Laura Delano
speaker
735 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Laura Delano’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Laura, thank you for coming on Culture Apothecary.
Thanks for having me, Alex.
So good to be here.
Thanks, Dr. Drew. It's great to be here.
so i was an intense sensitive um big feeling kid and at age 13 ended up having um what i now see was a profound kind of crisis of self where i realized you know i don't I really know who I am. I'm just performing these roles in school. And I had this total collapse internally where I just, I felt convinced that I didn't have, I didn't know who I was and I didn't have an authentic sense of self.
And so that eventually led me to begin.
Yeah, seriously.
Yes.
But you see, Dr. Drew, this happened at a very opportune moment in the history of adolescent psychiatry. This was in the mid-90s. So you probably recall there was this huge push at the time to take angry, irritable, despairing kids and give them a bipolar diagnosis. And so that's what happened to me at age 14. Mm-hmm.
And so what, you know, was in retrospect, I see a very typical, if intense version of adolescence. You know, I was cutting myself and I eventually was talking about and thinking about death. And, you know, I was an extreme teenager. I needed help and my parents were overwhelmed. So I ended up getting this diagnosis within an hour of meeting a psychiatrist who I'd never spoken to before.
I just poured out all my pain to her and she concluded I had this incurable mental illness called bipolar disorder and that began what was a nearly decade and a half relationship with the mental health industry. And with each passing year that I invested more and more deeply in this idea that I was sick and that my difficulties were all symptoms of this illness.
And two meds became three, three became four, four became five. My life just began to fall more and more apart. And every step of the way, my parents and I were being told that my illness was just progressing. And eventually I reached the point where
I was declared treatment resistant because I was basically the story, you know, was I was just so sick that even all these, this great treatment and all these great hospitals, because I was going to the top doctors at the top institutions in New England, you know, even all of that wasn't able to help me.
And so that story of treatment resistance led me to... Let me ask a really challenging question.
It's such a good point. And I often say, I do think socioeconomics is a huge piece of the puzzle here when it comes to struggles just generally and when it comes to the power that the American mental health industry has over our society today. And because I had access to the best of the best, I was going to McLean Hospital, New York Presbyterian. I was seeing Harvard Medical School.
professors for consultations, we believed all the more deeply in everything we were being told because who would we be to question these leading experts? And so at the same time, we went so deep in because I think of this faith we had in all of these top doctors. But when I did eventually kind of have my awakening, you could say, and I realized that
this story of incurable mental illness needing lifelong treatment is just a story and it's actually one that's not based in much scientific evidence. And I eventually decided to come off all of these.
Totally. And I had no idea that the average length of a psychiatric drug trial was six to eight weeks when I was started on these drugs. And I also had no idea that there's zero evidence base for polypharmacy. These drugs have never been, you know, the safety and efficacy of these drugs have never been studied in combination with one another. And yet...
There I was on multiple psychiatric drugs for well over a decade. And I just assumed, I just took for granted, if my doctors are prescribing me this, this way, there must be an evidence base for it. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. And of course, you know, I eventually learned the hard way that's not true.
I completely agree. And in many ways, I feel for the tough position that we've put psychiatrists in over these past 30 decades that the psychopharmaceutical revolution has taken hold. The more prominence these drugs have come to play in... the treatment of struggling people, the, you know, the smaller the toolbox that psychiatrists have at their disposal.
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