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Peter Breggin

Peter Breggin Books

Psychiatrist

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“If you've heard Hillary Clinton's recent remarks on Ritalin and other drug use on children, you'll find the usual nauseating demagoguery. She appears to be urging Ritalin caution; but, if you listen carefully, she's calling it a miracle drug: "A Godsend for emotional and behavioral problems, for both children and their parents." She insists her efforts are not an attack on the medical treatment of children's emotional well-being because the drugs are very, very "useful."”

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Author:Peter Breggin
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“Following the school shootings, Hillary and Tipper Gore, as well as their husbands, got together for the first White House conference on mental health. Because of her interest in mental health and her own problem with anti-depressants, Tipper had been made the expert, the psychiatric consultant to the president, duly designated.”

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“I was asked by the National Institute of Health to be their scientific discussant on the effects of these drug [Ritalin] at a big conference they held. Beforehand, I reviewed all of the important literature on the issue. Even with experiments on animals. When they're given these drugs they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. We make good caged animals with these drugs. And we make good caged kids by knocking their spontaneity out of them. And, Michael, the other thing is that these drugs enforce obsessive behavior.”

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Author:Peter Breggin
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“I think that's a major reason. Instead of turning in their own lives to philosophy, religion, love, family life, or nature, they think of psychiatry; and today that means the "pill" as an ultimate answer. Also, if you have a desire for social control, "benevolent" control and "benevolent" authority, then again biological psychiatry offers a tremendous opportunity.”

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“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.”

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“In some cases it is identical because methamphetamine is one of the F.D.A. drugs allowed for children. The three basic stimulants now are amphetamine, methamphetamine, and then Ritalin, which are all in the same class and Schedule Two drugs along with cocaine, the most addictive drug as recognized by all the world's drug agencies.”

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“It's going to get even worse if Hillary [Clinton] follows her plan that I describe in Reclaiming Our Children. But even now in many, many schools the nurses are giving out more drugs than were given out in children's mental hospitals when I was in training. You can go into a school today and find that ten or twenty percent of the boys are on drugs given by the school nurse. I just recently visited a school where over half of the children were being given drugs.”

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“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.”

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Book:Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications
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