Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide, and Crime

For years, I have questioned how any mental health clinician could believe that psychotropic were safe or effective, with such a mountain of evidence showing that they are neither. In my practice, I have sat with many clients who were on psychiatric drugs; while none of them had really gotten better from them, so many of them seemed oblivious to this. This book satisfies my question. They were "spellbound" by the drugs themselves: by the pharmacological properties of the drugs themselves and by the professionals who convinced them that the drugs were going to help. It is easy to prove to an objective person that psychiatric drugs are unsafe and useless; the data are compelling, even overwhelming. But I now understand that the person taking these drugs is and cannot be objective about the drugs. This is quite helpful to me clinically. I recommend ALL of Dr. Breggin's books; this is one of his most rigorously researched, persuasive, and conclusive yet.

Dr. Peter Breggin's ground-breaking and truth-telling new book, Medication Madness, is profoundly impacting in its focus on the dangerous side effects that can occur with psychotropic drugs. The one thing that the perpetrators of the many random appearing crimes such as the massacre at Columbine have in common is that they were taking SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressants. Dr. Breggin describes the spell-binding effects these, as well as other psychotropics, have on patients' minds. He documents many crimes where he has been an expert witness and the individual has been under the effects of involuntary intoxication. This book is a necessity for every family's book shelf and should be a mainstay for every person who practices in any of the Mental Health Professions. It is a book that will also be enlightening for those who practice Mental Health Law. It addresses the myths regarding treatment with psychiatric medications. The evidence is clearly documented, indicating that taking such medications can be very harmful to patients and can devastate the lives of family members and friends who love and care for them. Peter Breggin, M.D. is a Harvard-educated, main-stream psychiatrist and expert witness, who dares to proclaim that "the emperor has no clothes." He explodes the claim that those who are diagnosed with a mental illness must take medication to correct a chemical imbalance. Rather, taking such medications indeed induces a chemical imbalance in one's brain. This book is written with clarity and empathy. It reads easily for both laymen and professionals.It truly may very well be the most important book written in this century about mood altering medications and the dire effects on the mental and physical health of those who take them. It is a must read for anyone who desires to be fully informed as to the consequences for those who take these drugs. Every professional and every consumer, potential consumer and psychiatric survivor has an invaluable resource in this book that "tells it all." I cannot overemphasize the importance of reading this important new work by the Conscience of Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin. Delores Jankovich, MA, LMSW Overland Park, Kansas

Medication Madness offers a necessary counter balance to the mass marketing of psychiatric drugs and the consequent surge in their use. Patients are often told not to read adverse-reaction lists to avoid imagining they're having one. Yet driving into unfamiliar territory without consulting the map is simply dumb. Dr Breggin has devoted his life to reminding the public that there is a map, and the roads it charts are not as rosy as drug advertisements suggest. Yet the real meaning of adverse effects is lost when reduced to statistical properties of faceless cohorts. What does a published 9% rate of psychosis in a cohort of kids on Ritalin really mean? Well, for any one of those kids, or the thousands of adults on psychiatric drugs, the real-life meaning can be suddenly shattered lives. Medication Madness presents real-life cases that put faces on those statistics. These cases bring the reader into lives forever changed and sometimes lost by adverse reactions. The cases Breggin presents are the most remarkable examples of drug-induced manias and psychoses encountered over his many decades as a psychiatrist and expert witness. In Medication Madness, Breggin also advances his spellbinding thesis. Spellbinding occurs when a drug user lacks awareness of aberrant behaviors manifesting under the influence. Behaviors a user normally avoids or finds horrific suddenly seem perfectly rational to the user. The cases in this book bear witness to this effect wherein users shift from model lives to out-of-control psychoses without ever even noticing. Breggin further proposes that the spellbinding of psychiatry's 'feel good' drugs isn't just an adverse effect, it's the 'therapeutic effect'. When psychiatric drugs 'work' they do so by blocking awareness of problems in life, the same problems that genuine psychiatry's role is to help people face, understand, and address. So the shocking cases of extreme drug-induced behavior in Medication Madness are simply further steps on a continuum of drug-induced spellbinding along which lies a 'therapeutic target zone' of moderate self-blinding. A bold and paradigm-shaping thesis indeed! Of course I have to admit my a-priori bias, having been a research assistant to Dr Breggin for many years. And I have been so engaged because I believe in the intellectual and ethical integrity of his views and life's work.

Dr Peter Breggin has outdone himself. Medication Madness is a masterpiece. There is probably no other psychiatrist in this country more knowledgeable about the lengths the drug companies will go to in order to profit off the sale of ineffective and harmful psychiatric drugs through the massive misdiagnosing of people as mentally ill. Likewise, there is probably no other psychiatrist more knowledgeable about how far the same companies will go to cover up their wrongdoings when people are injured by their products. Consequently, in Medication Madness Dr Beggin has provided the whole story of how the entire nation has been conned for the past 20 years and the resulting toll on human lives and society as a whole. He leaves no stone unturned. Starting with the corruption involved in the clinical trials used to get the new generation of psychiatric drugs FDA approved to the recruitment of the so-called "opinion leaders" to publish bogus studies to sway the minds of prescribing physicians in every field of medicine to the victims left in the aftermath. Some of the most damning chapters in the book give the details of how the legal system allowed the drug makers to keep the evidence of harm hidden for nearly two decades while they quietly settled cases out of court and made obscene profits off products they knew were causing great injury to millions of people. This book should be required reading for not only consumers but for every doctor who is even thinking about prescribing psychiatric drugs. Evelyn Pringle Investigative Journalist OpEd News columnist

I had the distinct honor to have had a chance to review the manuscript for Medication Madness in early 2007 and have been impatiently waiting for its publication because of its exteme importance to the country. Dr. Breggin has been so right for so long about so many things regarding the harms caused by psychiatric drugs and Medication Madness continues this excellence. Through his meticulous research and experience, especially as an expert in legal cases, Dr. Breggin has had the perfect vantage points to come to understand how psychiatric drugs cause people to experience what he calls "spellbinding." In the extreme cases, people commit terrible acts of self-harm or violence, including suicide or homicide. This is a riveting, as well as important book. If one thinks about it, prior to the introduction of the first "SSRI" antidepressants we virtually never had students shooting up schools. Now it occurs all too often and when the truth has come out these anti-depressants are almost always implicated. In Medication Madness, Dr. Breggin presents an unassailable case that these drugs cause such actions. Dr. Breggin uses the term Medication Madness to refer to the effects of psychiatric drugs on those taking them. I would suggest it is also just as applicable to our society, which is suffering from Medication Madness by having such a large percentage of people taking these very powerful drugs. It is my hope that this book becomes a blockbuster and helps our society come to its senses in the use of these drugs. In the interest of full-disclosure, Dr. Breggin and I have been allies for years against the oppressive forces of involuntary psychiatry and the medicalization of human suffering and he has some extremely kind words to say about me in the book.