Filtrer par genre

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

Progressive Radio Network

Psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, MD believes you can make a marvelous life. Great guests, callers and conversations to inspire you.

465 - The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 9-2-26
0:00 / 0:00
1x
  • 465 - The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 9-2-26

    In a world quick to prescribe electrical violence to the brain under the guise of “treatment,” it is a profound relief—and a moral imperative—to sit down with one of the clearest voices challenging this relic of psychiatric barbarism. On The Breggin Hour, my husband Peter Breggin and I spoke at length with Professor John Read, a clinical psychologist from the University of East London whose work has helped pierce the veil of denial surrounding electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Professor Read is no outsider throwing stones. He comes from the heart of the clinical psychology establishment, yet he has become one of its most formidable critics on ECT. His recent international survey—the largest ever, with 1,100 participants from 44 countries—gives voice to the lived reality of those who have endured this procedure. The findings are damning. What the Largest ECT Survivor Survey Reveals The research team, which included ECT survivors like our colleague Sarah Hancock, asked hard questions about efficacy, memory loss, and informed consent. The results: On five different measures of effectiveness, the “majority” of recipients reported “no improvement” or that their condition was “made worse”. Two-thirds experienced significant memory loss—both retrograde (losing past memories) and anterograde (inability to form new ones). For most, this persisted for at least three years, which in practical terms means it is often permanent. The vast majority were not adequately informed about these risks. Neither were their families. Women continue to receive ECT at twice the rate of men, with 82% of the psychiatrists administering it being male—an observation that raises uncomfortable questions about power, empathy, and whose distress we choose to “treat” with electricity. These are not abstract statistics. They represent shattered lives, erased memories, and families left picking up the pieces. As Peter has long documented, ECT is essentially a closed-head electrical lobotomy that exceeds OSHA safety thresholds for electrical brain injury. The brain is not “reset”—it is traumatized. Professor Read put it plainly: we are inducing grand mal seizures in people while another branch of medicine works desperately to prevent them. The original 1930s theory—that schizophrenia and epilepsy were mutually exclusive, so inducing seizures could cure the former—was bizarre even then. That we continue this practice ninety years later, with so little rigorous evidence, is a scandal. Legal Victories: Hitting Them Where It Hurts  Professor Read has served as an expert witness in key cases that are finally forcing accountability. In a 2023 Florida jury trial, manufacturer Somatics was found liable for failing to adequately warn about brain damage and permanent memory loss. A 2024 California case against individual psychiatrists and a psychiatric center—alleging negligence, fraud, malpractice, and battery—settled just before trial after surviving all dismissal attempts. MECTA, another major manufacturer, has filed for bankruptcy amid mounting litigation and withdrawn its Spectrum device, only to introduce a near-identical “Sigma” model. The industry adapts, but the human cost remains. Peter shared his own observations from decades of work, including the first successful ECT malpractice case (Salters, 2005). He described the visible horror: patients emerging confused, amnesic, and disoriented—much like victims of repeated concussions. This is traumatic brain injury, period. The temporary “euphoria” some experience is often the brain’s response to injury, not genuine healing. The Deeper Problem: Over-Medicalization of Human Suffering  John Read situates ECT within a larger tragedy—the reduction of complex human distress to a purely biological problem solvable by pills or electricity. Poverty, trauma, abuse, loneliness, and loss are pushed aside while white coats reach for the shock machine. Many psychiatrists, he notes, lack the skills or willingness to sit

    Wed, 02 Sep 2026
  • 464 - Dr. Breggin Hour 8-19-26

    In the past months, the world has watched as the people of New York City elected Zohran Mamdani to office as mayor of the largest city in the United States, with over 8 million residents and international cultural and economic centers such as the financial sector and performing arts realm. Youthful, charismatic, and bold, he won the election by over 50% in a 3-way race. Mayor Mamdani started making changes from his first day in office. His political philosophy, however, is the same old package the world has seen fail in socialist countries around the world, including Cuba and Venezuela in our own hemisphere. In the name of fairness, Mamdani planned to pay for the universal daycare, the subsidized housing, the price-controlled groceries, the public transportation through various taxes and other fees, especially on the very rich, the celebrities and billionaires who call New York City home, or own property there. Despite being targeted as the cash cows that would pay for the party, the wealthy did not just pack up and leave on the day that Mayor Mamdani was sworn in. They appeared to be holding their breath, waiting to see if they could afford to stay. Then Taylor Swift posted two short social media items, neither one long and neither one declaring she was leaving New York City, but containing an air of wistfulness and a hint that leaving might be an option. Within 48 hours, there was a surge unlike any seen in living memory in new listings of high-end residences for sale. Values of the listings totaled $2.3 billion. Should even a portion of those owners who are listing depart from the city, the financial repercussions for New York City and for New York State will be enormous. Meanwhile, on the heels of the Mamdani victory, new political hopefuls who are declared far-left socialists, many under the banner of Democrat Socialists of America(DSA) are running in primaries around the US. The DSA party and the DSA National Election Commission are hip, excited, and trying hard to be fun. But all the charisma, the self-declared desire to be kind, to be fair, and all the taxes in the world will not create a more productive, liberty-oriented, vibrant environment able to nurture ingenuity, growth, and opportunity for all. The Democratic Socialists of America have totalitarian goals that they share with their sibling revolutionaries, Communists, Socialists, and the Woke Left Under all the hype and the slogans of the Democratic Socialists of America and other far-left groups is a desire to tear down the America we grew up in. They want another American revolution. Like basic Communist tenants the far left wants to abolish private property (or tax it to death), put religion in a closet or abolish it altogether, make everyone “equal” – not in opportunity, but in outcome, and embrace the policies promoted by globalist entities such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization which have lots of goals and targets aiming at fairness and equality on an international scale and at the expense especially of the United States. We have tried in the West to be so kind, so tolerant, so darn nice in the face of destructive policies and hate-filled rhetoric and actions that we have allowed the destruction of our own culture. So, we invited a genuine survivor of the totalitarian communist USSR who was born in Moscow and immigrated with his family as a young child to Canada. Our guest brought his memories of long food lines, the fear that sits like a stone in a family of dissidents, and his awareness that those who make trouble can be shipped off to Siberia. We met with Jamie Glazov for an episode of The Breggin Hour. It was one of those rare conversations that feels less like an interview and more like speaking with family. Jamie’s presence, his clarity, and the depth of his lifelong study of totalitarianism left us both strengthened and sobered. The perspectives Jamie shares are fresh, straight from the news headlines. Jamie is the R

    Wed, 19 Aug 2026
  • 463 - Dr. Breggin Hour 8-12-26

    The story told by our guest Patrick Hahn of how the medical industry has taken advantage of people who wish they had been born a different sex is appalling, heartrending, and a lesson from the extremes to which modern medicine can become perverted against the very people it is supposed to serve. Anyone who thinks they were mistakenly born into the wrong body has a tragic story to tell about how they became alienated from themselves while growing up. Instead of helping people recover their identity as a male or female human, in all its glory, and with all its complications, modern medicine is making billions of dollars by taking advantage of this vulnerability and pretending that the proper approach is to medically attempt to change their sexual identity by mutilating their bodies through highly dangerous and permanent surgical and medical interventions. In an especially tragic twist, the sex change industry has now targeted children, some as young as toddlers, beginning with indoctrination and leading to “puberty blocker” hormones to prevent the natural maturation of the individual. These early medical interventions often lead to surgery to remove breasts, vaginas, or penises as if in collaboration with the psychological demons that these individuals need to overcome. It’s gotten so bad that one state has just authorized interchangeable body parts in an “anatomically correct doll to be used in public school sex education. The industry of so-called “gender affirmation” continues to be a “third rail”—dangerous to touch in any critical manner. People are stifled publicly and privately from speaking about this issue in a critical manner because they have been told they will cause so much pain and prejudice if they do. But the real suffering is being perpetrated by medical professionals, hospitals, and therapists who encourage the fantasy that one can change their sex to improve their quality of life. The reality is quite dismal in terms of outcomes. In every area in which our guest Patrick Hahn addresses the real science behind medical and psychiatric interventions, including his most recent book on the sex change industry, Patrick Hahn writes the most comprehensive, interesting analyses available. Where our books dovetail with his, and they often do, we nonetheless learn a great deal from him. If you’ve never heard him speak before, listen to this show simply for the pleasure of hearing one of the most brilliant and thoughtful critical researchers in the field of medicine and psychiatry today. This week on The Breggin Hour, Patrick Hahn joins us to discuss his powerful new book, Irreversible. Patrick is a careful researcher and a clear writer who has spent years documenting the medicalization of ordinary human suffering. His latest work traces how the obsession with “sex change” moved from a tiny fringe subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States alone—and how that industry rests on a mountain of lies and deceptions. Patrick does not mince words. “There is nothing good about this industry. Nothing,” he told us. “The whole industry is based on lies.” In biology and medicine, he reminds us, nothing is more certain than this: there are two, and only two, sexes. It is impossible to turn a man into a woman with a surgeon’s knife. When an entire medical enterprise begins with that lie, the rest of the story unravels into incoherence. Activists insist that “trans women are women,” then demand fantastically expensive surgeries and lifelong cross-sex hormones precisely so those same individuals can resemble women. If they already are women, why the need for the knife and the drugs? The most comprehensive long-term study ever conducted, from Sweden (one of the most “trans-friendly” countries on earth), found that after surgical transition the suicide rate was elevated by a staggering nineteen times compared with matched controls from the general population. Not nineteen percent higher—ninet

    Wed, 12 Aug 2026
  • 462 - Dr. Breggin Hour 8-5-26

    In 2021, Dr. Ron Elfenbein, MD, operated urgent care centers in Maryland, testing and treating COVID patients with monoclonal antibodies. The treatment was so successful that he was able to test and treat patients, see them recover, and watch them go home. Dr. Elfenbein went on Fox News sharing the great news of how successful the treatment of monoclonal antibodies was for COVID. Four months later, he was criminally indicted on 5 counts of fraudulent coding and billing at his clinics. A matter that should have never been brought in criminal court—at most deserving of some administrative action. He is still fighting these charges today. That is the stark outline of what happened to a good doctor. The fuller story is even more revealing—and more troubling. He is the kind of doctor you would want for your own care or for the care of your family. Dr. Elfenbein is an emergency physician with more than two decades of experience. When COVID arrived, he did what physicians are trained to do: he looked at the evidence in front of him and treated the patients in front of him. Monoclonal antibody infusions—technology that has been used safely since the 1970s for a range of conditions—produced dramatic results. Patients who arrived looking “on death’s door” often improved while still sitting in the infusion chair, with rapid turnarounds during the treatment itself. Lives saved. Hospitalizations prevented. Families spared further illness. No ventilators. No funerals. Displaying ingenuity and personal drive along with organizational skills, he built infusion centers and quickly became one of the largest providers in the Mid-Atlantic region. Patients traveled from neighboring states because they could not obtain the treatment closer to home. He saw the technology work with his own eyes. So did the patients and their families. Who needed any mRNA vaccines? Patients were being treated inexpensively and were able to return home. But there was a pandemic and a vaccine blueprint we documented in our book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey that had been developed for more than a decade, involving many billions of dollars in profits and offering the potential to finally exercise control over free and feisty American citizens. Led by Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, both working with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Deep State, careers and billions in research had been invested in shoehorning the “next generation” of vaccine technology past FDA approval requirements and into the marketplace. The “Universal Vaccine” was the holy grail before 2020. The mRNA vaccine model was considered a strong candidate with tremendous support from Bill Gates and others. “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we can’t just turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say, ‘hey, everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet.’ But there must be some way…”  Michael Specter, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Moderator at the Milkin Institute’s Future Health Summit 2019 panel titled “Making Influenza History: The Quest for a Universal Vaccine.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, an Emergency Use Authorization was issued for the mRNA COVID vaccines. It was based on the legislative condition that there were no preexisting “adequate, approved and available alternatives.” And that was the wrinkle. There were adequate, approved, and available alternatives to a rushed, unapproved, mRNA vaccine system already documented to be toxic. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, and even the basic medical treatments for respiratory viral conditions that are a part of any general practitioner’s armamentarium (albuterol and Budesonide inhalers, analgesics, oral steroids, cough suppressants, and antibiotics for secondary infections or other available tools that were not being recommended by the government when patients began to exhibit viral respiratory symptoms thought to be caused by COVID). None of these treatments

    Wed, 05 Aug 2026
  • 461 - Dr. Peter Breggin - 7-29-26

    Dr. Juliette Engel is a living witness and victim of some of the most vile hidden Intelligence programs ever devised. She has survived and even thrived since her brutal childhood, going on to offer brave eyewitness testimony to the depravity that can result when persons in power decide that they can violate any morals and acceptable behavior in the pursuit of control. The justification, as warped as it can be, is to say that we must sacrifice some people/children in order to preserve the greater good. From being delivered by her parents into the arms of CIA handlers at the age of six, to meeting Jeffrey Epstein on the San Juan Islands in the 1980s, when he was talking of buying islands in the Caribbean, Dr. Engel has encountered evil and survived. On this week’s “Breggin Hour,” Peter and I had the privilege of sitting with Dr. Juliette Engel. At 77, she carries herself with a quiet radiance that Peter described as angelic. After hearing her story, I understood why. What was done to her as a child would have broken most people. What she has done with her life since then is a testament to the best of the human spirit. Juliette was born into a family of OSS, CIA, and NSA operatives. At the age of six, in 1955, her own father sold her into the MKUltra Monarch program. There she endured mind control, satanic ritual abuse, and the deliberate fracturing of a child’s mind through repeated trauma. The program’s goal was to create a dissociated, highly controllable person—someone who could later be used as a prostitute or intelligence asset. She was trained in what she calls “sex magick,” prepared for a future of exploitation. She escaped at seventeen. With no memory of her childhood, she put herself through university and medical school and became a physician in Seattle. For decades the past remained locked away. Only later, in her sixties, after twenty years of extraordinary humanitarian work in Russia, did she begin the long, painful process of opening those sealed rooms in her mind. What she discovered there is almost unbearable. Yet she has chosen to tell it—first in her memoir *Sparky: Surviving Sex Magick as I Lived It*, written from the magical thinking of the ten-year-old child she once was, and later in *Angels Over Moscow*, the story of her twenty years building an underground railroad for trafficking victims across the former Soviet Union. While working to improve medical care for children in Russian orphanages, Juliette uncovered a trafficking network that moved young girls to Scandinavia and the United States. She followed the trail. What she found changed the course of her life. With the MiraMed Institute and the Angel Coalition she founded, she helped create a network of villagers, police, educators, journalists, and officials who rescued more than 70,000 children and young women. She did this at great personal risk, often traveling alone through dangerous territory. She did it because she knew, in a way few of us can, what it means to be a child with no one coming to save you. In our conversation, she spoke of creating “Sparky”—an internal role model, a tough, courageous little girl warrior she invented at age ten because she had no trustworthy adults. Sparky was everything Juliette longed to be: strong, pretty, smart, able to stand up for herself and others. That imagined self became her compass. Decades later, when Jeffrey Epstein and his brother approached her at a private gathering on the San Juan Islands—offering her a house, naming the exact amount in her bank account, inviting her into their world—something deep inside said no. She credits Sparky. The protective programming that had once kept her silent also, in that moment, kept her safe. She spoke, too, of the suicide programs that are deliberately installed in survivors—the overwhelming voices that rise up when a person begins to remember or to speak. She has faced them more than once. She has learned to recognize the attack when it comes and to pu

    Wed, 29 Jul 2026
Afficher plus d'épisodes