The Drugs May be the Problem

Duty to Warn

The Drugs May be the Problem

Inconvenient Truths About Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Industry

By Gary G. Kohls, MD

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it." -- Patrick Henry (1775)

“It would be good for humankind and bad for the fishes if all the drugs were thrown into the sea.” -- Dr. William Osler

"One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine...The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease...The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine." -- Dr. William Osler

“Prozac and its successor antidepressants cause sexual dysfunction in as many as 70% of people taking them.” – Dr Loren Mosher

The title of this column, The Drugs May Be The Problem is also the title of a seminar that I will be presenting starting on Saturday morning, January 21, 2017. On that date, the first in a series of seminars will be presented at the Red Herring Lounge, 208 East 1st Street, Duluth, MN. The event begins with registration at 8:30 am. The seminar will go from 9 am to noon. There is space for 50 participants and there is no charge for attendance. Donations will be accepted to defray expenses. The hope is that individuals or groups that attend the seminar will be interested enough in the topic to be motivated to offer sponsorship of or promotion for future events.

I borrowed the main title from psychiatrist Peter Breggin’s ground-breaking 1999 book Your Drug May Be Your Problem. Thousands of Big Pharma whistle-blowers like me, along with millions of other skeptics concerning the alleged safety (now disproven) and alleged efficacy (now disproven) of Big Pharma’s often toxic and often addictive psych drugs, are justifiably concerned with the huge influence that the for-profit, essentially amoral, multinational pharmaceutical corporations have over the medical establishment, including the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) and academic psychiatry.

Many whistle-blowers that have been trying to expose the frailties and fraudulence of the psychiatric drug industry regard Dr Breggin as a mentor, and increasingly, many survivors of psychiatric drug addiction and neurotoxicity feel the same. His books occupy a significant section in my personal library.

I have spent many hours reading and studying Breggin’s books. Over and over again, I have confirmed the veracity of his evidence and applied his insights in my past practice of holistic mental healthcare, where I saw hundreds of patients who had been seriously sickened by and addicted to irrational cocktails of psych drugs, which has been prescribed in trial-and-error experimental fashions. Sometimes, when all the psych drugs and their combinations and dosages of drugs had been tried and failed (usually making the patient worse), brain-disabling and seizure-inducing electroshock, the ultimate psychiatric method of last resort, was added, with the predictable loss of employability, personality and memory – both short-term and long-term.

Sadly, because Breggin has been such a big threat to the profitability of Big Pharma and the practice of psychiatry, he has unfairly been regarded as a medical heretic, and therefore he, his courageous truth-telling and his books have been essentially black-balled by psychiatrists and the medical establishment. Despite the fact that his ideas are considered heretical in mainstream psychiatry, his books continue to be inspirational and educational for psychiatric patients who know that they have been sickened and/or made worse by the use of brain-disabling drugs and electroshock.

Breggin is a giant among psychiatric whistle-blowers and a huge thorn in the side of the super-wealthy and obscenely profitable multinational psychopharmaceutical corporations (and much of academic psychiatry). He has been influential with free-thinking physicians and feared by establishment types ever since his first ground-breaking book was published in 1991.

That book was titled Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock and Biochemical Theories of the ‘New Psychiatry’.

Last year was the 25th anniversary of Toxic Psychiatry’s publication and I dedicated a recent seminar that I did in St Paul, MN to him. It needs to be emphasized that Breggin’s books are virtually banned books in polite medical establishment circles. They are rarely found on mainstream book-seller’s store shelves, and they are absent from hospital libraries that are designed for physician education.

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