Close

Psychiatry as an Instrument of Social and Political Control

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 Mena 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 ChildrenTalking Back to Ritalin, and the Ritalin Fact Book.

Scroll right for more books
waragainstchildrenofcolor.gif  

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

 

I. The Role of Psychiatry in Paving the Way for the Holocaust

German psychiatrists proposed the extermination of mental patients before Hitler came to power. Then in Nazi Germany, organized psychiatry implemented involuntary eugenic sterilization and euthanasia, ultimately killing up to 100,000 German mental patients. The six psychiatric euthanasia centers utilized medical professionals, fake death certificates, gas chambers disguised as showers, and the mass burning of corpses.

Psychiatrists from the euthanasia program also participated in the first formalized murders in the concentration camps. Inmates were “diagnosed” on euthanasia forms and sent to the psychiatric euthanasia centers. These facilities later provided the training, personnel and technology for the larger extermination camps.

Medical observers from the United States and Germany at the Nuremberg trials concluded that the holocaust might not have taken place without psychiatry. Dr. Breggin’s peer-reviewed scientific and historical paper summarizes psychiatric participation in events leading to the holocaust, and analyzes the underlying psychiatric principles that anticipated, encouraged, and paved the way for the Nazi extermination program.

Read Dr. Breggin’s Scientific Paper on the Role of Psychiatry Leading up to the Holocaust

See Dr. Breggin’s Astonishing Speech on Totalitarian Psychiatry & the Nazi Holocaust

 

II. An Overview of Peter Breggin’s Successful Campaign to Stop the Resurgence of Psychosurgery in the 1970s and Peter and Ginger’s Successful Overturning of a Multi-Agency Eugenics Program Aimed at Inner City Children in the 1990s

The Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, now called the International Center for the Study of Patient-Oriented Psychiatry (ICSPP), was founded in the early 1970s to organize my international campaign to stop the resurgence of lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or psychiatric brain surgery. Initially, I had no idea that my campaign would end up focusing on the racist intentions of federally funded biological psychiatrists and neurosurgeons. I certainly could not have anticipated that twenty years later, the Center would once again be fighting a government-sponsored racist psychiatric program. This report tells the story of the first and second violence initiatives and the Center’s efforts to counter them.  Read more…

III. More About the Successful Anti-psychosurgery Campaign

IV. More About the Successful Anti-Violence Initiative Campaign (in progress)