Dr. Peter Breggin, Mental Health Reform and Covid |547|

Peter Breggin is a psychiatrist with a distinguished career in mental health reform and patient advocacy.

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Click here for Dr. Peter Berggin’s website

Book: COVID-19 and the Global Predators

Click here for forum Discussion

Alex Tsakiris: On this episode of Skeptiko a show about  mental health reform and COVID, and ultimately a show about evil. I have an interview coming up in a minute with Dr. Peter Breggan psychiatrist and, uh, someone who really has well an unparalleled career in terms of mental health reform. You’ll hear all about that, but what you’ll also hear, and what I found particularly interesting from this kind of skeptical perspective we have is he says that the biggest obstacle that he faced.

In just convincing people in his community, you know, psychotherapists that what he was finding in the mental health field, in terms of, uh, corruption and deception and completely immoral stuff that was going on. The biggest problem in convincing people that was true is that just didn’t want to accept evil.

They didn’t want to accept, accept the idea that, you know, people were doing really, really bad things on an individual level. And at an institutional level. So the reason I say it’s kind of a skeptical thing is it does seem like we’ve run into that again and again on this show, we’re really smart people.

People you wouldn’t expect to be blind. What we all understand is that there’s just some people that are really messed up and that maybe they’re messed up at a level beyond this biological robot level, which we’ll get into in a minute. And I was like these movie clips, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting.

What, how we’ve understood. From that kind of cultural perspective. So I have one for you today from a backdraft, the movie from 20 years ago with some really amazing actors. And here is, uh, Donald Sutherland playing the psychopathic arsonist in front of the parole board until our buddies.

Robert DeNiro. Here’s a clip.

[00:02:13] Clip: . The parole board has received Mr. Bartell’s fitness report, endorsement from his section warden, Dr. Norris, uh, supervising psychiatrist. I would describe Mr. Bartell’s progress as remarkable

mr. Bartell, do you regret your crimes? Yes.

And then aware of the pain that I have caused excuse me. Excuse me. Remember this Ronald remind me who it belong to. What did you do to that little girl?

Ronald? What’d he do at all ladies.And what about the world? What would you like to do in the whole world? Bring it all.

[00:03:10] Alex Tsakiris: So, of course it’s Hollywood dramatic and this one, especially dramatic of that, of that era. But you got to wonder if the kind of, you know, wacky dogmatic, scientism, you are just your brain. So the psychiatrists and the parole board, like I’ve looked at my numbers, I’ve done my tests. You know, you, you gotta be all right.

You can’t really be evil. You gotta wonder, I gotta wonder. If that’s not at the root cause a lot of th...