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
And then they think, oh, wow, my med really helps me because I would feel so much worse if I wasn't on it.
At 13, I was sent to a therapist.
The therapist eventually sent me to a psychiatrist.
At 14, I saw my first MD, my first psychiatrist.
And in one session, first appointment with her, after I poured out my heart and just how angry I was and I was cutting myself and I was thinking about death and I was acting out at home and...
I was, you know, my thoughts wouldn't stop, you know, spinning around in my head about how meaningless life was.
She said to me, you know, this all sounds like something called bipolar disorder, and it's an incurable illness that can be managed with meds.
She didn't look in my brain.
She didn't conduct any tests whatsoever.
She didn't, you know, scan anything, nor did it occur to me as a 14-year-old girl to ask her, like, how do you know?
I just took this in and heard, you know, yeah, your brain's defective and will be for the rest of your life.
And it profoundly impacted my sense of self and really began what ended up becoming this decade-and-a-half odyssey through the mental health system that I talk about in my book on Shrunk.
And thank God I eventually found my way out of it because a lot of people don't.
I have many, many friends who feel stuck or who aren't even here anymore because they gave up hope and trying to get off these meds that they were on for years.
Yeah, I mean, it's a similar playbook to the opiate crisis that we are still, you know, reckoning with as a country.
I think we've been taught to view these drugs as, you know...
benevolent, gentle tools that really have limited trade-offs.
You know, maybe some headaches, maybe some digestive issues, but they should wear off in a few weeks.
And in reality, these are psychoactive chemicals that our brains become dependent on.
And so I don't think it's necessarily a nefarious... I don't think there have been nefarious motives here, at least among the doctors themselves.
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