As society decays and moves away from God, morality, and truth, more and more people — especially children — are being put on dangerous psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants. Meanwhile, a new study confirms once again that there is a strong correlation between school attendance and child suicide. What is going on?
A leading expert in the field who spoke with the Illinois Family Institute, Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, is sounding the alarm about these escalating crises and the enormous threat they represent. The world-renown author and critic of psychiatry also warned that leaving public schools was now the “only real hope” for families concerned about the horror.
The data from across the Western world paint a troubling picture no matter how you look at it. The numbers consistently show, for instance, that prescriptions for antidepressant drugs have surged in recent years. In fact, data shows more than one in six Americans now take psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, with numbers continuing to rise.
According to data highlighted by the American Psychological Association, the number of Americans on antidepressants surged by almost two thirds in just fifteen years. The rate of suicides among American children is soaring, too. The phenomenon was almost unheard of prior to a few decades ago, and yet now it is a leading cause of death in American children and still surging.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Illinois Family Institute, Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist trained at Harvard who is also one of the world’s leading critics of the psychiatric industry, said Americans should be very concerned about what is happening. “I think it’s terrible in every way,” he said about the growing use of antidepressant drugs.
“Antidepressants cannot change a person’s attitude toward life or how they treat other people, it can’t change or improve their capacity to love or make them more concerned parents, or more well-disciplined children,” he explained. “Almost all psychoactive substances have one common effect: they blunt the emotional response of the individual.”
The problems that are being diagnosed psychiatrically, Dr. Breggin continued, “are never biochemical in origin,” something that runs counter to conventional wisdom. “The problems we call psychiatric are based on our human experiences — our suffering, our loves and hates. They are psychological, spiritual, political, and emotional issues: the stuff of life.”
Psychiatrists, continued Dr. Breggin, “are unfit to deal with these complex problems.” In fact, the prominent expert compared the field to a “biological, materialistic, humanistic religion — in the worst sense of humanistic.” This is why psychiatry and its tools “are so beloved by communists to control people, because they have the same godless materialistic religion,” he added.
Speaking of how the drugs work, Dr. Breggin, who served as an expert in multiple high-profile cases involving antidepressants, said they “cause multiple biochemical imbalances where there were none before.” Beyond that, these chemicals are basically classes of “neurotoxins” that cause long-term harm to the brain, he added.
Perhaps even more alarming, there is “no question” that the drugs “increase rates of violence and suicide, in every age group, not just children,” continued Dr. Breggin, who wrote the hugely influential book Talking Back To Prozac and led the push to end psychiatric lobotomies. He also served as medical expert in multiple cases involving antidepressants and murder, and “the cover up is just amazing.”
Asked why rates of antidepressant use were increasing so rapidly, he said it was not clear to what degree there was, in fact, a “mental health” crisis ripping through the U.S. population in recent decades. While he acknowledged that the actions of “predators” during COVID caused widespread disturbances, Dr. Breggin pointed to public schools and Big Pharma as potential sources of what is being observed.
Among other concerns, the psychiatrist suggested marketing and advertising by the pharmaceutical industry was a big part of the problem. “A lot of fear and turmoil is created by elites, and then those same elites turn around and make a lot of money selling drugs to deal with that,” he said, blasting Big Pharma and the industry’s “indifference” to the harm caused. The FDA serves as the industry’s “accomplice,” Breggin argued.
Interestingly, two separate studies in recent years have found a very strong link between attending school and suicide. The latest, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, noted that child suicides surge when children are back in school, and slow down by large margins when school is out for the summer. Covid lockdowns and re-opening confirmed the trends.
Dr. Breggin was blunt. “I do believe the only real hope is for families to get out of the public school system,” he said, noting that parents could do a far better job of providing or securing education with the money spent by the state on schools. “We’ve got to get people out of the public schools and into institutions that support God, their religious beliefs, the Constitution, and so on.”
But the problem goes far beyond just public schools. “Right now all institutions serve Mammon, the totalitarians, and Big Government,” he said, noting that he “did not talk like this before I started studying what was going on with COVID.” The institutions, he added, “are designed to serve the rich and powerful and make them more rich and powerful.”
Dr. Breggin, who forced authorities and the industry to investigate the link between antidepressants and suicide and violence, is hardly the only expert sounding the alarm. In fact, a report by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights citing dozens of examples and over 30 studies concluded that psychiatric drugs “create violence and suicide,” including school shootings.
The epidemic of mental and spiritual issues plaguing America went into overdrive in the 1960s, as Bible and prayer were expelled from school. Today, by throwing fuel on the fire in the form of dangerous “medications” to deal with the fire this created, a raging inferno threatens to consume even more lives and families.
This article was originally published by the Illinois Family Institute: Top Expert Sounds Alarm on Surge in Antidepressant Use