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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Appearances
And there was a whole kerfuffle with me and my psychiatrist and security guards were called and I was escorted over to the ward and given the so-called choice of going voluntarily or involuntarily. That was the first thing in me that just What is this? Like, I had known intellectually for years that people were forcibly hospitalized all the time. I had watched it happen.
But I had never imagined that I would be that person. And when it actually happened to me, it forced me up against this idea. previously unquestioning faith I had had and all of these well-meaning mental health professionals to take care of me. And I realized they also have control over me. I've given them this power over me. So that was the first of a few experiences with force and coercion.
And then what really was my big turning point was actually finding a book that was the equivalent of, you know, a supportive person. For me, it was a book by a journalist named Robert Whitaker.
The book is called Anatomy of an Epidemic, and it looks at the long-term evidence base for psychiatric drugs and makes a compelling case that if you actually look at outcomes, they're much poorer in people who stay on these drugs long-term. And that was... what really jolted me awake. And there I was on five drugs and my life had fallen apart over the previous decade.
I was a total, I was totally dependent on my family, totally disabled, couldn't work, had no friends, was just in crisis after crisis. And that book is what helped me step back and say like, what if it's not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it's the treatment? And that set me on the path that I've been on ever since. Yeah.
Well, maybe I could quickly kind of walk your listeners through how I got myself off of these drugs and which led me to the work that I do. And just to set the stage out the gates, the issue of tapering off of psychiatric drugs is a hugely important one. And I think right now, especially as more and more people in our current cultural climate are beginning to step back and question
their relationship to pharmaceuticals. By my account, there's somewhere between 65 and 70 million Americans on psychiatric drugs. So the issue we have here is that Getting on these drugs is very easy, but getting off them can be very hard.
And there are very few visible places where you can turn in our society and certainly within the mental health system itself to actually get good, safe, reliable information about how to taper off these drugs. And so when I decided in 2010, in my late 20s,
to come off the five meds I was on, I had no idea that because I'd been on these drugs for so long, my central nervous system was completely dependent on them. No one had told me that. It had never occurred to me to educate myself. And so I also didn't know, therefore, that stopping these drugs too quickly
would cause debilitating withdrawal symptoms so i came off five drugs way too fast in about half a year which is basically cold turkey and had a brutal time spent the first year you know it was a big success if i took a shower i was just i was just a mess and i would say the first few years off the drugs, you know, it, it really took that long.
It took years for my, my body to recover from what I call pharmaceutical trauma, because these are potent psychoactive chemicals. And when, when, you know, they've been altering your body for decades, many, many years, it takes a lot to heal from them. So I just want to say that out the gates that it's a really serious decision to make.
It's dangerous to start a psychiatric drug and it's dangerous to come off one. And what I ended up discovering a few months, year, a year in was that the people who knew the most about how to safely taper off of these drugs were not actually doctors. They were lay people. They were people who had to have had to figure it out for themselves because they had no support
from the mental health system itself. And so I began to connect with other people who were trying to come off these drugs. I was writing online about my experiences leaving behind the mental health system. And so people were finding me through my blog. And I just, I realized that my story is a much bigger story. What happened to me is not unique to me.
This is happening at scale to so many people around the world who start psych meds for all kinds of reasons and And then years later, when they want to come off of them, have a hell of a time. And so I eventually started a nonprofit organization called Intercompass Initiative that now my husband Cooper runs. And our mission is we're not anti-medication. We're not anti-psychiatry.
We're about helping people get good information about the drugs that they take and about how to safely taper off of them. And I think to me, the most important part of what we do is around helping people understand kind of take back the power and the ability to help themselves and one another in a mutual aid capacity.
Because I know for me, as someone who grew up in the mental health system, I believed for so many years that the only kind of valid help there was came from a professional. And there are some great therapists out there. Some of my closest friends are psychiatrists. I'm not bashing them, but they've Professionalized help has such a monopoly in our culture.
And I think a lot of us have realized that going through difficulties yourself, taking these drugs yourself and coming off of them actually gives you a different kind of expertise that can be really helpful to other people. So much of what we do is about helping people help each other.
Yeah, Moniz won a Nobel Prize.
Yeah, and I think one important point to make here is that because people are often brought off way too fast without realizing it, and the doctors don't realize they're tapering people too fast either, when people have a hard time after they've come off, they get told, oh, you're having a relapse of your illness because, oh, we tapered you slowly. We tapered you over a few months. Yeah.
A few months is actually very fast. And so people will end up staying on these drugs long-term because every time they think they're coming off slowly, they feel horrible. And then everyone tells them, see, this is why you need to be on them. And that's where public education is so important.
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