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Dear <Contact.FirstName>' Very best, Ginger The Breggins Are Back! The Breggins are back! With a new organization and a new conference, the Empathic Therapy Conference, April 8-9, 2011 in Syracuse, New York. The new Empathic Therapy Conference is for professionals
who want to raise their work to a new, happier and more effective level
as
counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and other
health care
professionals. It's also for non-professionals
who want to improve the quality of their own lives and the lives of
their
family members and loved ones. This conference will be a more personalized, cohesive and inspiring and informative event that will be filled with practical and useful knowledge aimed at helping us all to bring out the best in ourselves as professionals and as individuals. In 1972 Peter Breggin founded the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. Then Ginger joined him and they both ran the organization successfully until 2002 when they chose new leaders to replace them. Now the Breggins have left the group behind and will no longer be involved in its conferences. Peter and Ginger Breggin have formed a new
organization,
temporarily called the EmpathicTherapy Organization.
The focus of this organization will remain on Dr. Breggin's twin interests—exposing
the
fallacies and misdeeds of the Psychopharmaceutical Complex and promoting
the
greater value and effectiveness of more caring human approaches like
Empathic
Counseling, therapy, and improved educational perspectives. Now Dr. Breggin and the conference
will focus even
more on what people really need—more inspired and effective approaches
to
helping themselves and others without resort to psychiatric diagnoses
and drugs. Dr. Breggin's new conference will be on April 8-9, 2011 in Syracuse. The conference will give you an opportunity to really get to know Dr. Breggin and Ginger, and to hear and meet passionate exponents of therapy and self-help approaches that bring out the best in people. There will be lots of opportunity to personally meet and to interact with all the presenters. Go to www.empathictherapy.org for more information. And email us right now at empathictherapy@hotmail.com with your contact information. We will get in touch with you with discounts on membership and the conference in the next few weeks. We've already chosen the site for the conference, an easily accessible hotel with a relaxing and comfortable ambiance for getting together with a group of spectacular speakers who have agreed to present. We'll nail down the details in a few weeks on our empathic therapy website. Pilots Taking Antidepressants? The FAA Is Risking Our Lives By Peter R. Breggin, MD A few years ago I was hired by the FAA to defend the agency against a suit brought by a pilot who wanted to fly while taking a prescription antidepressant. I helped the FAA formulate its defense of the agency's ban on pilots using antidepressants and, as a result, the ban remained in effect. Pilots remained unable to fly while taking antidepressants, including the newer ones such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro and Effexor. How times have changed. Ignoring the scientific data on adverse drug effects that the agency and I generated and evaluated for the earlier case, the FAA is lifting its 70-year-old ban on allowing pilots to take antidepressants. Has the science changed—improving the adverse reaction profile of these drugs? To the contrary, since that time my most dire observations have been confirmed in the FDA-approved label for all antidepressants. Now there is not only a Black Box Warning for suicidality in children, youth, and young adults, but also a lengthy Warnings section about a variety of extremely dangerous abnormal behavioral reactions in all ages including aggression, hostility, disinhibition, impulsivity, and mania. Why did the FAA lift the ban on pilots using antidepressants? According to FAA statements to the media, depressed pilots sometimes kept on flying while secretly taking antidepressants. They were flying below the radar of drug testing, so to speak. The new policy not only allows pilots to use antidepressants, it grants a degree of amnesty to those who have been using them illegally in the past. The FAA feels it's safer to allow the use of antidepressants because it will make it easier for pilots to obtain needed treatment for depression. It supposedly will also make it easier to monitor their use of these dangerous drugs. If we accept this argument, why not legalize stimulants such as amphetamine as well to stay awake? They would help keep the overworked pilots awake. And why marijuana to help them relax? The FDA also argues that it would safer to let depressed pilots fly if they can take antidepressants. But who wants depressed pilots crisscrossing our nation's airways with hundreds of lives depending on their judgment. And it's unrealistic to hope that taking antidepressants will have such good results for depressed pilots. As I often remind readers, careful meta-analyses of antidepressant studies cast their beneficial effects into doubt while confirming their harmful effects. Now consider this. Reckless driving is one of the most commonly reported adverse effects of antidepressants. After taking antidepressants, disinhibited, agitated or angry drivers find themselves exploding into road rage or using their cars as instruments of suicide. This is one of the first antidepressants reactions that clinicians like myself began noticing soon after Prozac hit the marketplace. In Medication Madness I describe how an otherwise calm and self-controlled individual took Paxil and then drove his car into a policeman in order to knock him down to get his gun to kill himself. He seriously injured the cop but failed to get his gun from him. In another case in my book, a kind and gentle man turned wildly psychotic on Zoloft and drove his car into a barrier in the hope of killing his passenger wife after he realized her body was harboring an alien beast bent on destroying him and all of humanity. Yes, just the class of drugs for pilots to take. Just a few weeks ago I testified before the Veteran's Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives on the connection between the increased prescription of antidepressants to our troops and the increasing suicide rate among them (video on my website). I presented a mountain of scientific evidence against giving drugs that stimulate aggression and disinhibition to heavily armed young men under stress. But to pilots? It sounds even more dangerous. This blog originally appeared in a longer form, which can be retrieved on www.breggin.com under Breggin Blog.
Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private
practice in Ithaca, New York. He is the
author of many scientific articles and books including Medication Madness:
The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime. Learn about Dr. Breggin's new organization
at www.empathictherapy.org or
visit his professional website at www.breggin.com. He can be emailed at psychiatricdrugsfacts@hotmail.com
or phoned at 607-272 5328.
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PeterBreggin, MD |
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