Psychiatrist Attacks Prozac, Ritalin

Calling the field of psychiatry "fundamentally flawed," psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin '58 decried the affects of popularly perscribed psychiatric drugs like Prozac and Ritalin last night in a speech to about 60 spectators at the Science Center.

Breggin's address was sponsored by the Harvard Student Pugwash group, an offshoot of the international Pugwash organization, which promotes the study of the ethics of science and technology.

The much-criticized author of Talking Back to Prozac and Talking Back to Ritalin, Breggin, who was a Crimson editor, said his interest in psychiatry stemmed from participating in and directing a Phillips Brooks House program which sent 200 volunteers to a local psychiatric hospital when he was a Harvard undergraduate. Working with the patients, he was appalled by the way they were treated.

"It was a horrendous situation," Breggin said. "I was not prepared for the myths I was told. The mythology was that it wasn't bad to do terrible things to these people."

From there, Breggin said he studied to become a doctor and psychiatrist. However, he said, the profession took a serious downturn in the 1960s.

"By the late '60s, the profession of psychiatry was economically on the rocks," he said. "Only by taking money from the drug companies could it survive."

By accepting money from large drug companies, Breggin said, the American Psychiatric Association took part in an unhealthy partnership that biased them to use often poorly-tested and unnecessary drugs.

Breggin mentioned the tremendous popularity of Prozac and Ritalin as an example of this trend and said that any criticism of the drugs has been very quiet.

In an example, Breggin cited the first product liability case against pharmaceutical company Eli Lily, which produces Prozac, in which Prozac was blamed for a murder-suicide tragedy in Kentucky. Breggin said that although the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Eli Lily had rigged the trial, the case received little media coverage.

"Eli Lily has gotten the newspapers to stop covering it, and it has got the courts bamboozled," Breggin said.

In fact, Breggin said, documents revealed Eli Lily found an increase in suicides among participants in its clinical trials of Prozac.

He said the drug is currently popular because it acts much like a stimulant to energize depressed people with "very amphetamine, cocaine-like effects."

Breggin was equally critical of Ritalin, a drug often used to treat children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). He said the effects of the addictive drug essentially take away young people's personalities.

"Addicts of Ritalin will sit around...doing stupid tasks that require no initiative and have no novelty," Breggin said. "Children become more complaint. They'll sit down and do these stupid things, so long as we drug them."

Breggin further cited a study that showed a shrinkage of the brain in adults who used Ritalin as children. He said he was frustrated that no one seemed to care about the negative effects.

"That's an incredible thing to inflict on 3 or 4 million children," Breggin said. "We live in a nation that handles its kids by drugging them. I think it is this century's child abuse."

Overall, Breggin said the use of such drugs by psychiatric patients is akin to treating them worse than inanimate objects.

"Are we really just junky machines to have crap poured into them?" he asked. "Something happened that we treat our children worse than machines."

Though the majority of the audience was very receptive to Breggin, three members of the audience challenged Breggin's unconventional ideas.

He acknowledged that very few people within the profession agree with his line of thinking, and cited an instance where several doctors attempted, unsuccessfully, to revoke his license.

"If you criticize from within the profession, the profession assaults you," he said.

Student organizers in Pugwash said presenting a diverse viewpoint, like that of Breggin, is valuable.

"Dr. Breggin represents a side that is not often heard in a university system," said Gaurav A. Upadhyay '00.

"I think it is pretty important that people are getting the right mental treatment," said Erin R. Clifford '01. "This is a good place to raise those kind of issues and get a good forum of discussing what we should be putting in peoples' bodies."