personal channels on www.brighteon.com. One channel is for recent videos and the other is for older ones. His weekly TV interview show, “ReFounding America and Reclaiming Ourselves,” appears live every Wednesday at 6 pm (New York time) on brighteon.com. It is streamed on ROKU and heard on internet radio at www.prn.live.