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
Well, I think, I mean, when I look at my own experience, I see that all the struggles I was going through were actually very meaningful responses to what was happening in my life, around me, in the culture of the town I grew up in. When I eventually came to believe that my struggles were symptoms of an illness, I cut off the ability for my suffering to mean anything else.
I stripped it of context. I depoliticized it. I basically came to see it as these meaningless symptoms of faulty pathology. And so when you think about how many people are... engaged with the mental health system today in our society, again, just people on psychiatric drugs alone, it's almost one in four adults and something like one in 10 kids.
And you think about how many of them are also like me, believing that their struggles are symptoms of an illness instead of responses to their lives. Maybe it's related to nutrition and diet. Maybe it's related to bad things that have happened to you. Maybe it's related to bullying or a meaningless job or loss of social connections. There's so many reasons why people have
challenges, sometimes they're biological in nature, thyroid issues. And, you know, of course, there can be real biological factors. But I think because our culture is so medicalized in how we think about struggles, we we end up not only perpetuating the suffering because we're all convinced that we can't really do anything about it because it's just faulty pathology.
But we also end up disempowering ourselves from actually changing our world. I think if you look at COVID, for example, and how many people ended up on any anxiety drugs and antidepressants, that anxiety and despair was actually a really healthy response to have given to what was going on. And yet people ended up coming away from that thinking they were sick.
So I think the consequences are significant and we have to step back and say, is this really the best way to make sense of our struggles? Or are there other more humanizing ways and contextualizing ways to think about it?
Hear, hear.
here, here, especially for our young people. And growing up in therapy, I think for a lot of us, certainly for me, taught me to focus a lot on myself and a lot on whatever emotion I happen to be feeling that day and kind of prioritizing it over everything else. And I think you're seeing the effects of that in our culture too, where young people feel
feel a strong emotion and then see their, see the world around them only through that emotion. And, and, you know, and, and there's a lot of kind of that itself can be quite immobilizing. And I think, you know, for me taking back my power and realizing I have to take responsibility here. for, you know, what I do with how I feel.
I think more young people are actually, you know, waking up from this, like, therapeuticized way they've grown up and realizing, like, you know, I don't know if I want to keep doing this anymore.
And I want to actually kind of step back into the driver's seat of my life and take responsibility for myself and not just, you know, be angry all the time at everyone and, and, you know, demand change just so I can feel better because life is hard. Life is really hard. And, and, uh, exactly.
Well, please come visit me at lauradelano.com. Our nonprofit inner compass initiative is theinnercompass.org. We have a free self-directed tapering manual. We have a community there. We have tons of information and find me on my socials. You can get all of that on my website and please read on trunk and let me know what you think of it.
I hope so too. Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
I don't.
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