Defending Our Freedom and the First Amendment

by Peter R. Breggin, MD

Medical societies have always exercised the authority to censure doctors for their conduct and speech, and even to remove their medical licenses. But now, the California legislature has gone out of its way to pass a redundant law specifically about threatening COVID dissenters with the power of the Medical Board of California to remove their licenses. Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed the bill into law. We will return to the California offense against medical freedom in the conclusion of this column.

The Attack Against My License in 1987 for Remarks on Oprah Winfrey

It was terrifying at first and then became the most significant victory of my life and Ginger’s because I went from being a largely unknown “maverick” psychiatrist to being a public force with total exoneration and an apology — far more than we had hoped for. It also led to getting a contract for my first best-selling book, Toxic Psychiatry: Why Empathy, Therapy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry.”

As a young psychiatrist, I had earned my enemies by being critical of the state mental hospitals in the surrounding area of Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia. Among many other things, I had also debated some professors of psychiatry about drugs, to their chagrin and resentment, and criticized medications at a big symposium at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC.

I had, in fact done nothing wrong. Ginger had joined me in 1984, and we were proud of our reform work together. I was simply the first psychiatrist in history to challenge psychiatric treatment in principle, at its very roots in fake science. I demonstrated scientifically in books and peer review articles that all psychiatric treatments — drugs, electroshock, and psychosurgery “work” by impairing brain function and have no essential curative or beneficial value. Their presumed benefits to the individual are usually nothing more than blunting mental function and putting the individuals out of touch with their own suffering. Their benefits to other people are the ability of the drugs, in varying degrees, to make most people more subdued, more compliant, and less difficult.

I also examined the science behind the medical model for emotional and mental problems and showed that no psychiatric diagnoses had been proven genetic or biological in origin. I was, and continue to be, science-based, and psychiatry is not. Psychiatry’s power base is not science but pharmaceutical industry money.

They Had to Stretch Too Far to Get Me

Since no patients had complained about me, the forces after my license had to utterly concoct something. They went after me for remarks I made on Oprah. In 1987, the pharmaceutical industry organized an attack on my medical license in Maryland, my home state at the time. They brought the charges through a stand-in, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), which I later exposed in my book Toxic Psychiatry as being funded by the industry.

The materials NAMI sent to the Medical Board included some with “Property of the American Psychiatric Association” printed on them, indicating their involvement in pushing this action against my professional status and career, which the APA Medical Director later admitted to me...Continue reading here.

First published in AmericaOutLoud.com.

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