159: The Hidden Dangers of Psychiatry & Medications (And What to Do Instead) | Laura Delano

What really culminated my psychiatric career was being told you have treatment resistant mental illness. Now I'm being told the treatment isn't going to be able to help me because I'm just so defective. That broke me and left me concluding that my only option was to kill myself, which I had tried to do. I ended up having an experience with a psychiatrist who caught wind that I was maybe a little suicidal. He wouldn't let me leave. Things escalated. Security guards were called. I realized this system that I have been turning to for all these years as a source of comfort and solace and care is actually a system of control. The fact that more people than ever before are on psychiatric drugs at the same time as more people than ever before are suffering, struggling and killing themselves and unable to function in their lives. It's time to talk about that. The doors are open to my 2026 live Audacious Embodiment event in Miami, May 15th through 17th. And I'm calling all of my ladies who are ready to stop pretending, performing, curating and managing a rigid identity. This weekend, we will be focusing on four Ps because I love alliteration. Pattern Disrupt. We are going to lay fresh snow on your mountain so that you can ski new tracks because experiences that take you out of your routine and stimulate all of the right conditions allow you to shift your identity even after one weekend. The next P is permission field, because when you know what's possible, when you are modeled and templated a new breadth of experience for yourself as a woman, you get to be more of yourself. And here's the thing. When you're attending a retreat or a training, you need to choose a space holder who has owned more of his or her shit than you have, because they can expand that permission field for you. And if you ask any of my friends or my family, they will tell you that I have done my share of pivots and am pretty practiced at being bad and wrong so that I can facilitate this expansion of your permission field in the space of just a few days, maybe even just a few minutes. The next P is pleasure because it deserves to sit in the proper place in the hierarchy of your priorities as an everyday experience. I also am very focused on creating the conditions for the pleasure that we experience as women together. It is so healing and so powerful. The last P is polarity because your girl just came off of a David Data teacher training. I have many nuggets to share and I have a very particular perspective on what it is to be a woman in her feminine power. And no, it is not rose petal baths and rage catharsis in groups on retreat. OK, the second edition of Audacious Embodiment Live will feature more practice time with yours truly by request of the previous audience members. and also, of course, daily dance, sensual movement, and transformational practices that will expand your experience of your own body as a woman and create the conditions for more aliveness in your daily life and a total rebrand on who you get to be as a woman in this world. I cannot wait to squeeze you in Miami this May. The link is in show notes and also at kellybroganmd.com forward slash AE. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan. And today I sit down with Laura Delano, who is what I would call a grassroots advocate. She is the founder of the Inner Compass Initiative and the author of the recent book, Unshrunk, a story of psychiatric treatment resistance. If you have been through my program, Vital Mind Reset, you know that there's a conversation with Laura and that Intercompass Initiative is my primary referral for tapering support. I've known Laura for many, many years. We go way back to my Northeastern days and witnessing her trajectory and the way that she shows up with grace and softness to this extremely controversial movement is inspirational to me. So we get into many topics. I hope that this discussion will be a resource that you can share with others who understand mental illness to be a pathology that is valid, who imagine that there are people who need to be medicated and who might not otherwise believe that it's possible to move beyond diagnosis, labeling and polypharmacy. So we get into lots of stuff, including borderline personality disorder and why it is considered one of the worst labels that you can find yourself accumulating. We talk about the secondary gain, the benefits of patienthood and what she was getting out of being a patient. We talk about the truth around treatment-resistant diagnoses. So in her case, treatment-resistant bipolar disorder, what that actually means. We talk about the ingredients to a successful tapering withdrawal and recovery from psychiatrization, as she calls it. And we talk about what changed for her. Specifically, what was the linchpin that changed from her experiencing herself as a mental patient with a broken brain to somebody who now has a grand purpose in the world, who is a mother, a wife, and an embodied human having her specific human experience. So I hope that this conversation will be catalytic, will be exactly what you need to expand your intuitive sense that there's more to the story about so-called mental illness and so-called treatment options than we've been told. Welcome, Laura, to the show. Oh, it's so good to be here, Kelly. So I was talking to a newish girlfriend, and this was, I don't know, literally a few days ago. and I've had the pleasure in the past, probably since I moved to Miami, but in the past, I would say like five to eight years of developing a lot of friendships with people who literally have no idea what I do, quote unquote, right, or what I have identified with in terms of my professional life or intellectual life or whatever. So it's often the case that it just doesn't come up, you know, what my perspectives are on the pharmaceutical industry or health and medicine or, you know, name a topic. So she, in an offhanded way, telling a story about something else. She mentions, you know, well, there are just some women who probably need to be on medication for serious illnesses, like, I don't know, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. And she's otherwise, like we're both big German New Medicine fans, like she's otherwise very aligned. So it's not like that was coming out of an allopathic mindset. And I said to her, I said, listen, I don't know what you want to know about this. And you may be like, I'm unsubscribed from your pedagogy, Kelly. And I left her message and I just said, if you're interested, I do have a lot to say on the subject. And something about that sentence, it still gets me. Something about that sentence, after many years of transforming my own identity as a former angry activist, I still can take the bait of saying like, there's things I know you need to know and let me tell you. And anyway, I thought of you and I thought I'm so grateful that I get to have this conversation with Laura in a few days because this feels like the way I want to talk about this subject. And I don't even really know what that It means other than that, your heroine's journey, the meaning of your narrative and the way I experience your voice, your contribution. And your conviction as non-ideological, and it may be, but I experience it, you know, as very human. I don't know how else to put it. I felt like this was this was perfect. So I probably will send this podcast on to her as an introduction, if nothing else, to a very different perspective on so-called mental illness and the trajectory that a woman can take or a person can take. But obviously, that's been my focus beyond these labels, beyond dependency on said medications and into her her dharmic path, into her journey, into her raison d'etre, however you want to say it. So I want to start kind of in the deep end. And of course, at this point, everybody already knows that you've put a book, book baby out into the world, Unshrunk. And I want to know why you did it. Because you and I go way back. And there were many opportunities that you probably had to put all sorts of material that you developed expertise in out there. that there's some reason that you wrote this tome and that you did it in the way that you did it and that you put it out when you did. So I'd love to just start with that almost probably existential question of why did you put this book out there? Well, I knew for myself, I had to take my story back from the mental health industry and from all those years of, you know, turning over my right to make sense of my own experiences to all these very well-meaning doctors and therapists and all of it. And so I knew, you know, it was about a lot more than just coming off of all the meds that I was on and rejecting the diagnoses. I had to actually, you know, if it wasn't this long so-called illness, you know, what happened back there? And so for myself, I had to write that story to make sense of it on my own terms, in my own way, on my own timeline. But I think more broadly, I wrote it because to me, storytelling is the most powerful vehicle for catalyzing curiosity and sometimes full on aha moments. and egg is in my own experience. It was reading those stories that Robert Whitaker told in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, that I saw myself in them. And I realized, holy cow, what if it's not so-called treatment-resistant mental illness? That's why my life has fallen apart. What if it's the so-called treatment? And so I wanted to take my own personal story and basically write the roadmap of how I got sucked into the whole thing, how I woke up, how I got myself out, so that if there were others out there, and there have been others, and I've heard from so many people all over the world who have seen themselves and what happened to me, to give them the chance to have that moment of recognition, of realizing, wow, what if Laura's story is my story too? And I think lastly, I wrote the book because I wanted to spark conversation, including difficult conversations, perhaps especially difficult conversations in our culture about the fact that more people than ever before are on psychiatric drugs at the same time as more people than ever before are suffering and struggling and killing themselves and unable to function in their lives. It's time to talk about that. And I wanted my book to help catalyze that. So I want to talk about these bigger picture questions because the nature of these difficult conversations, I think, is sort of symbolic of where we're at with our consciousness as a collective, right? With our maturation beyond victim consciousness and the attachment that many of us have to our helplessness, our dependency, our powerlessness, right? So these bigger picture questions are, it's so exciting to be able to talk to somebody who's of such like mind about this and who's come through a very different channel. Obviously, we were on opposite sides of the desk, the locked door, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. The locked door, yeah. But of course, first, since you have taken the approach of coming through your story to deliver a message, I want to talk a little bit, obviously, the breadth and the depth are in this book. That's the whole point. But I want to talk a little bit about how you are conceiving of your narrative now, what your story actually was like, and then move on to these bigger takeaways that feel important to you, important to me. You know, we share this touchstone of Whitaker's work. And I want to also showcase that in case anybody hasn't heard of it through me or you. And yeah, so maybe you can take us back because you are, you know, I have teenage daughters now. And I think about what it would be like in this sort of nascent stage of identity formation. what it would be like if they were sold the story that something is wrong with them, right? And if they allowed that story to seed this fertile soil from attachment issues maybe they had on my account when they were little, you know, and just watching that grow over their adolescence into their early 20s. And that is a big part of your maturational trajectory that you got young, right? And it's extraordinary to me to witness you as this poised, eloquent woman who has such command of the story now. And it gives me this feeling in my heart of like, wow, I live for these transformation experiences. You know, I just find it so exhilarating, so enlivening and so like hopeful in the least childlike way. Right. Like, like truly, like there there are possibilities that you might not otherwise imagine exist unless you hear somebody like you talk. So so take us back, you know, best you can in this short format to the origins of your interaction with the with the system. I was a 13 year old girl that grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. So for anyone not familiar with the stereotype, it's, you know, Stepford wives, basically. And so I was there. I was surrounded by all these people who on the surface looked like they had it together, so to speak. And I and I myself had it together because I happened to be a good student and a good athlete. And so, you know, in the performance game, I was winning. I had good grades, accomplished squash player, yada, yada, yada. And I, you know, moved relatively smoothly along in that way. Always an intense kid and a sensitive kid, for sure. You know, the kind of sensitive kid who would cry if I stepped on an insect by mistake. You know, that kind of sensitivity. but you know i was succeeding quote unquote and then i had this profound experience with a mirror when i lost touch with myself looking in my visage and had this wild out of body you know in retrospect i think psychedelic experience where i just i realized i had i had no self and at the time that realization terrified me i obviously have a different perspective on that all these years later. And I couldn't, because I didn't have any visible frameworks or frames of reference to make sense of what it meant that I realized I didn't have a real self. I ended up just interpreting that to the best of my 13-year-old abilities and concluded I was just like a robot, basically programmed to perform well by all these adults around me. And that left me feeling despairing and powerless and angry. Anger is a driving theme in my life and certainly in my story of psychiatrization. So I began acting out, cutting myself, yelling and scaring my parents while keeping it together at school. So I had this compartmentalized, to the outside world, I still was put together. But at my home, I was a maniac, basically. And my parents, God bless them, got overwhelmed by their own fears and of the darkness that was coming out of me. And they sent me to a therapist. And that began this eventually 14-year relationship to the mental health industry. And such a relatable conflation of care with intervention and treatment. And you and I know that it is the very rare therapist who can hold the boundary between warmth and availability and a present witness and the pathologizing of human behavior and just shuttling somebody off. Even out of the best intentions, of course, it's a theme that will probably come up many times. There is this notion that there's a responsibility that caretakers have to grant access to treatment. So therapy was the gateway to the system. Okay. Yeah. And I love, I say the same thing all the time too, this conflating of care with treatment that at the time, and this was the mid nineties. So I was the beginning wave of really the epidemic of labeling and medicating kids. It was just taking off then. And so all and so, you know, anti-sigma mental health awareness campaigns, all of these drug company funded efforts to normalize medicalized discourse hadn't yet really happened either. So my parents just saw nothing on offer to them but a mental health professional and and they saw no one else, no other parents talking about the struggles of their kids. I saw no other kids talking about their own struggles. So it just, I completely understand why they made that decision and why so many parents do and the landscape around you of, of, of so-called help is completely barren with the exception of a clinician's office. Of course you're going to end up going there because you're terrified and you love your kid and you don want them to die And and so you know I think I think that more ubiquitous than ever before this decision that parents make But it was just beginning back then in the 90s. I was like the very beginnings of this. And so tell us how you started to collect labels and diagnoses and associated medications and what may be at the peak of your, I don't know if we want to call it institutionalization, it looks like. Yeah. Yeah, so the first label was bipolar disorder. And I was 14 by then. That therapist ended up referring me to a psychiatrist. And because I was too serious of a case, she thought I needed more help. And that psychiatrist in one session, after meeting with me for one hour, said, you know, my anger and my irritability were symptoms of mania. And my self-injury and despair and whatnot were depression. And, you know, Laura, you have this lifelong and curable illness called bipolar. But don't worry, there are medications for that. So so bipolar was the first label, which I rejected for a while and through high school. I knew it was BS. And I don't think my parents were really invested in it either. And I went away to boarding school. And so luckily, I kind of slipped through the cracks of accumulating diagnoses then and the so-called meds. And when I got to Harvard as a freshman and really spun out and was just not sleeping and doing tons of drugs and completely like a basket case and doing all kinds of really crazy, dangerous, impulsive things, I just got so overwhelmed with my pain that I just I couldn't stop thinking about that original diagnosis. And I concluded I must be that. So I then embraced it and embraced the drugs and two meds within a year. had become like three or four. And so the labels that then quickly accumulated after that were, you know, social anxiety disorder. Not too long after being put on a bunch of psych meds, I ended up getting a binge eating disorder diagnosis because I was binge eating a lot. Substance use disorder because of eventually being on all these meds and feeling increasingly more hopeless and despairing and dysfunctional in my life led me to get drunk every night because at least I didn't care what a mess my life was. So I got substance use disorder. And I did early on without being told this and later on was officially told that I was also borderline. The most incurable of all pathologies. Indeed. And those of us women labeled borderline are, you know, the way I experienced that diagnosis, even with all of the institutionalization and internalized, you know, medicalization that I, you know, had at that point, even then I still felt so offended by this. But what was brilliant was that the psychiatrist who gave me who officially gave me that label at his borderline center, you know, the way it was, I somehow knew that if I showed hurt about being given this diagnosis, it would just further reinforce how borderline I was. So I pretended that I didn't care and I pretended to be fine with it. And I looked at all these women around me who had totally taken on that identity and were actually even proud of it. I was proud of my other labels by then, but the borderline label I never felt proud of. Well, it's such a relational get out of jail free card, right? Because any diagnosis allows you to abdicate. That's kind of the whole point to abdicate responsibility and triangulate against your own behavior, cognition, mood, whatever it might be. But borderline is so relational in its nature, right? It's considered probably the least biologically founded and clarified, validated diagnosis. And it's really just about these relational patterns. And I often talk about because a lot of what I talk to women about and work on in my own life is the resolution of the push-pull energy that we have relationally with money, with our businesses, with our spouses, with our kids, right? Where there's like one hand saying no and one hand beckoning, right? And I remember and often reference this that an attending when I was one of the units where we involuntarily hospitalized, a lot of so-called borderlines. He said, you know, you'll always see the fuck you don't leave me energy. And so this became almost a way to dismiss, dehumanize any interactions that you have with like this volatile woman who probably feels entitled to the volatility and then takes no responsibility for it. It's a sort of like perfect storm. And now, of course, I think, well, the fuck you don't leave me is endemic to every single push-pull relationship that we experience, it's a part of the trauma signature that imprints our relational capacity. It's so common. So to think of that as being crystallized as an identity, I'm so disabling. It's not unlike the way that we colloquially use narcissistic as an adjective. I think it's probably equally problematic except in the men's camp. But regardless, so you collected some of the worst of the worst. And were you compliant with your medication? What was the experience of being medicated like for you? From that first year of college on, I was a very good compliant patient. And I basically took all of my perfectionistic, overachieving, people-pleasing tendencies that I'd grown up with and had done me well in the performance game. And I just applied them to the performance of patienthood. And so, yeah, I took my meds as prescribed. I tracked my symptoms. I kept my doctor updated and we would tweak my meds if my symptoms seemed to be worse. And in retrospect, I see that because of that, because that original crisis of so-called self was never resolved, of course. I was just so hungry for a sense of purpose and meaning and belonging. And then here is this entire kind of world presented to me of patienthood where you have endless opportunities to do good and to work hard on yourself and to build these ongoing relationships with all these really smart, well-educated people who are paying so much attention to you and they're investing all this time and care, thinking through your case. It became the organizing principle of my life was being this patient. And of course, the more I did that, the smaller my life around me became. And with each passing year, the more compliant I was, the more dysfunctional my life became and the more meds I was on and the more all of it. And what really culminated my psychiatric career was being told in my mid-20s, when I'd been at this for almost a decade by then, in a compliant way, Laura, you're getting all this great care from all these top doctors, Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals and all of it. And yet, you know, here you are getting worse and worse and worse. Like, unfortunately, your bipolar disorder is treatment resistant. You have treatment resistant mental illness. And to be told that when I had spent all of these years of my life so committed to doing treatment well, with the desperate hope that if I keep doing this, one day I'll feel okay. I hope. It's what everyone's telling me. And now I'm being told the treatment isn't going to be able to help me because I'm just so defective. That broke me and left me concluding that my only option was to kill myself, which I had tried to do. And that experience was not my awakening, but it was really, I think it was certainly the depths of where being a good patient brought me. And of course, no one saw that. No one understood that at the time. It was all just poor Laura. She's just so unlucky to have this extra serious brain disease. And yeah, it took me two more years after the suicide to actually begin to wake up from it all. So you're referencing indirectly Whitaker's work, right, which you mentioned earlier. And just my one line summary is always that he's an investigative journalist who exposed non-industry funded data that proves, I would say I was about to say suggest, but I don't even think that's the appropriate verb, that medication is responsible and treatment itself across diagnoses. So from antidepressants to benzodiazepines to so-called antipsychotics, you name it, is responsible for recidivism and these poor outcomes that we have, especially long term. In folks who are treated for so-called mental illness, right? So we had this hypothesis that says, like, if people are taking their meds, you know, more than ever, like you said, shouldn't we have less than ever disability, mental health disability? And of course, they're not inversely correlated. So what's actually going on? And he was one of the first, I think, to pretty solidly showcase iatrogenesis as the driver, right? So doctor-induced harm, that the treatment itself is making people sicker and more disabled than they ever would be otherwise. So, you know, when my friend, you know, sort of parrots this trope that says, well, of course, there are some people who need to be on medication. The assumption is that the medications are effective in their, you know, intended outcome. And when that's not true, of course, then we get to look at the so-called side effects that are, of course, just other effects. So when you're saying that you were labeled treatment resistant, I'm guessing now you look back and say, well, that's actually just the trajectory of long-term medication compliance is actually more and more unmanageable symptoms, new symptoms, new constellations of symptoms. but you experienced that as a new identity that you didn't know how to strive within. So that efforting towards getting the A plus as a human and redeeming yourself through validation by this system that had hexed you, it was taken away in that one conversation. And you decided to try to press the reset button. Yep. In the most fundamental way possible. Yeah. And it's it's real this what you know, what you're saying is really making me think about how such a linchpin in all of this, this this whole the fact that your your friend said that the fact that that's like the go to thought that most people have when when they see someone in the midst of great struggle. You know, it speaks to how powerful this indoctrination, hexing, as you call it, which I love, how powerful it is that we have been so well trained to see people falling more and more apart as, you know, indicative of their pathology. that this, you know, it's not like people are, I think all of those people who saw me getting worse and worse truly in their hearts saw me as, yeah, just this tragedy of this, you know, this, it's no fault of my own. My poor brain is just so sick. And I think people have such a hard time because we have conflated care, love, help with medical treatment. People cannot see. They literally cannot see this realm that I now see when I look back at myself and I look at all these people who I talk to in my life of iatrogenic harm that is just pervasive. It's everywhere. And it's not just psychiatric drugs, of course. It is like we have a lens over our eyes that distorts our capacity to see it. And it's really hard. It's really, really hard to remove that lens. And I have found that there's no way to will yourself into that. For me and for so many other people, there's almost like a spontaneous insight, an aha moment, something that almost feels not of you that catalyzes the falling away of this lens. And once it falls away, you can't unsee it and you see the harm everywhere, but you can't force someone to see it when they're not ready. And that's the real conundrum. And that's part of why I wrote my book, because I do think oftentimes that aha moment comes from hearing your story and someone else's story. Yeah, absolutely. I have attempted to study this, what you call it, an aha moment, this this catalytic identity shift. And I have never been able to figure out what the ingredients are other than that. When you're ready to change your identity and all of the associated beliefs and habits and even emotions that attend it, moving in the direction of that suddenly feels like relief. So I love to track to the rupture of empathy with the system where you probably, over those two years, you were in a lived experience of this system may not actually have my best interests. They may not be pleasable. There might not be love that ever comes, despite all of my efforts from this system that I thought was here to save me. It's this like parentification of the system itself that I think is a part of how the system does what it does. I don't think that's unique to your experience. And what's potentially somewhat unique is the nature of your rupture. So what was it that catalyzed this identity shift? You called it waking up, where you could see the system with more sober eyes. You could see it. And maybe that's not the best way to describe it because most of us, of course, I had my own version of that rupture with the system, but most of us go through a pretty righteous, angry phase of then flipping right from the idealization to the vilification and neutrality comes like much later. So yeah, I'd love to hear about how you think about that now. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, perhaps something deep in me that I didn't, wasn't necessarily like aware of it in thought began with my overdose, but where I really see the beginning of this waking up was two years later. And what really catalyzed it was actually encountering for the first time in a direct way psychiatric force. And so, you know, as a patient and having been on psych wards and around patient culture for years by then, I had, of course, seen people be forcibly, you know, incarcerated against their will on psych wards. And I'd heard about people who'd been forcibly drugged, but it had never occurred to me that I might be one of those people because, of course, I was this compliant patient. And I ended up having an experience with a psychiatrist who caught wind that I was maybe a little suicidal, which was true. And I actually did want to go into the hospital, but I wanted to go home first to get my things because it's awful to go into the hospital when you don't have your own belongings and he wouldn't let me leave. Things escalated. Security guards were called and I was escorted over to this psych ward and given the so-called choice of going voluntarily or involuntarily. And something was dislodged in me in that experience. And I realized this system that I have been turning to for all these years as a source of comfort and solace and care and benevolence, all these people are so kind to me. And this is actually a system of control. I just hadn't seen it before because I had always said yes to it. And now I was saying no. And I wasn't even saying no. I actually did want to go inpatient. And I had a couple more experiences like that with being put on a drug I didn't want to take. Having the police called on me to do a wellness check, so-called wellness check when I slept through an appointment. And those experiences jolted me from that slumber, that faithful slumber I was in of just, this is all, whatever they tell me is good for me. And whatever they tell me I need, I need. Suddenly, I had been forced to step back and ask questions about that. And it was in that state of mind that I then found Anatomy of an Epidemic. And so it like sealed the deal because I was questioning this system and then was presented with this powerful book that wove, you know, data and research in through personal stories. And the rest is history, really, because, you know, once you see it, once you once those that lens falls away from your eyes, you can't put it on again, even if you wanted to, which, of course, I didn't. And anger was actually, I would, I like to say it was this, it was primarily curiosity more than anything else. But definitely the engine of anger was driving me as well, you know, because I realized I've been living my life thinking I have two options ahead of me, just treatment resistant mental illness or suicide. Like I truly believe those were my only options. And now I'm realizing there's another possibility and I don't know what that is, but it's something. And if there's a something, I have to give it a shot. I can always kill myself. That's how I thought. And the more I pursued that something, the more I felt anger and grief and, you know, the more the onion layers began to fall away. And I just and here I am 15 years later, still still very much, you know, in a process of unfolding, you could say. Aren't we all? Yeah. So you've probably heard about diversifying investments and saving for the future. But what about becoming your own bank and opting out of high interest loans and difficult decisions about whether to sell off an asset? As a single woman and a mother my whole system exhaled when I learned about the specific and unique whole life insurance policies that my now friends Josh and Ken offer So unlike crypto stocks and even gold you can borrow the money that you invest in this policy even days after you deposit it You can actually choose never to pay it back because it comes off of the death benefit, which is exponentially more than you put in over the years. And your policy keeps compounding and growing as if you didn't touch it. There's nothing else based on my research, not one other type of investment that allows for that. 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So again, it's juvent.com forward slash Kelly Brogan and the code is Kelly 300. You might have a sense that supporting your energetic and subtle body is important, but how exactly does one do that? Like short of scheduling regular sessions with an energy healer, how do you do that? Most of the time I find that when we take supplements, it's from the energy of fixing ourselves. And honestly, it's really no different than taking a medication at that point. That's why I love flower remedies and specifically my girl Katie Hess's elixirs from Lotus Way. The formulations that she creates are so nuanced that sometimes it feels like I wrote the descriptions myself. The last one I took was designed to dissolve go-go-go mentality as well as fatigue, weakness, apathy, and resistance to self-care. Relatable? Okay. I have a monthly membership called Flower Revolution where I get a new and super powerful on point remedy sent to me every month. And it blows my mind how resonant each one is with exactly where I am in my process. I think of this as a truly feminine investment that harmonizes my process and allows me to walk, talk and interact with grace. You can try it for a month or six at the link below. And if you just want to dip a toe in to learn more about how flowers heal, you can take their quiz. You know, I always find this so interesting when I speak to women who have been medicated, especially forcibly so, how difficult it must be to truly dislodge attribution of your challenging experiences like 15 years later to something that's kind of damaged or fucked up about you. Right. Because as somebody who has not experienced directly what you're experiencing, I saw this in my practice. I can relate probably with with pure and perfect empathy to every struggle that you have. right so are these just human struggles are they maturational arcs that we all move through maybe even archetypes that we inhabit and embody but once you have been again i like i do use that word once you've been hexed to to remove that from the energetics of your system is uh it's like a it's like a layer of challenge on top of the challenge of just being a human where there's not a part of you that says, well, maybe it's because I just have a, you know, I've had a difficult journey as somebody who's particularly, whatever, whatever you say about it. So I'd love to talk about your recovery, if we want to call it that process, from the system, from these labels, from the medications, and specifically why, I know your answer to this, but why you succeeded, right? Like, why can I hold you up as evidence that it's possible to move beyond these diagnoses? What do you think it was that you had access to that you had within you? Maybe you mentioned curiosity that was sort of like, which I relate to so much that I am, I'm a double Gemini, a very curious person. And I also had that righteousness, right? It was like the perfect blend of like a driver and also a kind of willingness to be wrong and be wrong and be wrong and be wrong, right? To learn. So I wonder what now you look back and you think like, I got out. Why? Like, what were the ingredients that you have that maybe not everybody has access to? And that doesn't mean that there are some folks who need to be in the system. It just means they didn't have those particular ingredients. It's a great question. Yeah. And I think there are layers to it. There's the very kind of material logistical layer of, you know, the fact that I was born into a family who could take care of me while I was coming off of these drugs, which I did incredibly fast because I didn't understand that my central nervous system had become physically dependent on them. And actually, just to pause on that point quickly, because I think it's part of the kind of collective hex that we're all under when it comes to psychiatric drugs. When your central nervous system is dependent on these drugs, which for many of us, this happens sometimes over weeks, but certainly months, years, if you're on these things, when you stop them fast, your body just doesn't bounce back. You have this state of disequilibrium. Or even flow. No, totally. I mean, that's quite like, what is slow? And slow is not usually what people think slow is. So when people come off these drugs, and they feel horrible, they think and they're told, you know, this is my baseline. This is me off meds. This is why I need meds, because I feel horrible when I don't take them. And then when they go back on and they feel better, they're like, oh, yeah, these meds are helping me not realizing that they're actually in withdrawal when they're stopping them. And when they're going back on them, their body's no longer in withdrawal. and the experience could look very different if much slower, which might even take for some people years. It's mystery about who needs that much time, who doesn't. So as I was coming off too fast, five drugs in about half a year, which is in my mind basically cold turkey, I could not take care of myself. I couldn't work. I couldn't function in any kind of basic way in the world around me, And I had a family who I could live with, who could help me buy food, who could, you know, who let me be the mess that I was for a long, long time. And I know, Laura, I just want to double click on this because I sometimes have said that, you know, when I moved to Miami, I started doing for a year before I ended my practice remote sessions. And there was one particular gal that I was working with who was one of my more challenging discontinuation cases in my career. And I sometimes thought, if anybody could see a video of this woman who was a former professional, high-functioning woman who was taken down by 30 years of an SSRI and the effort to discontinue it to the point where she was like a feral animal. I mean, couldn't cut her nails, couldn't shower, lashing out, like nonverbal for months. I mean, thankfully, you know, she's another success story. And this is probably like a two-year process, maybe more, maybe three. What do you mean by you couldn't work, right? Because were you just tired, you know, needed a break? Like, what does that mean? because I don't know how to otherwise convey what medication discontinuation related disability looks like and why it means that when you do not have a family, loved ones to literally take care of you, to provide for you, then the odds of your ending up back into, it's like a Stockholm situation, back into the system and seeing the system as a savior are very high. So what do you mean you couldn't function yeah i mean i'm i'm lucky in that the i mean i definitely had many feral moments but i was for me it was much more to my some of my family members you know it didn't even necessarily look i just looked like i was zoning out on the sofa for eight hours so they're like well it was you know but internally what was happening was that i was my mind was this just unspeakable hellscape of paranoia and distortion. And I didn't know what I could trust. So participating in the world around me was a literal feat every day because in large part, because of what was happening in my mind and the fear, the distorted fear that was interfering with literally every single basic decision, basic interaction, standing in front of the mirror to brush my teeth being like, I can't. How do I do this? Because my head, my mind is just, I'm just feeling really complicated to put toothpaste on my toothbrush, you know, just, but, you know, not necessarily to the outside observer, I'm just like zoned out looking at my toothpaste. And so I think a lot of people feel this profound alienation because the world around them doesn't understand what is happening internally. Sometimes it is visible, like, like this woman you're describing and other friends of mine who bang their heads into walls, who scratch their faces open because they can't handle the energy. You know, akathisia is a horrible experience. A lot of women have, a lot of people have. Yeah, for me, it was just, it was a lot of it was mental. And then just like crazy, you know, health, like digestive issues, chronic headaches, light sensitivity, spontaneous vomiting, boils on my skin. I just, my body felt like this wasteland and I felt so trapped in it, especially because I had this so-called binge eating disorder for all these years. So I was, you know, 70 pounds bigger than I had once been. So just engaging with life around you feels really hard when you're just every second of every minute of every day literally is a battle to not implode. And what the beauty in that experience and, you know, to return to your question about like, How did I make my way out? I think one of the benefits of having never actually felt any help from psychiatry is that I was so comfortable with being in great pain, mental and emotional pain, even physical pain, too, which I think actually preceded my relationship to physical pain preceded my psychiatrization. I was a kid who weirdly, maybe not weirdly, I realized at a young age, you know, I can hold my hands under burning water and stare in the mirror until the sensation doesn't hurt anymore. Like I did wacky stuff. This was I was like eight, you know, really interesting things. So I had this long, this lifelong kind of almost like meditative relationship with pain because I was in it a lot and very comfortable with feeling it. That I think that helped me move through the withdrawal experience, which was basically like a dramatically magnified and distorted version of what I already knew. It helped me move through it without putting a story on it and putting myself in the additional prison of having a story about what this like, I can't survive this. I'm permanently broken this. I just somehow didn't go there. And I just I think that helped my familiarity with pain was a huge asset for me. And I think actually what ended up To this day, when people ask, what does recovery mean for you, quote unquote, to put the finest point on it that I can, really the biggest shift in my life has been my relationship to pain. And the stories I tell myself about my mental, emotional, even physical pain. It's like that's where the radical transformation has happened because I still feel plenty of emotional pain. I'm just like not scared of it. It doesn't freak me out anymore. That's like the takeaway for me and in my book too. And once you realize that and once you find that freedom, then this massive industry and consumerism more broadly and all these nonstop bombarding messages of like, you don't feel good? Do this, take this, buy this, read. It doesn't hook you anymore. And I think that's the biggest threat to the mental health industry is like when enough of us realize our emotional pain doesn't need to be fixed, then yeah, there's no demand for it. It's going to fall. And that being said, there are times when my pain is a signal that's inviting me to take action of some kind. So it's not like I just wallow in pain all the time and don't, you know, evolve as a person. sometimes it is telling me like, excuse my language, like get the fuck off your screen. Like you literally don't even know what the weather is outside today. But sometimes it's like, just feel me. Cause you know, I just, it's grief. Usually grief, that's the emotion that I just have to just feel. And it's about discerning. Like when is my pain actually a signal that I need to take an action that I might not be taking or stop doing something I'm doing? And when is it just something I just need to be with? I bet that has served you also in childbirth, you know, and as a mom. Oh, yeah. And this, I think of, of course, as this maturational evolution where you become bigger than whatever might otherwise have been projected upon as some inconquerable, you know, assailant, persecutor, bad other, whether it's a problem, a person or a system. And I know that you believe that being unafraid of human experiences is a service that you can offer other folks. I know that that's probably the only thing that I offered my patients in clinical practice was never, never freaking out. I never, ever freaked out one time ever. Doesn't matter how psychotic or suicidal somebody was. I actually think of that actually as a trauma-based adaptation, but it certainly served, you know, it served that I was like able to remain calm, cool, and collected because that amplification of the reaction to pain and fear of pain is a part of how, you know, we all decide that we don't get to actually experience ourselves as individuals, as humans, and we're somehow all responsible for making sure the others are not feeling a bad thing, you know? So I wonder, you know, as you were moving through this identity shift and maturing in this deep way, embodied way, like did the people around you in your family or former friends, were they worried about you? Were they concerned for you? Were you able to embrace this new identity as somebody who doesn't identify with your diagnosis with ease if people celebrate you? How did that go? Because so much of what the triangulation against ourselves is founded upon is the collusion with the system, right? So that nobody has to experience their own projected fears of their own emotions through you. It's this web that we weave together, this victim-y web. And if you broke rank, so to speak, I imagine it wasn't received well by all. By the time I broke rank, my world had grown so small that the only friends I had were fellow patients I'd met in programs. And I, of course, misunderstood at the time my therapists and my doctors. They felt like my friends. These are the people I talked to and my family. So I didn't have to navigate friendships, work relationships, any of that because I didn't have any of that. But within my family system, for sure, it was not easy. And I think one thing that was of great benefit is that because I was such a good little patient driving my own so-called care through my adulthood, my family system hadn't enmeshed itself with coercion and force and compliance in any significant way. So luckily, we didn't have to navigate that together as a family, which a lot of people do. It's really hard to let go of your loved one who's suddenly not taking drugs anymore when the meds have actually been a means of controlling and and managing the relationship in some way. So I didn't have any of that. But of course, my family was like terrified, you know, because I had this serious history of near lethal overdose. And we, you know, talked for years and years about suicide. And they were afraid. And especially when I you know when my darkness went on overdrive and with an early withdrawal which you know for a while none of us realized was even withdrawal because I wasn informed about all this Yeah it was it was touch and go There were periods and I didn't have like a huge amount of contact with certain family members, but I think God bless them because they, they hung in there with me and they, they had enough respect for me to like really let me be in my process and hang and hold all that uncertainty, you know, hold it and not try to like do something about it. And I think, you know, as I reintegrated and like re-embodied myself, because so much of this, of course, is about embodiment and disembodiment. And, you know, like at age 13, I was actually, that I was, you know, it was an opportunity in that moment I lost myself to actually like, really become fully embodied as a young woman. And because that was interfered with, and then of course I was loaded up on all these drugs that profoundly disconnected me from my body. A lot of the post-psych drug journey was about coming back into my body, reintegrating, and then being in the world and in my relationships in that reintegrated way. So it was just more of that happened and it was slow over years. the more faith of my, I think my family developed in me. And now, you know, all these years later, it's like, it feels like another lifetime ago that, that I was the designated patient in the family system who, you know, was always messed up and in crisis, expending the energy of my, you know, the whole family system. Yeah. It feels like another lifetime ago. And it also, of course, feels close to in a beautiful way, but I think it's really hard for a lot of people, for family systems to reconfigure post-psychiatrization. It's really hard. A lot of them don't. Also because you referenced the secondary gain that the patient secures from that role, but of course it's a system, right? And the system is now hinging upon this dynamic. So yeah, to make that transformational leap into a more sovereign and organized system just comes with its own challenges. You tell a story that I find to be, I tell this story that you have told, you know, every opportunity I can, because I find it to be like such a moving example of what humans in crisis need and why it's not locked units and forced injections and, you know, labels and subjugation to a system that otherwise would have them believe maybe in perpetuity that something is deeply broken about them. So the story is about somebody in your community who experienced suicidality and what you did and offered as a family, which I think is representative of your values of something for as long as I've known you, you've stood for, which is community and the power of this empathic, compassionate human network to sustain people through these dark, disconnected windows. So I wonder if you can tell that story as an example of how you now relate to human crisis and what you know to be some of the ingredients of system avoidance, if that's a thing. right? Like what, what does it take to not find yourself talking to a psychiatrist when you are in the throes of this kind of disconnection? And I think I know the answer that you might share, but like, is there a limit to that? Right? Like, are there some instances like my friend was suggesting where it's beyond what you can manage as a community or as a friend or loved one? And yeah, I think that's just so valuable to hear it from your perspective. Yeah, well, I and I can share an anecdote about that second part of the question, which is, you know, of course, the most complicated, you know, question of all. But yeah, it sounds it's similar to how you described how you were with your with your patients. You know, just that one of the beautiful gifts in going through your own dark night of the soul is that when you emerge on the other side, you're not afraid of darkness and the way that you once were and in the way that so many people are. And so to be able to authentically be with someone who is at the edge and not fake it, but truly authentically not be afraid of it is, I think, one of the most beautiful gifts you can give another human. And in many ways, I sometimes wonder, can you access that without your own dark night of the soul? Or is a dark night of the soul a necessary step to truly be with darkness without fear? I don't know the answer to that. To initiate you, maybe, you know, to that role even in the social fabric. Which, if it's true, if you do need that initiation, then it's all the more, you know, it's all the more hopeful to be able to say that to someone like what you are in right now. And it's what I say to this friend you brought up, you know, this young woman in our community who I crossed paths with. And she got to know me a little bit. We got to know her and she reached out. Gosh, it's been a while. almost a year now that we met and actually called me in the midst of a suicidal crisis on the way to the hospital and something in her said, call Laura. So she did. And I, and you know, her voice was rapid. She was talking really fast. She was clearly panicked. She had a family member in the car with her who was clearly panicked. And I was like, and she was talking it out herself. And I instantly saw that too. Like she knows what she needs here she's she just needs a sounding board who she feels safe with and not safe in the like paternalistic like you know trigger warning thing but just i can be i can fully be myself with this person and not have to navigate like judgment and whatever else so so she basically was talking it out which she already knew like if i go i don't know if i want to go i think if i go a second and i was just how did it go the last time and i just it's like you know why don't you come over just come over we're at dinner and and so in this in this you know again like authentic way because it's how i actually felt just walked she came she showed up at our door i walked her in i put my arm around her i was like let's have a cup of tea cooper's about to finish dinner you know my stepson and my son were like screaming and running around and i think this the the experience for her of being in this like extreme state where she's convinced she's about to die and being met with like, yeah, I'm with you. I'm not afraid of this. I don't think she'd ever had that experience before. I think it was the first time in her life, perhaps, that she had that experience. And so she's just like, she sat down at the table, you know, her kids are screaming over and then we're just talking to her in, of course, a respectful way because it's big what she's in. It's significant because, of course, there's this and this is one thing, too, that I think for anyone out there who, you know, especially parents, like if you're, if someone you love is in a profound crisis, like there's a, there's a long, there's a, there's always a story behind this. It doesn't just happen for no reason. And it certainly doesn't happen because there's something faulty in their brains. And so if you can meet that person with like true openness and curiosity and almost serve, like I sometimes visualize myself as a mirror. Like the mirror is just like the theme of my life. It's throughout my book. I think about it all the time. If you're just visualizing yourself as a mirror, basically like you're holding it up in front of the person to help them remember, to help them reconnect with like what they already know with whether that's something that's like common sense or instinct. This was someone who had been through so much in her life, had had so many experiences of not being seen, traumas, wounds, all these kinds of things. And like, of course, she's going to end up in this crisis when she hasn't had the opportunity to make meaning of all of this and turn it into something that she can work with and like catalyze into growth and evolution. And of course, that's the antithesis of what we're told as psych patients. Oh, it's not your fault. You just have a broken brain. you'll have it for the rest of your life then you'll learn okay what's the point in trying to evolve because no matter what I do I have a broken brain so yeah I think being with someone authentically without fear is such a gift and I don't want to pretend this is like some romantic everyone just go be with people in crisis it's messy and just to respond quickly to your other part of the question like I have had friends each of whom happened to be large men who I have tried to support in completely spun out states that you would call psychosis. And I had to back out because my bodily integrity was no longer, no longer felt protected. Both of those guys ended up, one got arrested, one got forcibly drugged. Like it's a messy thing here. And I don't want to pretend that it's all sunshine and roses if everyone's just like present with each other. Human beings are violent. We've been violent since the dawn of time. It's not because we have illnesses in our brain. It's complicated. And sometimes people come to me like I'm meant to have some answer. OK, well, if you're not going to forcibly medicate people like what do you do instead? Yeah, it's a logical fallacy, the replacement fallacy. It's true for every single time you question or expose the deficiencies of the current model. You're expected to have the better one at the ready. And of course, you can't ever arrive at the better one until and if you fully let go. Yeah. And because there is no better one too, because it's individual. Sometimes people are going to get locked up. It's going to happen. That doesn't mean everyone should get locked up all the time. We have this struggle to fundamentally individual people. We can't have this systematized, this is the protocol. Everyone's situation is different and needs different things. And I think that's one of the fundamental problems with institutionalizing and industrializing help because it goes against what it means to be human to try to create some massive system you can just plop down and it's going to work. yeah that's why i as you know i'm so passionate about sharing stories of what's possible because i i find it offers as i know you do a north star to just the right people at just the right time and something gets ignited in them that might have otherwise been forestalled or maybe never you know take take shape so i know that there are so many things that you are a stand for and there's so much rich meaning that you have woven from a tapestry of a lot of trauma, some of which is unique to you, some of which is collective, some of which is very specific to this translation into your purpose. So I wonder how you think about what you're a stand for these days and what feels like the most alive aspect of your mission. Because there could be so many ways to pay this forward. And I know you've been at this for a long time. So I wonder how it's evolved. Oh, it's a great question. And it's one that I almost feel like resistance to answer, I think, in part because I think you and I have so many. we've been on such a parallel journey in terms of the yeah how we identify our identity itself and how what how what how i'll speak for myself like how i define or choose not to define like what i see as the so-called problem and the so-called solution and all this and that and you know, so it's hard for me to even come up with a clear answer to that. Because in my own experience, it's been these past 15 years, I did swing, you know, I went like hardcore, like zero gluten, zero dairy, never touch anything, you know, poison in my body to, you know, event like kind of bouncing around eventually settling in this indefinable, like murky place where, like, I'm a human being living in this industrial modern culture. Like I don't live on a homestead. I have, I have wifi in my house. I, I've made choices that are, you know, murky. And, and I like to live there now because I realized, you know, it can be its own prison to define yourself against something and to, to create like a, you know, a structure for yourself that is so rigid that and fear-based, fear-based. It's like my, my almost five-year-old, he goes to a kid's birthday party and there's like a nasty Baskin Robbins cake. I'm like, enjoy, you know? And what's beautiful is that most of the time, I would say honestly, 97% of the time he takes a couple of bites and he's like, my tummy tells me I don't, I don't want to eat anymore. And I'm like, I am proud of how I've mothered this boy because he's in touch with himself and he's not living in this like fear-based, like not allowed, good, bad, right, wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's connected to his inner compass. Hence the name of my nonprofit, the nonprofit I started, like this was all about to me is how in touch are you with your instincts, this thing in you that we all have that gets like silenced and compartmentalized and pushed down by the world we live in. Like that would be my answer, I think, which basically means no answer because everyone has their own unique path and what that looks like. Talk about, you mentioned the Intercompass Initiative and what you envision for it from here forward. So Cooper, my husband, now runs the nonprofit and our mission historically and to this day is to help people basically to help people make informed choices for themselves we're not anti-drug we're not anti-psychiatry we're not anti-anything we want to take we basically see our mandate to to take all the information that's available out there that we can you know that we found helpful for ourselves provided to people you know organize it so for example, we have a free tapering manual that basically consolidates like all the wisdom of lay people over decades and how to taper off these drugs. We have it for free on our website, step by step with pictures and everything. So we connect people to information and to each other in mutual aid ways. So not services, not like peer support and blah, blah, blah, but like human beings in authentic relationships with each other. And yeah, and we're expanding, you know, we really want to try to, we want to expand our reach beyond serving, you know, people in their lives to hopefully also reach, you know, in this, in this interesting moment we're in as a country, I think there are a lot of opportunities to have an impact within the system, so to speak, which historically I haven't paid much attention to, but my heart is calling me to try to help inform people in positions of power, government power, whatever that means at the end of the day. So we're trying to inform policy and advocate for these issues right now also, which has been a new experience for us and one where we feel deeply called to do too. So yeah, if you're listening to this and you want to connect with other people who are in this journey, whether you yourself are in it or you're a parent of someone or a spouse of someone, we have a community. We have tons of free resources. We'd love to have you join us. And then, yeah, my book too, Untrunk, if it might be of use to you or someone you know too, of course, I hope you'll read it. Of course. And we'll make sure to have all of the resources in the show notes. And if you've been in my world, especially on this particular subject, then you've heard of Inner Compass. So it's amazing to now have this forum in podcast form, which I didn't have when we first met and to showcase the extraordinary light that you are. And it's so inspirational on like a soul level to feel your energy and to feel how, you know, the phrase I like to use is like a strong spine, soft heart. Like I can feel that even just through the pixels here. And it's enlivening for me. There's some, maybe it's the warrior in me that's still looking for these little hits of energy where I just feel like, yes, this is what the so-called fight looks like. It is you channeling your pain into a purpose that is, as you described, redefining what pain even is. And it's amazing. I'm just so grateful that you're out there, you and Cooper, and that you are playing the very, very specific role that only you can play. And that has been colored by your very specific experiences with the system and why fighting it is never really the answer. And I see you as having really alchemized so much into this beautiful offering and really what you stand for. so I'm so grateful to you and excited to share this with so many as I mentioned in the beginning oh gosh Kelly it's such an honor to be here I've long felt like we have this sisterhood with these thematically almost identical but just like different details and trajectories this path that we've been on and it's so nice to see you here and it's been far too long we need to catch up more and I'm so honored to be here and to have the chance to talk about my story with your audience. Awesome. Thanks, Laura.