Here is Breggin's Empathy Therapy Center.
Almost all emotional problems are about relationships--most commonly romantic, marital, and family relationships. Emotional healing from injuries and mistakes involves early relationships. It's about love. It's about the worst disasters where a child does not experience love for one reason or another. Doesn't connect with the family for one reason or another.
EMOTIONAL HEALING INVOLVES:
Recovery from injuries and mistakes involving early relationships from childhood to the present.
Future progress depends on learning and practicing how to have responsible, rational, and loving relationships in every aspect of our lives.
Caring, supportive, and loving relationships, whether professional or not, are the key to emotional recovery of all kinds.
If a person is psychotic, they need love totally, pure, as best as you can deliver within the bounds, ethics, and restraints of therapy.
PSYCHOSIS: ITS ROOTS & HEALING
Psychosis is a withdrawal from human relationships out of trauma, shame, distrust, and other negative experiences. Return to reality is facilitated by relationships that are non-coercive, shame-free, trustworthy, caring or loving, and hopefully bolstered by experience and wisdom.
I have patients who are extremely involved in psychosis.
And they often go back to early childhood. People get psychotic because they don't trust anybody anymore. They've separated themselves from other people. PTSD is normal. Everybody gets it. Everybody. Even if they're normal. You have to
Major attachments to the horrors is what you saw happened to your body. The trauma you felt that you decided to shoot the child or the woman in Iraq. It's guilt or shame. These cause trauma. They need love, not electrodes.
Breggin recommends 2 books:
1. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Robert Whitaker, 2010.
2. Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry, Peter R. Breggin, 1994.
Check out what a Soteria House is.
I Googled Open Dialogue. It's interesting. It sounds more ethical and productive than other forms of psychiatric treatment that Breggin has fought against, like drugs, electroshock treatments, isolation, lobotomies, etc.
Don't ever let someone tell you that lie that you have to be happy first before you can make other people happy. Other people make us happy! I was depressed until I was 45 years old when I met Ginger (referring to his wife, Ginger Breggin). I'm actually exaggerating, I was 48. Been with her 35 years. It took that woman to let me know what it really meant to relate to somebody. And I tell that to my patients. I say "What! You're young! You want to kill yourself? You think I should have when I was 12 and 13, 18, and 20? Should I have killed myself?"
"Oh, God, no, Peter. I love you."
I said I love you, too. And, Honey, I was worse than you are today." And it helps them. And then I tell them that "If they shoot themselves, it'll break my heart." And that does not make people feel guilty, not if you're smiling and loving when you say it. What they feel is loved. And I see a lot of suicidal people. I'm a bit of a doctor of last resort. You can imagine why.
Before Hitler came to power, psychiatry began to think about organizing for the extermination of all mental patients as useless eaters in the conversation in 1920 in a textbook by a psychiatrist and a lawyer. When Hitler came to power, perhaps he didn't know much about it, he certainly didn't give approval of it in any way. He did later. They organized a holocaust for mental patients. They invented the idea of central extermination camps, places you haven't heard of--Hadamar, Sonncenstein, Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernbcrg. And they set up crematoriums and they were open pits, and they gassed the patients who had wooden soap--all began with psychiatry--and in these fake showers and they pumped in gas, not that fancy stuff that the industry later developed. They used trucks to pipe in the gas. They killed at least 100,000 patients. And then one day Hitler, the only thing we know that he ever got booed for . . . he got booed at a truck stop, I think at Kaufbeuren, which was a state mental hospital. And the man who liberated the state mental hospital, even though Hitler had stopped the program, he stopped the program, and he shipped the euthanasia equipment into Poland and to the east. The first head of a camp was a psychiatrist. After that, they gave up the medical model. The first people killed were on euthanasia forms. And Hitler closed the program and the psychiatrist independently did in the state mental hospitals when they couldn't ship them to killing centers. And I got a phone call on a radio show from a young soldier who had liberated the camps and who sent me photos who liberated the state Hospital at the request of local citizens came to him in Bavaria and said they're still killing patients at the hospital, please. So he got his Army gun and he and his buddy went up and entered the hospital and the superintendent hung himself when they got there the Director, and there were crematoriums that were still working, the ovens. The ovens, they had ovens, they didn't have the pits anymore. A guy named, Lifton, I have no respect for, a psychiatrist who wrote a book called Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, 1998. They're not Nazi doctors. And in the book, Lifton, great Yale professor, praised the extermination camps for one thing: they did real good experiments on the usefulness of electroshock treatment. So psychiatry is so evil that it thinks it's doing better. It thinks that poisoning people is nothing compared to lobotomies. And yet they still promote shock. The FDA is promoting shock. I've been the only active person opposing electroshock. No other psychiatrist takes these stances because you'll be out of the profession.
