Is There a Link Between Mass Shootings and Antidepressants?- Interview with Dr. Peter Breggin

Nov 21, 2023 | Medical-Legal Podcast, Mental Health Podcast, Pharmaceutical Podcast Episodes, Podcasts, United States Healthcare Podcast Episodes

Roughly one in ten Americans aged twelve and over takes antidepressant medication in the United States. Antidepressant use among young adults between 12-19 years old has increased to 41%. The side effects of these antidepressants come at a cost. My guest is a world-renowned Harvard trained Psychiatrist for the past 60 years who has devoted his career to the use and abuse of antidepressants as well as medications for Attention Deficit Disorder; he has testified as an expert witness in several high-profile murder trials that involved the use of antidepressants. Here, to discuss the dangers of antidepressants and to answer the question of whether there is a link between antidepressants and mass shootings, is my guest, Dr. Peter Breggin.

Meet The Host

James Egidio brings more than 24 years of experience as a medical practice owner, manager, entrepreneur, and author to the Medical Truth Podcast by interviewing experts in the medical industry such as Doctors, Nurses, Researchers, Scientist, Business Executives as well as former patient’s.
Episode Transcript

Get ready to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the United States healthcare system with your host of the medical truth podcast, James Egidio.

James Egidio: 

Hi, I’m James Egidio, your host of the medical truth podcast, the podcast that tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the American healthcare system. Roughly one in 10 Americans aged 12 and over takes antidepressant medication in the United States. Antidepressant use among young adults between 12 and 19 years old has increased to 41%. The side effects of these antidepressants come at a cost. My guest is a world renowned Harvard trained psychiatrist for the past 60 years who has devoted his career. To the use and abuse of antidepressants as well as medications for attention deficit disorder. He has testified as an expert witness in several high profile murder trials that involve the use of antidepressants. Here to discuss the dangers of anti-depressants and answer the questions of whether there is a link between antidepressants and mass shootings. Is my guest. Dr. Peter Breggin. Dr. Bregan, welcome to the medical truth podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you on again. I know we spoke back several months ago about your book, COVID 19, the global predators. We are the prey. And today I’d like to just unpack a few things about antidepressants and we hear a lot about or at least hear the relationship between mass shootings and antidepressants and some of the side effects of antidepressants and the use of antidepressants among a lot of the younger population now that we see since COVID. go Ahead. It’s…

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

the antidepressants have been very much on my mind, although, of course, most of my work is around, has been around COVID for three years now. And our book COVID 19 and the Global Predators has sold 150,000 copies. I do want to give it a plug because it’s my life’s work right now. Sure. And Peter McCullough did an introduction for it, and Zev Zelenko did an introduction for it, and Bobby Kennedy, who’s from a very different political viewpoint than mine, he actually, as his own very good book on Fauci was coming out, he said our book’s the deepest dive into the criminal conspiracy. So it’s basic to understanding everything that’s going on right now, not just COVID. It’s about the global predators who are, uh, really moving toward a global empire. They really are serious about this. Yeah. So I wanted to mention that. Sure. And I’m now tracing all this back to the antidepressants and even to earlier years. And let me give you a little word on that. And this is all on our Substack, Peter and Ginger Bragan. I’m concluding now that there’s just a long history of the elite allowing, encouraging very brain destructive treatments and it fits with the general pattern that we’ve seen with the COVID 19 and its development in laboratories, whether it was released intentionally, it was spread intentionally, that we know for certain. And that’s in the book. But going back to picking a date, the 1936 lobotomy developed, and in 1949, the Nobel Prize Committee, whom I view as the elite of elites, uh, in the worst sort of a way, gave the Nobel Prize to Igaz Moniz, MONIZ. Moniz was slicing up the brains of confined state mental hospitals. And to indicate how evil it was to give him the Nobel Prize. And one year earlier in 1948 was the doctor’s trials in Nazi Germany that hung doctors for doing involuntary experiments that were really damaging to people in the extermination and concentration camps. And here we are, this man in Portuguese state mental hospitals is doing the same kind of outrageous thing, but he, but a year after the Nuremberg Code is evolved, they give him a Nobel Prize. And then last year, a Nobel Prize is given for mRNA development. And which is in itself is killing millions of people, I do believe with the vaccines could be another show. And then if we go on just a little further from the lobotomies, we get the drugs. We get 1954 psychiatric drugs, the Haldol and the first one is Thorazine. These are the so called anti psychotic drugs, of which we still have very many. Zyprexa, Risperdal, Abilify, Seroquel, and others. And they produce a frontal lobe lobotomy by suppressing the function of the frontal lobes, and especially the dopamine connections to the front of the brain. So we’re in this situation of this mass of that worldwide chemical of Lobotimization of probably by now 500 million people on these drugs. They hit 300 million when I wrote one of my early medical books in 1983. So why is all this allowed? And then comes Prozac. And what are we, what is one of the first things we find out about Prozac? At least those of us who are involved in it. Just giving you a little background that you may or may not have covered in your intro that I was the medical expert selected for all the cases against Prozac in 1994 there were over about a hundred and fifty for suicide murder and for just mayhem psychosis mania the very desperate Things that Prozac can give to you, and all the SSRIs can give to you. Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro, Celexa, all of that can do these things to you. And I was approved by a federal court judge in Indiana, where Eli Lilly is the maker of Prozac. So I got in 19, let’s say call it 1992 to 1994. A tremendous opportunity to look at all the medical, uh, hidden medical records, supposedly they gave, had to give us all of them, give me all of them from the development of Prozac. And I got to study all these things in a lot of depth. And the first case that we went to court in was a mass murder. Joseph Westbecker killed a dozen or more people in his place of work. I’ve really been deeply involved in it from way back And Now most recently, it’s not the, it’s not mass murders, it’s the countless acts of violence where one person against one person or two people, um, and suicide and violence and suicide very closely related. I can tell you about two cases that I was just involved in the last few weeks. One that came out successfully for us and one that did not. And one that came out successfully was a Lexapro case. And that’s one of the most widely used now of the antidepressants. It all depends on marketing. And this man had been on a series of SSRIs. And it made him much worse. He was a very good, loving man. He was a successful man. And he had some fears about cancer. That he had. And was apparently completely recovered from. The doctors, naturally, you got fears or anxieties. Okay, we’ll put you on SSRIs. And when he got worse and worse, and she kept telling the doctors, we have this in the record, saying, why are you doing this? This doesn’t help him. So finally he gets hospitalized and she again says to the hospitalizing doctor, and that’s who was being sued she said these drugs, I don’t think she even knew to call them SSRIs, these drugs he’s been on, Prozac. They’re making it much, much worse. So the doc says I’ll put you on something different. So what does he put on Lexapro without forming or it’s exact same drug. Most pharmacology textbooks just treat these drugs like one drug because they’re so similar. so he’s continued on this drug for his hospitalization. Needless to say, he doesn’t get well, he’s on Lexapro every single day. And the insurance company puts pressure on the doctor in the hospital to discharge him. We don’t know why, particularly why. And as he’s going home on the last day, The day before discharge, the wife tells it’s an honest discharge, the wife tells him again, this, whatever this antidepressant is that you put him on, he’s getting worse on that too. He has not gotten better. And indeed, you look more like a man ready for admission to the hospital than discharge. So now the doctor, without telling her, Takes him off his Lexapro, so he goes home, and he is now in Lexapro toxicity, which takes a few days to wear off, and he’s in Lexapro withdrawal, and withdrawal can also produce violence, suicide, and it’s just, it’s all brain disruption, it can produce all kinds of things. And he hung himself within less than 24 hours of discharge. That was one case. And we had a very large financial victory after my testimony. So this goes on all the time in one way or another. I won’t tell you, but it looks like you’re, you want to move to this, something next.

James Egidio: 

No, I don’t. I’m actually, what I’m doing here is I’m actually showing the viewers and listeners a paper that you wrote as far back, I believe it’s what, 2005?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

2003 and four. It came out in the issue of 2003 and

James Egidio: 

four. Okay. Three and four. So that’s how far back you wrote about this particular situation here with suicidality, violence and mania. With so that’s what I was illustrating here,

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

but I can comment on that for you. This was. I wrote this just before the FDA had it, had its hearings on revising the label. It’s it’s the full prescribing information. It’s technically called the label. People know it as the package insert. You have ads. When you have an ad in a woman’s magazine to take Prozac or Lexapro, they will have to put up a summary of these late these full prescribing informations. And this was brought about. Probably as much as anything by my work, Healy also was involved, and I know you’ve interviewed him in the past.

James Egidio: 

Huh, two days ago, or a week

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

ago. Yeah. And he came on the scene, about a couple of years after I was, putting out, talking back to Prozac and other books. And he testified as well, and a number of other people testified. But I testified particularly on something that we’re not talking about. They were talking about suicide violence. I said there’s a bigger issue here. This is an amphetamine like drug for many people. All these drugs can have amphetamine like effects as well. And amphetamines can cause violence and suicide as well. And I got a call from the FDA, from the manager of the FDA hearings on changing these labels that I’d worked hard to get them to change. And she said, would you send us like 25 copies of that article you just held up? And we wanted to give one to every member of our committee. This was shocking considering how much The Paul Lieber, who was head of that whole division, didn’t want me having a voice, but these things happen within the bureaucracy, and so every member got to read that, and the final label changes have Okay, Almost verbatim, my statements about what I call the stimulant profile, they call it the activation profile. They don’t name it, they just say these drugs can cause insomnia and anxiety and agitation and going on up to mania, akathisia, which is the inability to sit still, and mania and psychosis, and that’s out of that paper. So that, I’m now that I’m 87 years old, I take the liberty of remembering what I’ve done over the years. Yeah. I’ve been in the middle of this thing. Yeah. Go ahead.

James Egidio: 

That was gonna be one of my questions is and that was actually one of my first questions I was going to ask you is what is akathisia as it relates to antidepressants? Because for the listeners and viewers, they don’t have any idea what that is and what that side effect is with antidepressants as well. And then it also sounds like from what you’re saying. that these cause an amphetamine like side effect. A lot of these antidepressants, which can also, what potentially lead to even other psychosis type paranoia, maybe

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

absolutely paranoia.

James Egidio: 

Yeah. Yeah. So explain a little bit about the akathisia and that side with antidepressants.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

The gentleman that committed suicide in this case where we had a, very significant victory a couple weeks ago. He had akathisia and the way it usually shows up is the person has what’s called psychomotor agitation. That is psychomentally he’s agitated and motor he’s moving. And what it is, it’s so distressing. It’s being like tortured from the inside out and it’s a horrible experience. And people describe it in bizarre ways often, like my blood is boiling and things like that because they don’t have words for how awful it feels. And they say, oh, it’s crazy, his blood is boiling. But he’s actually expressing what he’s feeling. And this man to many doctors made clear that he was very agitated, that he was jumpy, which is a key word that he was at one point he says, I felt like I was coming out of my skin, jumping out of my skin. And that’s so common. That the opposition in the trial, the opposition experts said, No, he didn’t have akathisia. They always say they feel like they’re jumping out of their skin and he didn’t. Of course, he just hadn’t read the records the way I had. So we could counter him with actually, and he even said with the other expert. Something inevitable, which is not true. It’s not inevitable. Somebody’s going to say certain words, but that’s how it feels. And the actual diagnostic and statistical manual, the latest revision of it, that’s the American Psychiatric Association, the latest version of it, the edited version, interestingly enough, that, um, that, that actually mentions, as older editions had, that Akathisia can occur in both antipsychotic drugs and SSRI type drugs, it missays that, and that it can lead to very bad deterioration and violence and suicide. It actually says this, regression and suicide. And they’re so uncertain, these the elite psychiatrists, what to do about all this, that they left it out of the original. Fifth edition and they only put it in the revised fifth edition, but it was in the fourth edition. They struggle with it. They tend to take out everything I’ve used in court. They take it out. Yeah, it’s really astonishing. Sure. But But that’s what it feels like. And there have been papers back in the seventies describing this horrific experience. Psychiatrists don’t like to talk about it anymore. They keep expunging, how we get censored on social media. They censor anything really bad about the psychiatrists and about their work. That’s been going on since I was active in 2003 and four.

James Egidio: 

Yeah. As we move along in this episode too, I’ll, I have some video footage of a news report based on a mass shooting and the tie to antidepressants. And it shows in a way and it illustrates in a way how and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself in this conversation about how the media is pretty much censoring the elephant in the room That’s so obvious. But my other question to you is, it seems like to me, and from what you’re saying, is that when these patients let’s say present with this akathisia, and the physician, and they go in to see a physician, and they’re a little anxious, that it even leads to polypharmacy, where the physician will say let me put you on an anti anxiety medication. Now you got an anti anxiety medication like Xanax on board with the antidepressants, right?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Absolutely. And they ignore the akathisia even though it’s in every major textbook. They don’t see, they never, almost never see the akathisia. They call it he’s agitated without saying, he’s agitated moving around. And you can even have akathisia, this horrible internal turmoil without moving, but most of the people move around and they ignore it. They ignore dozens in my last case, dozens of references in the hospital record. To restless pacing, dozens of these references and they ignore them. It’s almost like they get trained to never blame the drugs, right? Folks, whenever you go to your prescriber And you mentioned something to him and he says that’s not the drug. It probably means it is the drug. It’s that bad. Yeah. And it’s very serious. I’ll give you an example of some of the editing of this kind of thing. Way back in one of the early shootings in 1994 or 5, I have these clips somewhere on my website, Breggin. com. Sanjay Gupta who is the big CNN specialist in medicine, and also the head of, at the time, and I forgot his name, it’s a famous name, but the head of the department that takes care of all the emergencies. What’s the name of that new department that’s been around for, Decades now, the home security, homeland security, right? Homeland security. They both said on TV, Oh, these drugs, these antidepressants can cause violence, which was amazing. And they never said another word. In fact, no major figure ever since the God knows what they did to them for saying that, but no major figure since then has said that on radio or on TV. Yeah.

James Egidio: 

So it seems like you have a patient that comes in, right? They get placed on these antidepressants they get the side, they experience the side effects, like you said, of these antidepressants, they get placed on other medications to ward off the side effects from the antidepressants. What where are the black, I guess they call them black box warnings on this stuff. And if there are there any on antidepressants?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

These are not black box warnings, but most of the antidepressants, some of the manufacturers are wiggling away from it now. It’s been many years, but since 1994, have carried this broad warning that I have in that paper. about aggression, psychosis, mania, aggression. All of them carry warnings about it’s causing mania, but not in the black box, but in the warning section. Now, what they did with black box warning, there is a statement in it that it causes, can cause suicide in children and young adults up to, I think it’s age 20. And but they don’t mention it for the older people. Now, first of all, that’s impossible that you’re going to have something that’s really causing harm to children and young adults and to nobody else. But the other thing is what happened. is as a part of those hearings I was telling you about, they forced FDA, actually very unusual, they must have felt a lot of pressure about this, they forced them to do a supervised re looking at all their original data. They found out that they had not properly evaluated their original data and that the, taken as a group, all of the antidepressants were causing increased suicide in children. And so then what they got really nervous about this and they didn’t do the same study for adults, they said, and also on your own review it for adults. This is too much work for us to help. Of course, they got the same data coming out that they originally had. This is the manipulations. You can no longer trust. federal agencies. That’s why we could do the book COVID 19 and the COVID global and the COVID 19 and the global predators. Ginger and I had this knowledge of the corruption of the drug companies on a real depth and the other federal agencies that were involved. But we had no idea that, for example, that COVID 19 had been organized for 10 years on a massive level called the decade of the vaccine. Bill Gates announced that and got billions and billions of dollars coming into his foundations to, to make some money. And get ahead and get more power following the coattails of Bill Gates, because he was then the richest man in the world. There were no competitors. He’d been the richest man in the world for years back in 2010 when he announced it. So I just want folks to know we’re talking about some details here about corruption, the corruptions worldwide.

James Egidio: 

Yeah, it sure is. For the listeners and viewers of the Medical Truth Podcast, they hear about Antidepressants, of course, they see the TV ads, but what is actually going on physiologically that creates the side effects in layman’s terms?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Ultimately, all psychiatric drugs do more harm than good. And by the way, that doesn’t mean you should just get off your drugs. You’ve got to get off your drugs slowly and carefully. One of my more recent books in my long career is Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and subtitled The Gall, thank you, A Guide for Prescribers, therapists, patients and their families. Thank you for that. And think about the fact that no other psychiatrist has written such a book. They don’t want to deal with withdrawal. They make their money giving drugs. And withdrawal is difficult and hazardous. I have to go very slowly. So be careful. Don’t listen to me today and come or anybody else and come off the drugs off hand. Just carefully done. The the common final pathway of all injury to the brain and mind is apathy. And it doesn’t matter. We have a head injury in the war. It doesn’t matter if you have a lot of concussions and playing football or have electroshock. or Take psych drugs or you do street drugs. The common final pathway is you become less engaged in life. You have less zest, you have less fine tuned thinking, less able to love, less able to hate. less able to engage, and this is where it fits into the theory that the global predators have wanted us to be weaker as a humanity. So they’ll give the prizes for bizarre things like mRNA, which is one of the, is the worst, the vaccines, the worst medical disaster of all time in cause of, in causing injury and death. And they’ll give it to lobotomy, which is this atrocious thing that appalls most people, slicing up your front lobes. He literally sliced them up. He had a wire strung between two points, and he would stick it in. This is… Disgraceful. So now when you get apathetic on the drugs, you think you’re feeling better because the same thing that’s causing the apathy damage to your frontal lobe is also impairing your judgment of yourself. And one of the very first couples that I treated, the wife brought in the husband and she brought him in because she felt he was not the same. He’s a very sensitive man. I think he was a minister, a very sensitive guy, and he said he was better on the drugs. And she said, no, this is not what you used to be like. And she said to him in front of me, she said, you don’t even greet the dog lovingly when you come home and he wants to jump all over you. And the sadness of that, and of course, thinking about herself, she wasn’t being greeted lovingly. So it takes away the fine stuff and you won’t know it, but your friends might notice your husband or your wife might notice your doctor. I guarantee will not notice. He’s seen this again and again. It’s a part of he doesn’t know what it is. He thinks it’s mental illness when it’s the drug effect. That’s what they do with all the drug effects. They’re mental illness.

James Egidio: 

Yeah. Dr. Healy had mentioned that in the interview that I had with him about you can actually take one of his patients took an actual hairbrush and you can actually rub someone’s genitals briskly because that’s what it was about sexual dysfunction with the use of SSRIs. And the patient didn’t even feel the briskness of the brush on the genitals. That’s how much

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

I can’t verify anything like that, but I can believe it.

James Egidio: 

That’s what he had mentioned. Yeah,

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

actually that sounds like a real anesthetic effect from brain injury. That may be,

James Egidio: 

oh, he. Attributed to the actual SSRIs, which actually gets to my one of my questions as to how dangerous are SSRIs when someone’s using them for off label use, such as premature ejaculation or anxiety or pain.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Psychiatry is so corrupt that it takes severe adverse effects and calls them improvement. And so it actually pushes SSRIs for slowing down the sexual processes. This is a brain injury that causes the slowing down. It’s a very severe adverse effect. So psychiatry and the drug companies have gone, I don’t know how much the drug companies are pushing this, but the physicians and psychiatrists in particular who lead the way have gone from not recognizing, refusing to recognize sexual dysfunction was occurring in 90 percent of people taking these drugs. It’s partly neurologic and it’s partly the broader damage of not loving, not caring. guys forget that sex is very much connected to loving and caring and you lose your loving and caring. So it’s both a direct physiological effect on the system and it’s also a dampening of the emotions of love. Now, all the patients that I have withdrawn from psych drugs, one of the things that I do all of them have recovered. I go very slow. And at the same time, I do therapy about you’re going to be having a lot more feelings as you come off these drugs. You’re going to have feelings maybe you didn’t deal with before, but you can do it. You can handle them. And I’ve not had anybody have permanent adverse effects of this kind. But the literature and the internet are full of not recovering from the sexual suppression of these drugs. And to give them to anybody to suppress their sexuality, so called premature ejaculation, which is very common in anxiety during sex. Very common in frustration and very common in not knowing how to combine sex with love. That could be a whole interesting show in itself. But no, these guys should be severely reprimanded for at the least for doing this, and they should be open to lawsuit for doing that kind of thing. That is really a bad idea to give somebody a drug whose side effects potentially permanent. Inhibition of your sexual feelings and sexual performances, both. And to do that to somebody and not tell them in bio ways may be permanent, is a serious adverse side effect. But it’s a sign, again, of how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is, how corrupt psychiatry is. Psychiatry now is nothing more than an arm of the pharmaceutical industry.

James Egidio: 

Yeah, and it’s interesting because they’re using it for anxiety as well and pain, insomnia. I know when I spoke with Kim Witsak, she had mentioned that her husband, Woody, was placed on antidepressants for his insomnia, which led to his suicide. he Was received a sample pack of Zoloft and what three, four weeks later, he hung himself. Tragic, very tragic. I

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

can confirm that story. I know that’s true.

James Egidio: 

Sure. So getting to the relationship between mass shootings or even past mass shootings and the use of antidepressants among young adults, because that’s primarily what it mostly is young adults that go into schools and whatnot. Yeah, it’s not entirely though. Not entirely, but there’s an interesting statistic that I pulled up just today, actually, in my research. And this is the number of young children that are prescribed antidepressants 41 percent since 2015. What’s your take on that?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

That’s marketing. In two ways. One, it goes up because of marketing the drugs and it goes up because they and I imagine that pharmaceuticals people and the psychiatrists all want to data on. mental illness to go up. So when they tell you that 20 percent or 40 percent of kids have this or that, that’s marketing. You must always remember when they tell you 20 percent of women are depressed and that’s why they get antidepressants. No, it’s not. It’s all marketing. They make these data up and There is no doubt, though, that I’m sure that antidepressant use has been going up. That’s marketing of it, and that’s also the fact that kids have been, more miserable under COVID 19. You make them wear masks, you make them stay at home, acting like they’re dressed for school in front of a box. And we do all these things to them and you tell them they’re going to get COVID, they don’t get vaccinated and that’ll kill their grandparents. It just goes on and on, but it’s all about marketing and it’s all about hatred of children. I believe now in folks. Believe me, I’m a scientist. I wouldn’t be accepted more than 100 times in court unless I was very science based. I published over 70 scientific articles, 20 some odd books. I tell you this because what I’m going to say is just so outrageous. I would not have ever thought about it before I studied COVID. And that is, the people who are increasingly governing the world increasingly want less of us and they want us to be more passive. Yeah. And what better can they do than to go after the children, get them hooked on street drugs? get them because they have the same general effects, um, get them hooked on psych drugs and the worst thing that happens when you give an antidepressant to children or you give them amphetamines for ADHD, which is non existent by the way, the major correlation between kids who get diagnosed ADHD and life is that they’re the youngest kids in the class. Yes. That’s how bizarre this thing is. So they, there is a huge push in the world today to suppress everyone, except the elites feelings. And of course, it’s a big joke, but they want us to eat crummier food. They want us to not have any energy to use our cars and our automobiles. They want to stick us in cities. And we have, and they’re going to make us stay within 15 minutes of home, all this craziness going on, which is about, we don’t really want you around. Get out of nature. We want nature. Get out of using the energy sources is barely enough for us. It’s all about that. And I hope it’s okay James, that I’m getting into that today. That’s

James Egidio: 

okay. I know that’s your passion now is this whole thing with these globalists. I know. Believe me I put several clips of Bill Gates, our, our friend and foe. And into plenty of the episodes, um, but I do want to stay on the

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

and I’d love to come back by the way. I told James folks that before the show started, he and I had a show in March, which I can’t even remember because I got COVID. Now think about this, me, my wife and my mother in law who live with us. We all got COVID at the same time. Without space for transmitting it to each other and the only place that we went to outside our home regularly where they could expect us was my chiropractor and his office had to shut down because of COVID around the same time. So we were very sick. And so I don’t remember the last show with him because I was actually hospitalized very soon after. Sure. And yeah. And I’ll say this. I want to say this. This is important. I realize that, and another person might not realize it so much, that for at least I was in there in April, at least maybe a month, until a month ago, I didn’t have the zest that you see today. I was flattened. I was disengaged. I was like somebody on Prozac or on on an antipsychotic, Abilify, or somebody on COVID. Or somebody who had been vaccinated, which I had not been. And this is the common denominator where they want us. Yeah,

James Egidio: 

they do. But I think we have to just push back on all this. This garbage and shut the TV off and go do things, get out there and be active and eat. They don’t want any of that. Getting back to the whole issue with these mass shootings. Now, were you were an expert witness on a couple of those cases, correct?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Yeah. I was a an expert witness involved on the, in the middle of one of the worst mass shootings, which was Joseph Westbecker, who back in 1994 Westbecker, an older man was put on Prozac. by his doctor, and he had previously had paranoid ideas, and he’d even been hospitalized. This was another conspiracy, they, oh my god, to get into this. The first big Prozac trial was fixed. I Was the major expert, and they tried on my side to not provide me the information I needed. To testify and I did not find it out till the night before when they were all in trial and I was free and I went through the records found out they had 35 depots. They’d taken giving me none of them and on. And we still the case was still a split decision by the jury for Eli Lilly. And then afterward it was discovered that the these people who lost the case had gotten rich. And the judge did a re evaluation and declared that the case had been fixed from this, and and he said it was fixed and they couldn’t retry it or anything and it was, had to be viewed as a potentially fraudulent settlement, and the Supreme Court of Kentucky said it was potentially fraudulent, so I was in the middle of that, and this man, and the they wanted to sue the doctor, and it failed. As well as the drug company initially before the fix was set up and I refused to sue the doctor because he didn’t have the information at the time. Information was being withheld. It’s the drug company. So that’s how the case went ahead. And the doctor the patient came in and was just doing about usual, but was anxious or upset. And the doctor put him on Prozac. That’s what everybody was doing in 1993. I think it was case was 94. And the man came back a week later. And was psychotic in the office for the first time and the doc recognized him and he stopped the Prozac and said Prozac question mark. He was actually doing his best for not having any information. And before the Prozac was out of his system, he went and he shot and killed about 12 people at his place of work. So I was the embroiled in that. One of the most disillusioning experiences of my life was my first encounter with being involved in a. conspiratorial web of fixing things to show you how the world works again. The press carried the victory, which was only which was a split thing in the jury. I think it was like 8 to 3 or something like that in favor of letting you lay off the hook. And so that’s what got carried. And then when the case was overturned, I think about 18 months later, completely overturned. No major media character. I learned about it in a legal journal. I Was also involved in less directly, but lawsuits surrounding Columbine and Harris, Eric Harris. I was hired by the family at one point. of Eric Harris. So I got to see the records. And now if you read the newspapers, Eric Harris was not taking any drugs at the time. But I have with me today, right in front of me, the autopsy report. He was taking at the time, he was taking a drug called Luvox, which is still used in the U. S., but not by its trade name anymore. And is one of the, one of the worst of the SSRIs, if you could say that some one is worse than the others, at least more in the literature about murder and suicide. And he was taking it up to the shooting, because in his blood and in his urine, I’ve got it in your urine. It’s pretty recent. In his blood and his urine, there was they found the Luvox and the called Fluvoxamine and they called it a therapeutic level. Is that ironic? They didn’t give the amount. They said a therapeutic level. So I was like, I knew that case inside and out. And yes, he got crazy only after he was started on his first SSRI, which was it. Another one of the group. But then they put them on the Louvox. And then I was involved also as a consultant in the mass shootings at the theater. In Colorado.

James Egidio: 

Yeah, that’s the one right there where the kid James Holmes. It’s right. It was on Zoloft in 2012. I guess it indicates

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

and that’s a little more complex. And I actually have a note here to make sure I get some of the data straight. I Participated and I wrote a report and, but they didn’t go, they didn’t need me to go to court because he was so obviously crazy, they thought they’d do better if they just said, look, he’s absolutely crazy and didn’t add to it the complexity of the drugs. Because people don’t want to think the drugs can do this, right? I think they got it not guilty by reason of insanity and without my even having to testify Yeah but I was involved in the case and he was Actually put on Zoloft by his psychiatrist who was an expert in this area, by the way, right? so forth as an expert in this I won’t mention her name and She put him on when he told her I am feeling so violent, I’m afraid to tell you, so I can’t. And then she put him on Zoloft. After that, being put on Zoloft is when he started all of his searches. For 20 days evolving his whole murder plot and then he stopped the drug, but he was by then completely psychotic for another week when he committed the mass shooting. So you don’t just recover when you stop the drug. Most studies show that. Many people who get psychotic on these drugs, and that’s common, so common, there’s even some studies, they don’t do them anymore, of course. But what, in the beginning, people were finding out that a third of mental hospital patients, acute treatment patients, were were there because of psychosis from the SSRIs. All this was very obvious in the beginning. And usually, once they get psychotic they’re hospitalized. And then they’re… Crushed, their minds are crushed with the anti psychotic drugs, and they may be even, put in restraints. So it’s a, it takes a lot to calm them down afterwards. So I’m sure he was still under the influence of the drug. And there’s other things. There’s the, really interesting is the mass shooting. I wanted to talk about this for a minute. Involving in Reno, Las Vegas of Steven Patek, this is everybody has shut up about, but Steven Patek was on a a level of Oh, actually, and I made an error before Holmes, I’m sorry, I think I said that Harris had, I may have said, had the blood in his, the drug in his blood and urine, but he did not. I was just reviewing all this stuff. The man who had the drug in his urine was Steven Paddock. Now he killed like 50 people, some very large number, right? And he had the metabolites of Valium in his blood and in his urine. And hardly anybody knows this. But I’ve got the, I managed to get a hold of the autopsy findings and that’s what they say. So also contributing to violence are Valium and Xanax. I’ve had cases, but it’s more likely to see a planned violence after the SSRIs because the sedatives. Don’t really leave you heavily motivated to do anything, right? So the sedatives more likely, like alcohol, more likely to be where you get aroused in a bar and you’re on alcohol and you shoot somebody. Or you come home and you beat up your wife or whatever. By the way, 99 percent of the shooters are men. And in the school shootings, almost all of them have contacts with mental health. And psychiatry, which demoralizes them and tells them they’re biochemically imbalanced and hopeless, chronic mental patients, basically, and they may not be their words. And then many of them also, but not nearly all of them we know were on antidepressants and sometimes on other drugs. BUt this case, Paddock, was the biggest mass murder ever in our country. And it doesn’t get any the police chief, the the highest ranking policeman, at least involved in the case, who was running the case. I

James Egidio: 

know him. I know I was still in Vegas up until 2020, and I’d been there for 52 years. And I know the police, the. The sheriff there at the time was Joe, he’s actually the governor now. Joe Lombardo is who it was.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

I’m thinking of another man who is now the police chief in the shootings in Ho and the, I’m sorry. In Maui.

James Egidio: 

In Maui, yeah. That’s what I was thinking of. Yeah.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Yeah. Isn’t that

James Egidio: 

interesting though? Yeah, very interesting. And it, it sounds like too that what happens and maybe you can correct me on this, but there’s almost like this manic depressive swing on these SSRIs. Is that correct?

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

That’s an aspect of it, but most people who get manic are so disorganized. That they can’t carry out a successful plan, they love to plan, so yes, you can have a tremendous amount of planning on in mania, but usually it’s very flawed planning, and people are caught right away, and so on and so forth, and they brag about it to people when they do it. It is a manic like phenomenon, though, it’s psychotic and it’s a manic like. Basically, it’s a horrible impulse to do violence. Sure. Whatever is coming at it, how you define the psychiatric disorder that they have, it isn’t disabling them enough to keep them from shooting. And organize, oh no, not shooting, but to organize, to get on and look up what theaters don’t allow guns so you can be sure if you go in there, there’s no other guns. I, research all this stuff that these guys often do. and that’s how it’s different from alcohol and different from usually Xanax. And, I had a case where a woman never taken Xanax. She took Xanax, came to visit her boyfriend. and saw his lover a hundred yards away and had been really no, she had a hundred yards away, grabbed his gun and shot her from a hundred yards and hit her, fortunately didn’t kill her, she recovered fully, and it was so impulsive and out of control, you could say yeah, but we know why she did it, she wanted to shoot him, but I was able to convince the prosecution to let this case go. That this was, this woman had never done anything while in her life. Some of these are close calls, because they’re motives mixed in and so on. Yeah. Boy, I’m all over the place today, I’m having a, I’m just opening my mind on this stuff that I haven’t thought about for a while. Yeah,

James Egidio: 

for a while. It seems like though, these are not very well, I guess you could say they’re planned, but they don’t seem like they’re very well planned. A lot of these kids, from what I. Understand the way the media reports. It is that they get a hold of a gun that a parent has somewhere in a closet and they just decide in this and I want to maybe use the word manic state to just pick up a gun and say, I’m going to go over to that elementary school and just start shooting. Yeah, that’s make a

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

statement. That would seem to characterize a number of them. And then you brought that up. We have the case, a terrible case in Connecticut where the young man did that and shot the children in kindergarten. And I’ve seen a tape of an interview that was done about the shooting with the assistant attorney general of the state. And he was asked, was he on drugs? And what were they? And he said that if I told you then people would stop taking the drugs. So that’s what we know. I think that’s the good data we have. Good, horrible data to cover up and also the fact that he let it slip. And so that, that young man, one of the worst, most atrocious murders of all time. Sure. That man was on psych drugs. And he, his mother went shooting with him, so that’s an interesting part of that case. He got the guns at home. the the shooter in Florida, again, I’m… Who killed a number of people, what, a year and a half ago now?

James Egidio: 

Oh, it’s a little longer than

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

that. Yeah. Oh my gosh. When is

James Egidio: 

that? That was about

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

four years ago. Four years ago. I had some… I did do a research on that case, too. Just because reporters were asking me. But he had contact with psychiatry as well. And it actually made a threat that was ignored. Mental health people ignored

James Egidio: 

it. Yeah. Yeah. And, I noticed that when these things happen, the first thing they want to blame are the guns themselves, as if the guns, just got up and started shooting everybody on their own instead of really looking at the elephant in the room, which is of course the history, the medical history, and it’s, it also seems like the media along with the pharmaceutical companies and even the medical journals, those. Yeah. Cover this stuff up. I, when I interviewed Kim the other day, Kim Witczak she’d mentioned something that was really interesting that a term that was used called ghost writing, where a lot of these articles are not even really written by the so called experts that are just written by some ghost writer, somebody that they hire and they say, okay, this is what we want you to put into this article based on this data and that we’ve, done some flimsy research on

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

so it’s a little worse. You got to tell me cynical than that. No. The drug companies find somebody to do the write ups. That’s the ghost. The ghost is from people who have special interests, not just some guy that doesn’t know anything. It’s too consistent. Some guy who doesn’t know anything could really blow the whistle on these guys. That’s true. It’s not that at all. And this is done. With many scientific, so called scientific articles, they are actually written by the, by drug company Flax, and they solicit doctors and pay them to put their names on them. It’s much more insidious than, wow, than you were suggesting.

James Egidio: 

Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course the media. They have to cover it up as well because the advertising dollars are coming from the big, huge from, we saw that with COVID and with Pfizer. You turn on the television and everything was sponsored by Pfizer. Even, Pretty much everything is, was sponsored by Pfizer. And I actually have a news report on a mass shooting that actually shows an obvious cover up, because while we’re on this topic of cover ups and whatnot, I just want to just illustrate how the news does that when it’s related to a mass shooting. Let me go ahead and just play that now. Abundance of

Video: 

psychiatric meds being prescribed to young men to blame for these shootings. Team twelves, Joe Dana verified. Hey James, when do I go on? What’s my next thing? An attorney for the alleged shooter says he was not on any prescription meds, that hasn’t stopped. Speculation online, Jen and by one very prominent member of the gun lobby from saying that our culture is drugging kids and that it’s to blame for this epidemic of mass shootings. The incoming president of the National Rifle Association, Oliver North, calls the scourge of gun violence on campuses a disease. And the disease in this case isn’t the second amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence. They’ve been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male. If you look at what has happened to the young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten. A host of bloggers also promote the claim that psychiatric drugs are fueling the behavior of many or most school shooters. So are they right? A leading expert on school shootings, who has written two books on the subject, and who educates FBI, says there’s no known cause effect link. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. I’ve not seen any convincing evidence that any of the attacks could be attributed to psychiatric medication. Dr. Peter Langman has profiled school shooters of college age and younger, gathering interviews and autopsy reports. Out of 51 shooters, there was evidence that 7 of them were recently or currently on psychiatric medication. mostly antidepressants. In those cases, the meds were already treating severe underlying issues related to mental and emotional health. When asked to provide more specific evidence for Oliver North’s claim, the NRA emailed us a 2011 review by the FDA, concluding that 31 psychiatric drugs, including three used for ADHD, had a disproportionate association with violence towards others. But the NRA could not provide evidence connecting school shooters and psychiatric drugs. Unless the NRA has more specific evidence, we are left to conclude that this claim is false. That prescription drugs, like Ritalin, are an identifiable cause of many school shootings. And the researcher we spoke with added that when you look at the lives of these shooters who were given meds, these were not ordinary kids who underwent some radical transformation under the influence of meds. They were already struggling in a lot of different ways, and that’s why they were prescribed those medications. But Joe, you and I both know that there are some

James Egidio: 

people who will… So there you go, This

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

is the global elite defending the billions and billions of dollars that they get from psych drugs, and also the effects they get. Which is to make us into a kind of mildly stupefied nation that no longer will fight for its rights. I think the drugs have contributed to that and that’s the biggest issue and I’ve just written a column about that on Peter and Ginger Bregan’s substack that This common effect that I told you about earlier, that all head injury, head dysfunction, brain dysfunction, eventually will make us more apathetic. And I think that’s a part of the huge apathy we see in this country. Probably 80 percent of the population gets on drugs at one time or another. And when we look at what’s going on at any given time, you get data like 25 percent of women, 15 percent of children, 20 percent of children, at any given moment on the drugs. And I realized long ago that means almost everybody is going to get them at some point. And we have now a study out of Denmark that showed that 80 percent of people there had taken the drugs, and those 80 percent were in fact and they attributed it to the drugs in part. We’re doing much worse than the 20 percent who did. Now, there could be many different variables in all of that. But there’s just so much data that these drugs are really terrible for the brain. In fact, the only way you can get a drug passed by the FDA is to show that it disrupts the brain function of an animal. So if you give your drug X to mice and nothing happens, FDA isn’t going to let it be a psych drug. But if you give it to the animal and the animal no longer can stand upright and falls down, that’s literally one of the criteria for anti psychotic drugs, the animal falls down or if the animal gets stuporous or if the animal acts more frightened or less frightened, and then you chop up the brain of the animal and you can prove that it’s actually changing neurotransmitters. That is. You have to prove it’s a neurotoxin before they’ll even let you try to get it approved. If you think about this is such a bizarre world we’re in this regard. Yeah,

James Egidio: 

unless it’s the vaccine, right? The bioweapon. Unless it’s the bioweapon, then it’s okay.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

Yeah, then it’s absolutely normal. to have right now we have 18,000-19,000 reported deaths in the U. S. to the VAERS system for death, most of them within a few days of the vaccine. We used to shut down a vaccine if we Suspected a death or if there was a suspected contaminant that might cause a problem. They just stopped it across the board. No fact, no vaccine ever had more than a few deaths before it was taken off the market.

James Egidio: 

Yeah. I think it’s a lot more than 18, 000. I know personally. Oh, I

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

know. Oh, health. No. It’s about, if it’s 18, 000 reported deaths, it’s 1. 8 million. Exactly. Thank you for that,

James Egidio: 

James. Yeah. Yeah. Because I know eight people, myself personally, that, that died suddenly from the vaccine. And I don’t know anyone, as I mentioned in many podcast episodes, died directly from COVID. None. Nobody.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

No. Same with us. Same with us, basically. Yeah. I don’t know that many people have died, but I don’t associate with as many. I’m so busy working. Yeah. But listen, let me tell you about that. Let me, let’s finish up with it. I think it’s important to finish. Sure. The best study done of VAERS, which is the system that reports, where you can send reports to the CDC. So CDC that gets them. FDA also gets them and they’re involved. So you can’t forgive the FDA of any of this either because they could take it over and say, look, all right, best study was done for a government agency said less than one in 100 adverse effects, serious adverse effects is getting reported on the VAERS system. So if we say it’s 100 and you have 18, 000 reports, that’s 8, 1. 8 million deaths. Now, I think it has to be more than that. Why? Because there’s huge pressures for doctors not to report or acknowledge deaths from vaccines. If you write or talk about deaths from vaccines. You can get, you can lose your medical license. You can lose your clinical position. You can be threatened in various ways, huge pressures. Furthermore, who’s going to report the deaths from the vaccines, unlike medical. medications. The vaccines are given on mass in parking lots. They’re given in pharmacies and all kinds of other places where the people are just flying through. How is the professional going to even know of a death, let alone reported? Sure. The final thing is, I’ve probably been involved in 200 cases. Or more. 300 cases or more, one way or another, of severe violence. No, even more than that. I’ve gone a hundred times to court, more than that. It’s many hundreds I’ve been involved with that have these serious adverse events. And none has the doctor, the nurse, or anybody involved reported it to VAERS. Same thing in the FDA, none of them got reported to the FDA, not one, with the exception of the Holmes shooting, which the drug company had to report because the autopsy finally got made public saying that it was involved, that that Zoloft was involved and the manufacturer Solvay sent a report into the FDA. It’s the only report I’ve ever seen to the FDA on these things. Did you

James Egidio: 

personally interview Holmes? I know Dr. Healy did. He actually interviewed him personally after the shooting. I don’t recall.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

No? No. Oh, after the shooting, no less. I don’t know how we would have got access to him.

James Egidio: 

Not… No, I did not. When I say after the shooting, I mean during the proceeding of the, him going to trial and… Yeah. Prior to that… No, I

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

don’t think I got to interview him. No? I don’t

James Egidio: 

remember anymore. And the other interesting thing is when I did interview Dr. Hill, he did mention something that was very interesting too about this link between the mass shootings and the antidepressants is he says a lot of times the defense attorney for the suspect, the perpetrator, will use that. To get a reduced sentence for his client or for the client. Is that true or what? What’s? Oh, yeah,

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

that’s my goal. That is my goal in every case is to at least get a reduced sentence even before we go to court or reduced list of crimes, take down first degree murder. out of the charges. And I’ve done that on a number of occasions, especially young people. I had a case of of a Prozac murder in Canada, the first one ever, and the judge and they had a clinic director testify against me, and I’m an outsider. The judge went totally with my testimony and the 17 year old actually Was he didn’t allow him to be tried as an adult. He said no, this wouldn’t go with him as a child. And he’s not gonna do any jail time. It’s going to go to a place where he can be for a while and then be released. I had another case down south where a young woman, um, when an abusive male came to the door a boy just a little older than her actually not really under 12. I think she was 12 and he was 13 or 14. She went and got her daddy’s pistol down and fired it at him at the door when he wouldn’t leave. And she was charged with first degree attempted murder, didn’t fire. And my testimony she got a very reduced sentence and the judge did not put her in jail. So I have some successes, but also failures. Yeah. People to believe this. And sometimes it’s a close call. Let’s have the judgment of the jury rather than be the expert. Because some of these are close calls and I’m very much in favor of. Not having people just say, Oh Bergen said the experts. Yeah

James Egidio: 

I, I. I went to a high school the year after I graduated, it was in my sister’s class that there was a school shooting where the teacher was killed, the school teacher was killed by the perpetrator who was, his name was Patrick Lizotte. In that case, in fact, they just released him after gosh, 39 years, 38 years, 39 years in prison in a state mental institute, but he had some serious mental issues at the time, whether he was on antidepressants or not, I have no idea. But he did, like I said, 38 years of his life in prison for that murder of that school teacher.

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

One thing that’s really, and I’d like to end on this. If I were 37 instead of 87, I’d go until you got tired. But nowadays I go until I get tired. But I’m fine. I think I have something in 10 minutes to go to. Sure, no problem. But the idea of ramping up mental health. In response to these issues, right? It’s crazy. Sure. Because even the people who didn’t weren’t on drugs, many of them through the mental health system. And that makes a young person feel stigmatized. Sick and they’re told you have a biochemical imbalance. You can’t control yourself. What a horrible thing to do to the personal sovereignty and self responsibility of a young person. Psychiatry is evil in taking away from Millions and well, hundreds of millions of people over the decades, taking away their personal sovereignty by telling them they have a genetic and biochemical illness when none of them do. In fact, as soon as we find out in psychiatry that somebody has a physical disorder in the brain, we send them to the neurologist, right?

James Egidio: 

Yeah, exactly. I know. And we can get into another whole another episode based on just yeah. Transgender changes surgically and mentally where psychiatrists are pushing these kids to the edge of I’d put them in jail. Yeah, pushing them

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

to the edge of The people who are encouraging children to do transgender, why not encourage them to do suicide? They’re doing that in Canada. Exactly. Mutilation for suicidal young people. Yeah.

James Egidio: 

We’ll have to maybe do an

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

episode. Some of our best people in the world have struggled horribly with their gender issues, their suicide issues, their violence issues as young people. Don’t mutilate them.

James Egidio: 

And that’s what they’re doing. That’s what they’re doing. Dr. Bregan, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Medical Truth Podcast. I really appreciate your time. Thanks. James,

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

it’s great to be with you. Yeah,

James Egidio: 

absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. And I hope to get you back on again. Maybe we’ll talk about these other topics, this whole thing. I’d be glad to. All right. Thank you so much, sir. Appreciate it. You’re a

Dr. Peter Breggin: 

gift to the, you’re a gift to the world, sir. Thank

James Egidio: 

you, sir. You too. You too. Thank you. All right. Bye. Tell Ginger I said hello too. I will. Okay. All right.

Thanks for listening to the Medical Truth Podcast. For the latest episodes, go to www. medicaltruthpodcast. com. You can also find the Medical Truth Podcast on Rumble, as well as all the major podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeart.