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Prescription for Insanity: Laura Delano on DarkHorse · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. This is going to be a good one, folks. I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting with Laura Delano. Laura is the founder of the Inner Compass Initiative and she has a book, which is, well, I just got a copy of it yesterday, but I believe it is on the cusp of publication or is it just out, Laura?
• 0:25
  It'll be out on March 18th.
• 0:27
  March 18th. Well, in any case, welcome to DarkHorse.
• 0:32
  Now, from the point of view of orienting our listeners, you and I know each other pretty well through the marvelous Brownstone Institute, where we have more than crossed paths over the course of four or five events.
• 0:48
  And I have become quite fascinated by your story. But interestingly, you actually show up in Heather and my life before we knew you in person. You show up in our book as a result of an article that you wrote. I've now forgotten the details of when that would have been that reported on your story. Do you know which article it would have been?
• 1:14
  It was a profile of me in The New Yorker in 2019 called The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs by Rachel Aviv.
• 1:21
  All right. That's it. So in any case, what we're going to be talking about today is your mind blowing experience as you were growing up and then confronting a rather profound challenge surrounding your interaction with professional psychology. So best thing I can do is let you tell your story, which I know you do very well.
• 1:47
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• 3:26
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• 3:32
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• 3:40
  Uh, it's such an, it's such an honor to be here just to start there, Bret. Um, it's, it's the briefest way to, to put, to put it is that I, at the age of 13, after having, um, what you could call an existential crisis was sent by my parents to a therapist, my parents didn't know what to do with their 13 year old daughter who was suddenly cutting herself and having explosions at home and, and acting out in all kinds of ways.(...) Um, and it wasn't long after I was sent to a therapist that that therapist recommended to my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. And this was in 1997.
• 4:29
  I was 14 at that time within an hour.
• 4:32
  (...) Uh, within that first appointment, I was told that my anger and irritability and outbursts were symptoms of mania and that my despair and self-injury, uh, and hopelessness were symptoms of depression. And that I had an incurable brain disease called bipolar disorder.
• 4:51
  And I was promptly put on meds and that began what ended up being the most, uh, you could say influential relationship of my life to psychiatry, psychology, to the hospital industry, the managed care industry.(...) Um, I didn't find my way out until my late twenties at age 27.
• 5:15
  Um, so,(...) so the story, you know, I could tell the long version or the short version, but it's basically, well, let's just say, um, the beauty of long form podcasting is we can hear your whole story. And because I've heard you tell it, I think the audience will benefit from any details you care to include.
• 5:38
  Okay. So, so when I was, when I was first given that bipolar diagnosis in the mid nineties, I knew instinctively that this made no sense.(...) I was the crisis that I'd had was basically realizing that I was in a culture that didn't make sense to me. I was in a school system with high expectations.
• 6:04
  I was in,(...) I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. So you're kind of textbook, stereotypical wealthy town in the Northeast. So there were a lot of expectations,(...) just, you know, percolating in the ether that, you know, if you want to feel good about yourself and feel like a worthy person, you need to succeed. So when I hit was hitting puberty.(...) Um, and you know, I had this profound experience in the mirror one night when I was brushing my teeth, where I just kept looking deeper and deeper into my eyes in the mirror until I didn't recognize the girl in the mirror anymore.(...) And I just was staring at her. Who, who is she?
• 6:50
  Who is she? And when I kind of came to, I realized I don't have a real self. I am programmed to perform in school, perform in sports, be polite and well mannered.
• 7:03
  (...) So in retrospect, all these years later, the experience that got me psychiatrist, as I like to put it was actually a profoundly wise awakening to how so much of the modern world we live in is out of alignment with our, with our true nature.(...) But of course, at the time I didn't have the, the framework to make sense of, of this realization, no one else was talking about any of this. I hadn't found the great philosophers and you know, I had no point, no frame of reference for what I was going through.
• 7:40
  And so I drew the only conclusion that I could think of, which was something must be profoundly wrong with me. So even though I felt like something was wrong with me, I also knew when that psychiatrist told me that I was bipolar, that that was a crock of shit. Excuse my language. So I, I through high school managed to avoid for the most part, taking the meds she put me on and she, she put me on Prozac and Depo coat and just to pan back for a minute in the mid nineties, that was really the era in which the juvenile bipolar disorder diagnosis exploded on the scene. And if you look into the kind of backstory of that, there were a few individual psychiatrists who were getting a lot of drug company funding to basically create a new market for them. They had their institutes funded by drug companies at big prominent hospitals.
• 8:41
  And the way they differentiated juvenile bipolar disorder from adult bipolar disorder, it was literally saying that in many in an adolescent bipolar disorder, mania looks like irritability and anger.
• 8:55
  So irritable teenagers have a mental condition that just so happens to require pharmaceuticals.
• 9:03
  Unfortunately they do.
• 9:04
  Yeah, that's tragic.
• 9:05
  And so that I, I came, came of age at the prime time to get sucked into this new, this new discovery of, of psychiatry.
• 9:16
  So let me just pause you there. I want you to go through your story as you're doing, but for me as an evolutionary biologist, the paradigm, the chemical imbalance paradigm was insane from the get go. It's not to say that an individual couldn't have such a thing, but the idea that huge numbers of individuals have a chemical imbalance makes no evolutionary sense.
• 9:47
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• 11:12
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• 11:59
  The alarm should be 10 fold when the solution is a remedy introduced during development.(...) Because as you're developing, you know, a child isn't a well coordinated, well balanced creature.
• 12:19
  That's what becoming an adult is. And if you introduce a distortion to the chemical environment inside a child as they are developing, then what you're guaranteeing is that if they are well adapted, it is only in the context of whatever it is you added, which is going to be core to your story that once you've fallen into this paradigm, and they're introducing powerful psychoactive substances into your body, then the best you could hope for is a dependence on those very same substances. Because once you take them away, you've never had any experience as an adult without these things. They are part of your architecture. So in many ways, you and your story and what you have discovered, and it's not just a matter of self investigation, as you're going to tell us, it's a matter of empirical testing of what works and what doesn't. But it is the demonstration of what should have been obvious to anyone who appreciated how delicately orchestrated the complex system of a human being is as it passes through development. So anyway, I never expected to meet anybody like you with a story like yours, but it is amazing how well it matches what you would expect on paper if you described the absurd experiment of imagining that, you know, a kid who is having outbursts needs some sort of a chemical intervention.(...) This is exactly what you would expect. So sorry for that aggression.
• 14:00
  But no, I, I think you're making so many good points here. And what's coming up for me is this question of why didn't none of this occur to me or my parents? Why?
• 14:14
  I, you know, I did reject the diagnosis at first, as I mentioned, but it wasn't that long before I eventually completely bought in to this whole chemical imbalance theory and everything that came along with it. But yes, why? Why did we just take for granted what we were told?
• 14:33
  And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because in the wake of my psychiatrists, these past 15 years that I've been reclaiming myself in mind, body and spirit from the mental health industry, I've become intimately familiar with my nature as a human being. And and I've had to grieve all the years that I did not have that sense of understanding, which of course, it's, it's, it's evolutionary. It's also just common sensical. There's a lot of common sense here that I we didn't have. And I don't blame, I certainly don't blame my parents. I don't blame any parents really, I don't, there's no blame here to put on individuals. So much of this is about the fact that the the culture we live in, in so many different ways, disconnects us from our biological nature.
• 15:31
  And, and in my experience, and the experience of many of my friends and fellow former patients, it took profound iatrogenic injury to help us wake up to this. And so that's the other the other question. And for anyone not familiar with the term iatrogenic, iatrogenesis is basically(...) injury caused by treatment or by doctors.
• 15:57
  And I think the term psychiatric iatrogenesis is going to be coming onto the scene in the coming months as more people begin to step back and question,(...) you know, whether these these drugs are as safe as and effective as we've been led to believe. But I, I do think at a deeper level, we all need to step back and say, why are we so out of touch with?
• 16:17
  Why are so many of us so out of touch with our true nature?
• 16:22
  And in an evolutionary framework, and you know, it's, it's learning from from you and Heather and reading your book was was it, it solidified so many instinctual senses in me that I hadn't necessarily articulated intellectually. And I remember when I read your book, besides discovering that I was in it, which was really wonderful.
• 16:44
  I was like, aha, this is it. And this in many ways is what that 13 year old me was sensing her way into.
• 16:51
  Oh, man.
• 16:53
  There is, you're right. This is the exact confluence of these things. And you know, as I've said many times, I like the title of the book that Heather and I published.
• 17:04
  But there's a part of me that regrets not titling it hyper novelty. Because all of this is part of a hyper novelty crisis.
• 17:12
  And the fact is you have a devastating version of a story that many of us have and don't even know it. So I don't blame my parents either. But the orthodontia I was exposed to caused the atrogenic harm.
• 17:31
  I would have suffered harm from the vision correction that was prescribed to me if I hadn't completely ignored everything I was told to do. The vaccines that I took likely caused a lifetime of allergies, some of them profound, like my allergy to wheat. So it's just across the board. If you do what seems like the right thing, how can it possibly be the wrong thing to follow the consensus wisdom of the most expert people across all of the various systems of the body?
• 18:12
  Well, it turns out again and again and again, it is the wrong thing to do. And the fact that your 13 year old self had an intuition that this what you were being told was wrong with you couldn't possibly be right, but you didn't have the framework to describe why it wasn't right. You didn't frankly, have the position what 13 year old is so self possessed that they can stare down professionals in lab coats telling them here's what we do for people with your condition. So of course, our parents got it wrong.(...) Right? How what they would have ended up being outcast for ignoring science if they had had the good sense to prioritize a better scientific model that was properly concerned about disrupting complex systems.
• 19:03
  And when I think about my experience in the mid 90s before I mean, I think we got our first computer when I was in middle school.(...) So before the widespread adoption of the internet, really, let alone social media,(...) I cannot imagine how hard it is to be a teenager today when you are in from basically from birth, you are bombarded with message after message after message that if you feel angst or despair, or insecurity or loneliness, or anger, or euphoria, there's something pathological in you that you need to take to a doctor to be fixed with a pill. I mean, I feel very grateful that I was born in the early 80s. So I have my foot in that in that old world, the pre, you know, social media world, because the disconnection I imagine a lot of young people have from their instincts is probably so much more amplified than it already was for me, before all of that external messaging.
• 20:11
  And just to be clear out the gates before we go in any further to my story or these issues, my perspective here is not anti psychiatric drug. I'm not anti psychiatry, I, I believe in informed choice. And I believe that each of us children adults, we have the right to be given the comprehensive information we need to make decision true decisions for ourselves about whether and how we take these these drugs, accept these diagnoses.(...) And so for me, just, I just I always try to make that really clear at the outset, like this is not a, you know, a story where the end game is all people on psych drugs should come off them and they're bad and anyone taking them is, is bad. This is so much more complicated and nuanced than than that.
• 21:02
  Well, I appreciate your caution, especially in light of what you've discovered about what was done to you. I will take a different position myself and I'm not I'm speaking only for me, but I am absolutely outraged at the arrogance that allowed this to happen, the arrogance and the cynicism, right? The, the,(...) it's one thing to have had a bad model of human psychology and have intervened out of the best of intentions, if that even ever happened.(...) It is another thing entirely to fail to monitor the harm that you are doing,(...) to fail to monitor the obviously contagious spread of the diagnosis that just so happens to produce a huge profit for the very people who have defined the disorder and produce the remedy.(...) So, and finally, I would say, you will find no bigger fan on earth of the idea of informed consent than me.
• 22:12
  I believe that the solution to all of our maha problems,(...) it rests with broadening our understanding of informed consent so that we no longer think of it as limited to experimental treatments.
• 22:27
  (...) We think of it for every ingredient in every food item, every exposure to some sort of novel chemical that we have, whether it's a solvent in paint or something that off gases from a textile.
• 22:41
  Informed consent is a beautiful, important, fundamental and natural law, I would argue. However, the problem with applying it to something like psychiatric drugs is that there is no one on earth who understands the mind well enough to give you the information you would need in order to understand these things. So, at best, informed consent would amount to something like, yeah, we have no fucking idea what that's going to give you. And we'll find out 30 years from now and it will be too late to completely undo it. You will be a brand new type of creature, right? So,(...) I am not saying, and people will find out when they hear what the content of your book is and the content of your story, but I am not saying everybody should just quit their drugs and people are going to find out that they can't, right? If that's what they did, they would find out they will make matters worse in many cases.(...) So, that's not what I'm suggesting, but from the point of view of are these things right for some people, I don't think we know. I think you would have to have somebody who doesn't profit from one outcome or another study the question in a large population of people over the course of many decades. So, we could see whether there is actually evidence of net benefit and what tiny fraction of the population are we going to find that benefit in. My guess is it would be small or zero.
• 24:16
  And as long as I'm on the soapbox, I just want to say that the paradigm that, well, Laura, there's something wrong with you. It's bipolar disorder. We can tell that because you have moments of rage and moments of depression and, well, there you go.(...) That is an inversion of reality.(...) Yes, you did have a problem, Laura. Your problem was that civilization was running an uncontrolled experiment exposing children with millions of years of evolutionary history in terms of how to develop and become an adult.
• 24:59
  It was exposing them to an environment that was not only overwhelmingly new, but changing so rapidly that you couldn't possibly keep up. That's the hyper novelty problem. And so, yes, you did have a psychological disorder. We all do.
• 25:14
  We can't deal with a civilization that is all new and constantly changing.
• 25:20
  Evolution cannot possibly have built us for that environment. It didn't. And so, yeah, we're all screwed up. That is no reason to be dumping drugs on people.
• 25:28
  Yeah, I often like to say that it's a healthy response to feel crazy and evocative of that rather cliched, is it Krishna Marti? Or so, you know, it's no measure of sanity to be well adjusted to a sick society. I think I'm botching it, but that realization has been so freeing for me in my own life because, you know, I still have plenty of challenges today in mind, body, and spirit. But I take comfort in knowing that, of course I do.
• 26:04
  This is a, this is a, it makes complete sense that I'm responding in the way that I'm responding given, given the world that we live in. And what's interesting is that the DSM itself, you know, psychiatry is so-called Bible of mental disorders.
• 26:21
  The first couple of editions of it actually use the word reaction in the schizophrenic reaction, depressive reaction. There was some acknowledgement of context that you're, you're, you're crazy because you're reacting to something by the DSM three in the early eighties that had been switched to disorder. And then I think from, from the rest is history really, insofar as this medicalized ideology of, of self that is so predominant in our world today just kind of took off running to the point where today it's, we're so, we decontextualize mental and emotional distress, even altered states of consciousness that you might call psychosis or mania or whatever it might be. You know, for example, when people reach out to me today for, for help, maybe it's a family member of a loved one who's spun out into psychosis. The first question I ask is, how's their sleep?
• 27:27
  Because 9.9 times out of 10, they were sleep deprived prior to losing, losing it. And so, okay, rather than give this person a schizophrenia diagnosis and tell them for the rest of your life, you're going to have this so-called brain disease, maybe step back and say, let's, let's just rewind things a bit here and see what happened leading up to this.
• 27:51
  (...) And so I think as we move, you know, as we come together as a society, which we need to do almost one in four American adults, and one in 10 American children is currently on a psychiatric drug. These numbers are astronomical by my calculations, and I could, I could be wrong, but I think that comes out to around 65 million adults and 6 million children.(...) We need to have a conversation about this because there's more suffering in our society than ever before.
• 28:20
  And, and you often hear, oh, we need more mental health treatment. People need better access to diagnoses, better access to medications.(...) We have more access than we've ever had to these, these treatments. So is this really,(...) you know, it's a rhetorical question, because you and I have a sense of the answer. Is this really the path that we want to head down?
• 28:42
  And I do think the future lies in us reclaiming(...) these struggles that get called mental illness from this reductionist medical paradigm where they're just translated into symptoms of diseases to be intervened upon. And instead, we step back and from an evolutionary standpoint, for some people, maybe a trauma standpoint, for others, socio political standpoint, socio economic standpoint, there's context to our struggle.
• 29:11
  And we have to start putting the focus on the context, not the individual biolid, you know, so called faulty brain pathology, which there's just simply no evidence for in the case of the psychiatric realm.
• 29:26
  So so yeah, now I'll get off my soapbox.
• 29:29
  Okay, I'll take it back and then I'll hand it back over. But I have come to understand, I mean, one of the failures of a complicated systems mindset being applied to a complex system like the human mind or the human body is interfacing badly with a system that overly trusts markets.
• 29:56
  And I'm a huge fan of markets when they are applied to problems that they are good at solving.
• 30:02
  But when you apply them to a problem like psychological disturbance, they have an overwhelmingly interventionist bent for obvious for obvious reasons.(...) Prevention doesn't pay.
• 30:18
  intervention pays and in obsolescence does not pay.
• 30:22
  Right. So I don't know if we must have talked about this somewhere along the lines. But many years ago, I started researching schizophrenia first.
• 30:38
  Because I was convinced that it wasn't what we were being told evolutionarily, the explanation just didn't add up. And there had to be something deep there. So I started digging and I formulated a hypothesis. I still don't know if it's right. But the evidence was in the right direction.(...) The idea was that exposure to light that fools the mind about what time of day it is causes dream generation circuitry to be inappropriately active in some people.
• 31:17
  (...) If you think about what a person having a classic schizophrenic break is like, they are talking to people that don't exist, they are responding to a narrative that is not evident to anyone else.
• 31:34
  They are fearful.(...) All of these are completely normal phenomena. If you're dreaming, right, you've got a problem that needs to be solved, you're discussing the nature of the problem with people, right? There's a story that some part of your mind made up and is running you through it as an exercise. All you got to do is have that stuff be active while you're conscious, and you've got a schizophrenic. Now, when I started digging on the question of whether or not artificial light of the wrong spectrum could trigger a schizophrenic response, what I discovered that was most encouraging with respect to that hypothesis was that in much of the world, especially the developing world, schizophrenic breaks were known, but they were not lifelong conditions.(...) They were, as you say, a reaction to something, and it was not well understood what they were a reaction to. But you can easily imagine somebody puts a light on the parking lot next to the building you live in, and it's got a lot of blue light in it, and you don't think of it as an important event because it's just some annoying light that pours through your bedroom window, and you don't understand that the frequency of that light impacts what time of day your brain thinks it is and that maybe you have a vulnerability or your dream circuitry is less well firewalled off from the rest of your mind than other people's. But the point is those people who have a schizophrenic episode, it's known to clear up. So why in the first world is this a lifelong condition?(...) And from there, I got to exactly what you just said, which is that it's not just schizophrenia, right? It's bipolar disorder as well, maybe panic attacks, that many of these things appear to be related to disruptions of sleep, right? And so anyway, I love the idea that the first thing you should ask is, you know, oh, you know, you don't rush to, well, sadly this person has a chemical imbalance, but it just so happens we have a chemical that can rebalance it. No, no, no, no. What caused this, right? Prevention. We used to know this. We used to say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
• 33:56
  And I can't remember the last time I heard anybody say that.
• 34:00
  So go ahead.
• 34:02
  Yeah, it's I love that's such a fascinating theory. It makes a lot of sense to me. And then when you when you think about all the the the other complexities of being human, because you know, maybe that person with the glaring parking lot light coming through their window is also kind of isolated in their life and isn't getting much interaction with other with other people, or maybe they're really stressed because of something happening at work, or maybe they're, you know, they have such long work hours that they're eating boxed mac and cheese every night. And so when you when you take a that that, you know, that theory of yours, which gosh, would that be fascinating to somehow rigorously test.
• 34:48
  And then you think about all the other kind of toxic stimuli in our in our world. And you're like, Oh my gosh, it makes total sense that that people lose it all left and right. And, and I do think one of the challenging things is that because, because the mental health industry has basically a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human today, and what it means to struggle and go crazy and all of that.
• 35:20
  (...) And it also has largely a monopoly on what constitutes help.(...) Like if you if you're spun out into an altered state, and your your family is terrified, understandably, they might not the only help that they see that's visibly on offer as a mental health professional or a hospital.
• 35:44
  You know, of course, in reality, there's a vast spectrum of all kinds of help that you can get. And we can circle back to that later. But because people don't even realize that there are options beyond just taking them to get diagnosed and treated it people, there's there's so little kind of mental space.
• 36:05
  People don't have the time and space to kind of step back and reflect in these deeper ways. You know, I imagine if that person had enough time in their day to look out the window at that light and be like, God, that light actually feels really awful on my eyes. I notice when I'm visiting my friends, and they're out in the country, I don't feel this way, you know, people don't have time to kind of reflect and, and learn for themselves for just this modern day and age that we're in is so technologized and professionalized. So I think that's one of the things that I hope for our culture is that we make more space and time to actually step back and reflect and think about these things that makes so much sense when you just give yourself a chance to actually, you know, let your mind wander a bit.
• 36:55
  Yeah, we also need to, we also need to train people. I mean, at the very least, we need to educate them in what was discovered in the Milgram experiment and it's many offshoots.
• 37:06
  The problem is not hard to see if you have a child whose development is off target, which many people will because, well, for many reasons, but one of them is that actually you're not built to have an antagonist to your parenting, right? If you parent a child, there's not supposed to be somebody trying to undermine that.
• 37:35
  But we have people trying to undermine it. People who are advertising to your child are deliberately trying to override your good parenting to get the child to do something that's profitable for them.
• 37:48
  So you're not supposed to have that. It's not surprising that when you do have that, that you're going to have a dysregulated kid, right? Kids are going to be dysregulated because they don't know who to pay attention to. But more to the point, when you have a dysregulated kid or person, and you're frightened because, oh my God, what is it going to mean that this person who is an important part of our family can't keep it together, right? They're having a psychotic break or whatever it might be.
• 38:26
  The ability to stare down a doctor and say, "Well,(...) look doc, that story you're telling, something tells me that that's not biologically reasonable." That sounds like a preposterous critique to most people.(...) And it isn't a preposterous critique. In fact, all you need to know is a bit about the history of science and medicine and all of the things that we have believed were true that turned out not to be and all of the harm that was done downstream of them.
• 39:01
  All the medications that contained mercury.
• 39:05
  Somebody should have looked at a doctor prescribing a medication that contained mercury and say, "Are you out of your freaking mind?(...) You want me to take mercury?" No, I think I'll go to an herbalist instead.(...) So the point is most people do not have the ability to stare down somebody in a lab coat. And we know that this is true because the Milgram experiment established it. We also know that it's a pattern that can be broken.(...) That people who observe somebody resisting the person in a lab coat recover their ability to be skeptical and bold.(...) So anyway, somehow part of the route out of here is anytime somebody wants to intervene in a complex system in a way that they say is going to be beneficial, you should be skeptical.
• 39:53
  The fundamental nature of a complex system is that it can't be predicted. So anybody who's confident that they can predict what happens when they dump some chemical onto your brain is probably over rating what they actually understand. And the right to say, "Huh, you sound overconfident to me.
• 40:11
  I don't need a better reason than that.
• 40:13
  I'm going to go see somebody else." We need to get better at that across the board, whether it's food ingredients, psychiatric drugs, orthodontia, any of those things.
• 40:26
  I agree. And I think with parents especially, I've watched and met so many loving parents who have felt so basically coerced into distrusting their parental instincts, who feel whether they're in touch with it or not, feel so much regret, shame, fear. And I think we have to really make space for both inviting and inspiring those parents, as you say, to look at models of those who are speaking out and who are claiming their right as parents to trust their own instincts, to inspire them, but also to just have so much compassion for them. Because I think back to my poor, terrified parents, who's this once promising young girl who was doing so well in all aspects of life is suddenly slicing her arms up and talking about death and pushing her back to the point where they're pushing my family members, screaming, cursing, slamming doors.
• 41:43
  I get why any instincts that might have been alive in them didn't last very long because they felt so alone and isolated.
• 41:53
  And they were. This was a time when the pharma-funded anti-stigma campaigns were really just starting to take off. So it still felt like a very private, individual thing for them to have a daughter who was struggling with a so-called psychiatric issue.(...) But it makes total sense to me. And I do think as we move forward, we need to make space for the parents who maybe have lost touch with those instincts to feel held and understood and supported as they find their way back to it. Because I know for me to find my own way back to my instincts was not easy. And it was scary and confusing. And now that I'm a parent myself, I'm so grateful for every minute of it because my orienting principle as a parent now is very much in line with my evolutionary instincts and my maternal instincts that I don't know if it would have been if I hadn't gone through what I'd gone through.
• 43:01
  So yeah, I think there's a lot of understandable(...) shame and regret for parents that we need to be really gentle with, I think, as we help them find their way through and beyond.
• 43:21
  Yeah, I agree.
• 43:22
  Because these are hard things to talk about.
• 43:24
  Compassion for victims of this system, you couldn't possibly have too much of it.(...) So I agree with you.
• 43:34
  Let's go back to your story.
• 43:38
  Pick up, you initially were resistant to the drugs that you've been prescribed.
• 43:46
  Eventually, they wore you down. You took them. Where'd it go from there?
• 43:49
  Yeah.
• 43:51
  Yeah, I get so through high school, I resisted them. I didn't take, I hid the pills as much as I could. I was not continuously on those drugs from ages 14 to 18. But what also happened through high school was that I, even though I had this deep kind of existential crisis at play in me where the performative realm of my life made no sense, good grades, good squash player, yada, yada, yada. I didn't know how to escape that. I felt trapped in it.
• 44:28
  So I continued to be a good performer. So I ended up getting into Harvard early.
• 44:34
  And I just kind of diluted myself into thinking, maybe I've got all this wrong.
• 44:39
  And once I get to Harvard, I'm going to finally feel good in my skin and, and okay about myself and my life will finally begin. And I'll be out of this dark hellscape of, you know, wanting to die all the time. And of course, that didn't happen. And so, so that freshman fall of college, which I think happens a period of time when a lot of young people end up meeting the mental health system for the first time, I really spun out because I'd been holding on to getting to the point where I'd been holding on to getting into a school like Harvard as this one last beacon on my horizon that could maybe save me. And it had come and gone. And I was still just as fucked up as I'd been before.
• 45:21
  And so I,(...) you know, was doing a lot of drugs and I wasn't sleeping. And I was, you know, I got really lost into postmodernism. And I was just deconstructing reality until three years. And it was at that point that I grew desperate enough.(...) And I was just so overwhelmed by my pain that I was like, that's it. I said to myself, that psychiatrist must have been right. Like there must be something wrong with my brain because I can't, I've tried everything to get myself out of this and there's no way out. So that desperation for relief, and also for a sense of understanding why do I feel this way is what led me back kind of willingly into the arms of the mental health industry.
• 46:09
  And then from that point on from age 18 till age 27,(...) as I like to describe it, I basically became a professional psychiatric patient. And my nature as a kind of driven perfectionistic young woman, all that all shifted away from academia and athletics to(...) my psychiatrist ization. And I was diligent about going to therapy.(...) Every week taking my meds as prescribed tracking my symptoms reporting my symptoms to my psychiatrist whenever they cropped up so we could tweak my meds. It became my life, my life's purpose. It became, it became my, my,(...) my sense of basically that identity was what helped me feel like I fit in somewhere.
• 47:05
  And so I basically basically from from the moment I accepted that bipolar diagnosis and the required(...) med regimen onward.
• 47:14
  As I grew more and more compliant with my treatment, my life fell more and more apart.
• 47:21
  And so I managed to get mostly through college, but I had to take a year off because I was so suicidal all the time. I had my first hospitalization during during that period of time,(...) which was very disappointing to me because I had some idea in mind that I'd go into the,(...) onto the locked ward and they'd take really good care of me and they'd figure things out and I'd leave feeling better. And really, I just watched Spongebob Squarepants and ate unripe oranges and drank watery decaf coffee for a week as they played around with my meds. And then they're like, okay, you're good to go. I'm like, but, but nothing's different.
• 48:09
  And so after graduating from Harvard, which I really don't even know how I did because I was on by that point, several medications, high doses.
• 48:21
  I don't, my memory, my cognition were really impaired and retrospect I can see, although I don't think I even realized it at the time, but I made it, I finished and then proceeded to basically spin out continuously until my mid twenties. When I was on, I was, I'd been unable to hold down a job. My family was having to pay my rent. I had been in a series of very dysfunctional relationships with guys who were basically as lost and messed up as I was. I had chronic health issues. My weight had fluctuated 70 pounds.
• 49:04
  I had, I, you know, diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome. And, you know, I had chronic fatigue issues and(...) I couldn't remember anything.
• 49:15
  I couldn't articulate myself.
• 49:18
  I was so messed up all the time that I basically had no friends.
• 49:24
  I was just, I couldn't connect. I felt so disconnected from my body, myself, from other people, from nature.
• 49:34
  And mind you, this whole time, I'm getting the best treatment at the best hospitals in the country.
• 49:41
  Harvard Medical School professors, you know, McLean Hospital, New York Presbyterian.
• 49:51
  And my family and I are being told each step of the way that I'm just, my illness is progressing. I keep falling more and more apart because I'm just so mentally ill that even all this great treatment isn't able to help me. And so I was officially declared to be treatment resistant, quote unquote. And so basically what that message, you know, the way I interpreted that was you are so fundamentally defective that we've tried everything on you.
• 50:28
  None of it did anything. So this is just the rest of your life. Like is it worth living?(...) And I really pondered that question to myself, do I want to keep,(...) you know, I'd had multiple hospitalizations by that time.
• 50:43
  I was like, I was just so, I was not living. I was going through the emotions of living and I was not living. I said, do I want to keep doing this or do I want to kill myself? Because this is not a life worth living.
• 50:56
  And so at age 25, I decided to kill myself and almost did. And I go into it in the book. And honestly, if there is a God, God was keeping an eye out on me that day because I really wanted to die.
• 51:12
  This was not a cry for help.
• 51:15
  And I look back all these years later with deep respect for that. This might sound controversial, but I look back with deep respect for that decision to kill myself because it made complete sense given the story that I was believing about myself. And the problem was, of course, that the story was a false story.
• 51:34
  And so I have to say, as your friend and as somebody, you know, I've been a guest in your home. I've seen you and your family. I know your husband quite well. It really hurts to hear that you were there and that basically it wasn't a wrong conclusion based on what you thought was really going on. To be that broken and to have it be something that would never go away, I get it. But the point is, you and I both now know that that's not, that wasn't something fundamentally wrong about you and that if you can break the pattern that was making it impossible for you to function and be happy, that you end up a successful, articulate, beyond thoughtful mother, wife, author, careful thinker. The number of ways in which we're all better off for you having somehow gotten through that is tremendous. And the ability to just simply compare what you report you felt like and what your life ends up being tells a rather profound story. I mean, the psychiatric treatment nearly drove you to end a life that ends up strange but a great life.
• 53:19
  Well, and that to me is the most important message that I think I could convey is that,(...) oh, and I get emotional talking about it. And I love when I, whenever I'm speaking, I often feel moved to tears and, you know, in my previous lifetime, I would have tried to suppress that and push that down and been embarrassed. Now I'm like, if the spirit moves me, I'm crying because I think this is a big part of the problem in our culture is that we don't let ourselves fully feel. But I was so convinced that there was no future for me.(...) And I tried so hard. I was such a good little patient.
• 54:04
  And, and to be clear,(...) every single doctor with the exception of maybe one or two, with whom I interfaced over all those years were truly good people who really wanted to help me. They cared about me and they were not bad people.
• 54:20
  But my gosh, I tried everything. And the hopelessness I felt at feeling so profoundly convinced that I was, I was sentenced to defective(...) brain pathology and that there was literally nothing I could do about it.
• 54:42
  Just to think about how many people are out there today who are feeling that way or, or close to feeling that way, because they too have been these good patients who, who want relief from their struggles and are doing what their doctors are telling them. The message to me, the most important message to me is there's always hope and, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, shape what happened to us. It's, it's not everything. Obviously they're outside factors, but this isn't, my story is not a story about being misdiagnosed, quote unquote, or being mismedicated or overmedicated or, oh, unfortunately, Laura never should have seen a psychiatrist. I am a story of the American mental health industry working exactly as intended.(...) I met the criteria, quote unquote, for multiple diagnoses. I would today meet the criteria and the very least for anxiety disorder of some kind.
• 55:42
  The, the, the only thing that's changed here for me in my life is that I changed the story I was telling myself about the nature of my pain. And, and then I was off to the races and obviously there was a lot of unlearning and relearning and learning for the first time that I've had to do, but it was all made possible by me realizing that I had believed in a story that was literally imprisoning me and killing me.
• 56:11
  Yeah.
• 56:14
  Which is, I think it's an impossible realization for me. It's an impossible realization for many people because for one thing,(...) you know, you said earlier in the conversation that you, you had, had to grieve for the life you didn't get.
• 56:34
  And I think a lot of people cannot face if they even take the first step down the road of, well, what nonsense. And what if I was having a chaotic reaction to a unsolvable set of puzzles and that, yeah, maybe that wasn't the best reaction. Obviously cutting yourself wasn't good for you, but, um, the point is it, you know, I have a principle I use with, uh, people I interact with, which is I don't hold them responsible for making a bad choice from a menu of bad choices.
• 57:15
  Right. It doesn't make sense. If you had a good choice and you bypassed it, then we could talk about whether you should have taken the good choice. But if you're a kid who screwed up because you're faced with a world that doesn't make sense and so nothing you do works, it's not surprising that you're going to have outbursts.(...) Um, so most people I think can't, can't stomach the question of, well, if I'm not broken, if the model isn't true and I'm not broken in the way that they say I'm broken, then I will have surrendered who knows how many years of my life. And I will have made it impossible to become who I would have been, which is just literally true.
• 58:01
  You're not who you would have been. And I think who you are is fantastic. And frankly, I wouldn't change anything about you based on what I know, but it's still not the life you were entitled to lead without all of those years of horror.
• 58:14
  You're somebody else. And, um, so anyway, that keeps people imprisoned because they would rather you mad, they, they just, they would rather continue with the assumption that it must be true. So they don't have to face the question of what might've been, and that wrecks their future too.
• 58:33
  Yes. And I remember going through my own.
• 58:38
  So, so maybe I'll, I'll, I'll bring listeners up to speed on how I kind of woke up from all this. And then, because I want to come back to this, what you're talking, what you're saying here, which because it's so important. Um, so two years after I tried to kill myself, I, I basically, basically those two years was more of the same, you know, I was doing partial hospital programs and outpatient programs and barely able to hold down part-time jobs and then crawling back to my parents' house because I couldn't handle it.
• 59:10
  And, and basically just biding my time until I would once and for all kill myself.(...) And in, in 2010, at the age of 27, I was going to day treatment all day at McLean hospital. It was my job, drive there in the morning, leave at the end of the day, pack my lunch.(...) And I ended up having(...) three encounters per series of weeks that showed me a side of the mental health system that I had never really seen before. And that is the power that licensed mental health professionals have to strip you of your civil liberties to force you to do things that you don't necessarily want to do. And so, you know, the first one was that my psychiatrist caught wind that I was maybe thinking about killing myself, which I had been, but, uh, wasn't actually actively in that moment thinking about. And he made me go onto a locked unit right then and there, which I wasn't even averse to. I just wanted to go home first to get my belongings because if, if anyone out there has been locked up on a psych ward, you know, you well know how unpleasant it is when you have none of your own belongings, no cozy clothes, no books. You're just, you know, carted over there, dropped the door clicks closed.
• 1:00:46
  There you are. I was fine going in. I just wanted to get my things first and he wouldn't let me things escalated.
• 1:00:55
  Security guards were called and I was given the so-called choice of going voluntarily or involuntarily. So I chose voluntary that dislodged something in me though. In that moment, I just was like, this, this, this doesn't feel right here. And then I had another event where they made me take a drug that I didn't want to take on that hospital stay.
• 1:01:18
  And then after that, when I'd been discharged, I was super tranquilized from that drug and I slept through a therapy appointment and my therapist called the cops to do a wellness check on me.
• 1:01:30
  I had these three encounters and each one just forced me up against this realization that this system I had been turning to for care over all these years, the most formative years of my life, had actually been a system of control. I just hadn't seen it because I had never said no.
• 1:01:50
  Once I said no, I saw it all as though I was seeing it for the first time. And it was not long after those experiences that I then happened upon a book by Robert Whittaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic that blew my fucking mind. Sorry for the F bomb.
• 1:02:09
  You're all right.
• 1:02:12
  And in a nutshell, the thesis of this book is that if you actually look at what long-term data does exist for psychiatric drugs, and there's not a lot, because it should be noted that the average length of a trial of the trials submitted to the FDA to get these drugs approved is about six to eight weeks.
• 1:02:35
  So there's very little long-term evidence at all. But what does exist shows that people in the so-called developing world have much better outcomes than people in the so-called developed world, and that the data itself is telling a very different story about these drugs than we've been led to believe. And so Robert Whittaker's conclusion is really that there's a strong case to make that the treatment is making us collectively sicker.(...) And so I read this book after having had those experiences with psychiatric(...) force and coercion.(...) So my faith in all of it had been called into question. And then here's this book, which was miraculous that I could even read because I was on five drugs. I was on lithium, lamectal, Abilify, Effexor, and Ativan.(...) Basically two mood stabilizers and antipsychotic and antidepressant and a benzodiazepine. And this was called sophisticated polypharmacy.
• 1:03:39
  And so I miraculously actually absorb what this book is saying. And I realize, holy shit, what if all of these years of progressively worsening dysfunction(...) is not my treatment-resistant illness, but the treatment.
• 1:03:56
  And that moment,(...) to go back to what you were saying earlier, the agony of facing that possibility was almost impossible to feel because I realized my life hadn't had to have gone that way. If only I had never seen a psychiatrist.
• 1:04:18
  All these years later, I really would not change a minute of any of it. I am so grateful that all of it happened because of all that I've learned from the experience and the life I've now lived, all of that. But at the time, I could not face this and fully absorb what this meant for me for quite a while.
• 1:04:39
  And I do think that is a really critical piece of this puzzle here as our culture calls these drugs more and more into question.
• 1:04:49
  How can we hold space for that terrifying first stage of grief, which I think is denial or shock, no shock and then denial, I think. Because it's really hard to move through it. And I think you're right that a lot of people can't and don't.(...) But if something is alive in you that is wondering, what if it doesn't have to be like this? What if it didn't didn't have to go like this?
• 1:05:19
  And helping people hang in there with that terrifying possibility long enough that they can actually find what I think was the most important driving force that got me through all of it, which was curiosity.
• 1:05:35
  Let's take as a given that all those years of my life didn't have to have gone the way that they went. Let's take it as a given that I was really harmed by these drugs and the diagnoses, the whole thing.
• 1:05:50
  But if I'm no longer sentenced to incurable, so called mental illness, like what could my life become from here?
• 1:05:57
  It felt like there was this endless possibility and I knew I had to find out.
• 1:06:03
  And early on, I'd say to myself, you can always kill yourself, Laura, like you give it a shot and you don't like what you get. Like that's how, you know, how where I was for a while. But I was defiantly curious to forge ahead into the unknown and find out who the hell I could be off these drugs that I realized had harmed me.
• 1:06:27
  And that's really the rest is history.
• 1:06:30
  So there are a couple things I want to highlight in your story. One, in case people didn't quite catch it, you had been in a system of control that you weren't able to detect until you said no.
• 1:06:47
  I think there's something so profound in that realization. And it's, there's a message for all of us. This isn't just about psychology.
• 1:06:57
  Systems of control can be cryptic.(...) You don't know until you try to break out. It's sort of the lesson of the Truman Show, right? You just start going places that you're not supposed to go and the system goes into overdrive not to let you.(...) The other thing which is connected to that is the tragedy of powerful, if these drugs were bogus, if they just didn't have any effect, if it was cryptic sugar pills, that would be alarming and terrifying because you'd think you were taking something to alleviate a problem and it's not real.
• 1:07:39
  But the fact that these things are powerful, psychiatric manipulators guarantees that if you weren't dysregulated before, you're certainly going to be dysregulated after you've been given them, especially if you're on five of them, right? I mean,(...) it's just inconceivable that this could result in a mind functioning properly with all of these novel inputs. And so what is the product of(...) intervening in this way?
• 1:08:13
  It's chemical mental illness, which was the ostensible reason for it in the first place. And so I'm left with the idea that it's like self-fulfilling pharmacy. You know what I mean?(...) The point is it makes you into somebody with a chemical imbalance, a literal one.
• 1:08:29
  And what an upside down picture of functionality. You know, pharma is going to take somebody with a healthy mind living in an unhealthy world and cause them to have an unhealthy mind at a chemical level because the remedy will always therefore be chemical. Like it's a business plan. And wow, am I angry on your behalf and on behalf of all of the people who have faced this. And I will say also implicit in your story, how many people have we lost to this?(...) How many people didn't find their way out and were living a life that they couldn't stomach and ended it?
• 1:09:21
  I mean, I know just personally, far too many who have both when I was a patient, losing fellow patients.
• 1:09:33
  And in the world, I then joined the world of people who come off these drugs. And I'm sure we'll get more into that in a moment. But there's a lot of pain in that world too, trying to get off these drugs that your body has grown dependent on.
• 1:09:49
  And we lose far too many people in that world too. And just to piggyback on what you were just saying, it's so profound.
• 1:09:58
  And it makes me think of just the work of Ivan Illich and his book, Medical Nemesis, and this idea that a system that sets out to help in a particular or to improve a particular area of life ends up destroying that area of life or worsening that area of life. His work has had a large influence on me in how it helps me really frame all of this. But the confounding variable here, the added variable that makes this phenomenon so hard to recognize in the context of psychiatry is that it isn't just the drug paradigm. It's also the diagnostic paradigm that comes along with it. And so what I mean by that is these drugs, any class of psychiatric drug, especially when used for the long term, and most people, 80%, the numbers I've seen are 80% of people on psychiatric drugs are on them for months or if not more than a year.
• 1:11:05
  And again, these drugs are intended for short term use, they've been studied for short term use.
• 1:11:11
  But using these drugs can actually cause adverse effects that mimic symptoms of psychiatric diagnoses themselves.
• 1:11:23
  And also trying to come off these drugs, especially if you come off too quickly, and I hope we have time to go into all of that, can set off a cascade of experiences that look like symptoms of mental illness, but are in fact symptoms of psychiatric drug withdrawal. And so you have this distorting factor happening where you know, whether it's you the patient or your family member watching you go through what you're going through, or your prescriber or your therapist, because we're all trained, we all have this lens over our eyes that medicalizes these mental and emotional states, you know, by translating them into symptoms, it makes it really hard to see what might actually be going on here, which is psychiatric iatrogenesis. And that certainly was the case.(...) For me, you know, to drive the two drugs became three became four became five, because with each passing month or a year, you know, new problems cropped up or things intensified and worsened. And no one in this system I was part of ever once stepped back and said, Hmm, maybe these five potent psychoactive chemicals coursing through Laura's body are causing some problems here. And so I think that's a big piece of it too, is that we're trained to see these experiences as symptoms of the very illnesses that we're taking these drugs to treat,(...) so to speak.
• 1:12:51
  And and that takes a lot of courage to, to step back from that to take that lens off your eyes, and kind of sit with the mystery of this, which which I had to do when I decided to come off these drugs.
• 1:13:05
  I, I knew I didn't want to hold on to that old story of self anymore, that I was, you know, mentally ill and would be for the rest of my life. But I also had no idea who the fuck I was off these drugs, I had no idea what it was like to be an adult, unmedicated, I'd grown up on these drugs. And it wasn't just psych drugs. I was also on the pill for 16 years. And that's a whole nother story. I mean, it's the same story, different drug class. And so I had to(...) find the courage to sit with all the profound discomfort that I felt as I came off them, because I did not understand what slow tapering was.
• 1:13:47
  And I'll talk about that more in a bit.
• 1:13:49
  And so I had to just constantly say, Oh my gosh, what if this is my baseline? Is this me? Is this an underlying illness?
• 1:13:56
  Am I having a relapse? Am I going to kill myself? Am I fucked here? Have I made a mistake just nonstop noise in my head trying to define and describe or even define what I was feeling? And I had to say to myself, you just let go of needing to know what this is, just be with it.
• 1:14:13
  And I had to do that for years. Sure.
• 1:14:16
  So the pattern you describe, where the drugs themselves and especially the elimination of the drugs create phenomena that look like symptoms of mental illness and thereby reassure the medical system that no, in fact, you do need these things. It's not like you come off them and then suddenly you're well. The opposite is true. It's like doctor mediated addiction.
• 1:14:45
  Right? The doctor is there to assure you that, Oh, this is the evidence that those things were helping as much as they didn't cure you. They are necessary.
• 1:14:54
  Maybe you need another, Laura.
• 1:14:57
  So anyway, that's a terrifying paradigm and it requires a tremendous strength of character to arrest that process.(...) And then of course, that leads exactly to where you were going to head next, which is, well, okay, what happens when you do realize that you've been the victim of a false model of mental health that has got you on drugs that are making things worse and not better. The obviously right thing is get these things the hell out of me. But what happens?
• 1:15:33
  Oh, yes. And that was definitely the conclusion I drew because I didn't know what I eventually learned about physical drug dependence. I thought to myself, you know, after reading anatomy of an epidemic and then diving into some more books and research that helped me really get clear in just how unhelp I'd been by the whole thing.(...) I concluded, okay, I have to get this stuff out of my body as fast as possible. The faster I get this stuff out of my body, the faster I'll heal. And I did not realize at the time that I headed backwards.(...) And that for many, many people, and we do not know the numbers because no one is studying this because there's not a lot of money to make and studying how to get people off these drugs.(...) For a certain number of people, it takes a really long time. And by that, I mean, not even necessarily a few months, it might take a few years to be able to taper off of these drugs in such a way that the profound alterations to the structure and functioning of the central nervous system have the time they need to gradually disentangle themselves from that artificial, you know, chemical substance that they'd grown dependent on.
• 1:16:55
  (...) So people, you know, people often hear, Oh, come off your med slowly. And they think, Oh, that means a couple weeks or a month or a few months or even a year.
• 1:17:04
  For many, many, many people, they need a lot more than that.(...) Not for everyone. And that's the mystery again, is that there's no way to know upfront, whether you will have a brutally hard time coming off or not. And so it's from, you know, kind of a risk reduction perspective coming off as slow as you can at the outset and slowly building up the speed that you're tapering until you start to feel enough disruption. They're like, Whoa, okay, my central nervous system is like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?
• 1:17:39
  So again, I knew none of this. So I came off of my five med regimen in about half a year, which I would call cold turkey.
• 1:17:47
  And I think, you know, in retrospect, I think the fact that I was so I felt so horrible on these drugs helps me get through withdrawal because it was basically a magnified version of what I'd already been living for years by that point. And, you know, spontaneous vomiting, unbearable migraines, boils breaking out on my skin, chronic diarrhea, then chronic constipation, crazy paranoid things happening in my head, sweating, insomnia, just cognitive fog, I could go on and on about what it was like to come off of these drugs too quickly.
• 1:18:32
  And again, it looked a lot like I was quote unquote relapsing. And it was scary for my family who, who respected me enough to say like, you're this is your own journey.(...) Are you sure you want to do this? Because they too were believing everything I'd been believing about how sick I was.
• 1:18:53
  But they they made space for me and my and I lived with my aunt and uncle during the first year I was coming off, who to this day I, I you know, can't, my gratitude is endless for the space they held for me. My goodness. Yeah, I get so emotional thinking about it because I was a mess going to the psych hospital for day treatment every day, and then basically living on their couch,(...) binge watching television binge eating all the food in their fridge, because that was the only source of temporary relief that I felt. And they just hung in there with me.(...) And they let me be a mess.(...) I'm sure they were terrified, but they let me be where I was.
• 1:19:36
  And I just slowly, slowly, slowly started to feel slightly less shitty and slightly less shitty over time.
• 1:19:46
  Until eventually and honestly, it was probably you know, three years in really, that I realized like, I'm actually living.(...) And it was this, you know, people are often like, what is what did your withdrawal experience look like? Break it down for me. How long until you healed? You know, tell me what got better first. And they people want this kind of tangible, measurable breakdown of what it was like.
• 1:20:16
  But so much of the process of recovering from psychiatric drug injury is for me was this spiritual thing, where I just put myself out into the world to the best of my abilities every day.(...) And I'd been born into a family who could provide for me materially while I was there, which a lot of people don't have. So I'm very grateful for that.
• 1:20:42
  And I just bumbled along like a deer in headlights with no idea how to be an adult in the world. And I slowly figured it out, bit by bit. And my body slowly began to figure itself out bit by bit.
• 1:20:57
  And now here, I'm, you know, 15 years in now.(...) And you could not, there was no chance that back then, I ever in my wildest dreams could have imagined that the life I lived today was possible for me, I could not have even imagined it, let alone thought it was possible.(...) And I think that's the other message for me that to anyone listening or watching who's like on these meds or trying to come off them, where your loved one is, and you just can't see a way through, it feels too dark,(...) feels impossible. That was me.
• 1:21:34
  For years of my life, I saw the same lack of possibility. You just keep putting your foot, one foot in front of the next, trusting that just because you can't see it or, or imagine how it could be possible doesn't mean that it that it isn't. My gosh, it gets so emotional thinking about it, because the hope piece is so essential here.
• 1:22:00
  And don't get me wrong.
• 1:22:02
  It is very,(...) very, it's a big decision to make to come off these meds, especially when you've been on them for a long time. It might not even be the right decision for everyone, given their resources, circumstances, stressors,(...) supports, or lack thereof.
• 1:22:21
  It's a decision that should not be taken lightly.
• 1:22:25
  And it's absolutely essential the way I see it, that if you do, if something in you wants this for yourself, that you make all the time you need to get as informed and prepared as you possibly can be about how to do this in a way that will give you the greatest chances of success. Because I only made it through because I had a family who could provide for me. And I didn't have basically any pressures or responsibilities on my plate.
• 1:22:55
  I don't know if I would have if I had to hold down a job, kids to take care of, a household to run. I don't know if I could have made it through. I mean, it was the hardest thing I ever did getting off of these drugs. So it's a very serious decision to take all the time you need to really think through carefully.
• 1:23:17
  So I would also say it is evident to your friends and others who know you that there was a hell of a lot of strength of character involved too. And I think, you know, I don't know, my guess is your barrier to exit was greater than a lot of people because it was more drugs because you had been put through the accelerated pace of treatment based on it being supposedly resistant because of how early in your life these things began to be applied.
• 1:23:59
  But anyway, I definitely admire you for not turning around at the point that getting off these drugs was obviously hell.
• 1:24:11
  I also just at a biological level wanted to point out that there's(...) an element that I think is easy to overlook here.
• 1:24:20
  (...) There's a chemical dependency that comes along with these drugs and that chemical dependency, you know, can function at many different levels.
• 1:24:31
  But the dependency certainly for those who were put on these drugs before they had developed an adult mind will actually have a non-chemical component as well that could still and maybe even largely explains how long it takes to get off them because you're not just trying to find a new chemical equilibrium. What you're doing is you're having to go through a delayed version of development.
• 1:24:58
  You never got the ability to generate a mind that independently knows how to function as an adult. So if you take away the crutches that allowed it to function as an adult in the context of these drugs, now you have to generate all of the right dendritic connections that allow you to know what to do.
• 1:25:17
  So of course that's gonna, even if you can go through that process at three times the rate it would have taken in childhood, it's still going to be years in order to just build up a mind that knows how to be.
• 1:25:33
  And you know, I want to make sure that people who are struggling with this, either for themselves or for a loved one, understand the core message of what you're saying, which is that there was every reason to question this along the way and that now that you're out looking back, you needed to stare down those questions in order to get to a life that you clearly love and feel rewarded by. That life was possible all the time and you needed to have the courage of your convictions to get to it, to access it.
• 1:26:14
  And I think a lot of people are going to need to think about that message in order to escape their own self-fulfilling pharmaceutical problem.
• 1:26:25
  Yep, and I think courage can look a lot of different ways. I think from early on, besides that curiosity, anger was what helped me find my courage.
• 1:26:39
  Grief was what helped me find my courage.
• 1:26:41
  And so I think this is not about, not that you are saying this, of course, but this isn't about getting myself in a great headspace to go forge ahead. This is actually about the very opposite, lean in to how fucked up you feel, to how despairing you feel about all of this, to the outrage you feel. And because these emotions in and of themselves are neutral. They can become destructive and harmful to oneself, if engaged with in a certain way, but they can become constructive and transformative and cathartic and empowering when you harness them and use them in service of your future self.(...) And so I think I wasn't consciously doing this, but in retrospect, I see, yeah, I was taking all of that pain I felt about the realization that I'd been through what I'd been through. And I started a blog, I began writing my story. I named the blog "Recovering from Psychiatry." Eventually, I turned it into an offering for others because it was the only thing, the only way I could survive it was to make something of it.
• 1:27:58
  And I think that's one of the limitations, to put it as nicely as you possibly can, of the medical model of so-called mental illness and mental health too, which is really just the flip side of the mental illness coin, is that it assumes that emotional pain and discomfort is a psychopathology to intervene on.(...) And of course, when that's all you think it is, you're going to go on an endless quest to try to intervene upon it. But when you let go of that and you actually realize, my pain is actually evolutionarily wise and socio-politically wise and wise in all these ways, then you're like, "Whoa, okay, maybe I can lean into this a bit and do something with it," which you can't do. You would be called extra crazy by your psychiatrist if you went in and said, "These late nights I'm spending,(...) ramped up about the absurdity of the medical model." They would be like, "Oh, manic episode coming in." They wouldn't say, "Harness that and do something with it." And so I think that's another important message for me is that your emotional pain can be the most...
• 1:29:21
  It does not mean it's necessarily a problem to fix. It might actually be the fuel of your engine that you need to drive yourself forward and to help the world.
• 1:29:36
  And that to me is where the sense of feeling free from all of it comes in because I often find myself in these situations where people are like, "Oh, so you're all recovered now?" And you're happy and healthy and you're fine and everything's going hunky-dory. And then I find myself in this funny position where I'm almost like, "No, no, I meet the criteria for all kinds of diagnoses." I still do if I cared about that book and if I cared what a psychiatrist thought about me, but I just don't care because I'm not afraid of my mind anymore. And my mind can still, you can just ask my husband Cooper, my mind can take me to some really twisted places. But A, I recognize that all human beings have minds that take them to dark, twisted places.(...) And B, I don't have to take that so seriously because it's temporary. If I let my mind go to a crazy place and I don't try to do something to stop it, and this returns to what you were saying at the beginning about the so-called schizophrenic episode, it's temporary.
• 1:30:46
  (...) I move through.
• 1:30:50
  And on the topic of moving through, if I could just take us, what you were saying earlier about how these drugs disrupt development.
• 1:31:02
  And when you're put on them as a kid, one of the things that I quickly realized after coming off the drugs, actually not quickly, it took me a few years, but I eventually realized, "Whoa, I actually now have to return to the very original stuff that got me on these drugs in the first place." Because I never actually worked through that. And when I took the time to go there,(...) and then I did my own, of evolutionary, although I didn't have that framework at the time, it's what I was doing, almost like an evolutionary assessment of my birth onwards, I realized a lot of important things. For example, I was a C-section.(...) I was a footling breach, the most oppositional kind of fetus you can be.
• 1:31:57
  And so this was in the 1980s. It makes total sense my mom made that choice. I never got to go through the birth canal.
• 1:32:07
  I never had that inaugural experience of joining the world where you realize,"Whoa, this hurts. And here I am. I made it through the other side. I'm strong enough to do that." So I even have gone to that layer of unpacking of myself to see, "Whoa, the injuries from the drugs are really just the first layer here of wounds that I need to...
• 1:32:39
  Some of which have been helpful to work through, I should say. Not to mention, I was put on antibiotics six times before I was three for chronic ear infections. I have a lot of theories about why I had chronic ear infections. It's pretty obvious what taking tons of antibiotics in those early years of life will do to your gut. It goes on and on and on.
• 1:33:00
  And so, of course, I can't change any of that.
• 1:33:05
  I know that my body has its...
• 1:33:10
  For example, I apparently have no lactobacillus in my body like a year ago to the stool test and maybe stool isn't the best, most reliable way to measure this. I apparently have no lactobacillus in my body, which nor does my son, which of course he doesn't because I didn't pass any on to him when he came through my birth canal.
• 1:33:30
  And I'm like, "What does that mean for my... What did all my gut have to do to compensate for that?" So it doesn't change any of this, but at least I have this measure of comfort in knowing the toxicities that I've been exposed to in my life. I can kind of make peace with it and then just do the best I can from here on in to take the best care I can of myself given the day.
• 1:33:55
  Well, I have two things I want to pick up on from there.
• 1:34:00
  One of them is you hit on my largest pet peeve about medicine writ large, including psychological medicine, which is that because medicine never adopted an evolutionary framework, because medicine was well underway by the time we came to understand that there was something evolutionary to be understood about it. It never caught up on what that implies. And so across medical disciplines,(...) there is a failure to recognize negative adaptations, which medicine mistakes for pathologies.
• 1:34:49
  So you talk about your pain, your anger.
• 1:34:51
  It couldn't be more obvious to me as an evolutionary biologist that pain and anger are adaptations and that if you take them away from someone or you anesthetize them, that the person will be worse off. It's not to say you can't have pain that's useless. If you have an amputation and you have pain in the limb that you no longer have, that's not helping you. But the fact of pain is there to help you. It's there to train you. It has all kinds of benefits.(...) Psychological pain is no different.
• 1:35:24
  There's a reason we use the same word for those two things. Pain is a mechanism for either recognizing that you are doing damage so that you will stop or warning you that you are putting something at risk so you will pay more attention.
• 1:35:38
  These things are important and any profession that sees them as a pathology in and of itself is about to do harm if it has any mechanism for overriding these mechanisms.(...) So good on you for having figured out that pain and anger are perfectly valid motivational tools to accomplish great things. And it's nobody's right to make you feel that those things are any less than being motivated by joy or beauty.
• 1:36:12
  Second thing is you talk about all of these wounds, maybe going back to birth, who knows.
• 1:36:21
  I've come up with a...
• 1:36:24
  it's not even a model, it's just an analogy, but it's so(...) clarifying, I think, that it's worth having in your toolkit if you don't already,(...) which is yes,(...) we all have wounds. We have wounds you would in a normal life and we don't live a normal life. We live in a hyper novel world that injures us because it can't help it.
• 1:36:49
  The trick is not(...) to be unwounded.
• 1:36:52
  The trick is to scar over.
• 1:36:56
  And the point is if you've seriously injured yourself physically, a scar is not the equal of the tissue you lost, but it is 99% better than an open wound.
• 1:37:17
  And so, you know, for those of us who are struggling with something, the real question is, am I at the point where this is now a scar? And clearly what you went through, you've scarred over, you've looked at it, you can talk about it objectively, you can(...) sort out, you know, the fact that, you know, your doctors and your parents were well intentioned that they ended up doing harm, but that that was not their intent.
• 1:37:42
  And if they had known, they would have not done it.(...) So anyway, it's clear that you've scarred over. And the point is that's liberating. That allows you to live in a very different way than if you've got that open wound that there's nothing you can do about. And so punchline of that little riff is one of the things that the modern psychological paradigm is doing is ensuring that wounds stay open.(...) Right? That it's basically a matter of maintaining their own necessity. And the battle for people faced with this is can I scar over so I no longer need intervention?
• 1:38:22
  Oh, it's I love how you put that. And I totally agree. And I think the I was the very beginning, I think of the generation of young people who were raised to basically in the therapeuticized culture, I was the beginning of I grew up in the beginnings of therapeuticized culture where, you know, and this is, I know some of my closest friends are therapists, many people feel helped by therapy, you know, this is not me saying the whole thing is, you know, should be thrown out or anything like that. For me, though, every single therapeutic relationship that I managed to be in taught me to pay great attention to all of my emotions and thoughts to raise up the significance of my distress and my my problems and make them the central focal point of my day to day life.(...) The more problems I had, the more I had to talk to about with my therapist.
• 1:39:37
  And it was almost because that was my because the the therapeutic encounter for so many years was my most what I saw as my most important source of support, absolution, you could argue. I,(...) of course, wanted that to go on and on and on. I the thought of finding my way through things enough to not need therapy would have just been insulting. Do you not know how sick I am? How dare you suggest I might not need professional help. And I do think that we maybe we're reaching a tipping point where we're, you know, kind of turn away from from this phenomenon, but it's it's nearly ubiquitous in our culture to privilege your emotional pain and thoughts more than almost anything else and then build your life in in reaction to that, basically. And I think the tragedy is that when I think about what that was like to to feel deeply when I was in that headspace where if I felt like anyone anywhere was saying anything to imply that maybe I'm human and humans go through hard times, you know, I would have been so insulted when I put myself in that back there and I'm like, what was that about?
• 1:41:05
  I really think that it was about, in part, disembodiment and disconnection from myself.
• 1:41:16
  But also, I think it was about the fact that visibly in our culture, there's almost no place you can turn where you can talk about your struggles that doesn't require a transaction of some kind, whether you're buying you're paying for a service or you're buying an app or you're talking to a chatbot or you're sitting in front of a licensed professional.(...) I didn't even realize that there were other ways to talk about my struggles and feel seen and understood in them. Besides going to a mental health professional. And I think I know in my own life, and I and it's a big part of the work we do a big part of the work we do at Intercompass Initiative.
• 1:42:00
  When I realized the power of seeking support from someone who's been where you've been,(...) and is basically on the same path as you just a little further down on it.
• 1:42:13
  That blew my mind blew my world, because I realized, oh my gosh, there is, first of all, I don't need to attach myself and identify myself so deeply with my so called problems to justify the ongoing this ongoing relationship because this is another this is a friend. And I don't have to, you know, have a laundry list of problems to talk about because we have an organic authentic relationship or as a therapist, what are you gonna talk about if not your problems. So that was mind blowing, but then realizing how much more helpful it was to be able to be like, this is the situation I'm in. If you've been in something similar, like what helped you? What didn't help you? Tell me about it. Maybe I can learn from you.
• 1:42:58
  And so I think when it comes to the realm of so called mental health, you know, maybe there are many people out there who are super happy with their therapeutic relationships. And that's great. I totally respect that. But if there are people,(...) I have to think there are at least a few people like me who maybe in their heart of hearts realize like, maybe there's more out there that will actually help me find my way through life than just this weekly session that I have to bill my insurance company for endlessly.
• 1:43:36
  And to see people in my world of, you know, kind of current and former psychiatric patients who are at varying stages of making their way out. Off the drugs away from the diagnoses out of all of it to see the profound help on offer there that comes not from profit, but from empathy.
• 1:44:00
  To me, it's like the most revel. It shouldn't be revolutionary. But it's the most revolutionary thing about the increasing numbers of people who are leaving behind the mental health industry. And I think it's probably the biggest threat to that very industry, if I'm perfectly honest.
• 1:44:17
  That's marvelous. You've once again landed someplace that I've arrived by some different path.
• 1:44:28
  It used to be in the prior world, one that is not part of living memory, that most people lived in a community for their whole life.(...) And they went to a religious institution, a church, temple, something.
• 1:44:50
  And there were all of these natural evolved mechanisms for helping you navigate life.
• 1:44:58
  Friendship is one that was sort of a reciprocal agreement to care about each other, to help,(...) the friendships are marvelous. And I don't mean to describe them as if they're even describable because they're not. But the point is, in the prior world, a basically functional person had their friends who are peers, who have similar struggles. They have their family. You may have an aunt who understands you well and has been, as you say, farther down the road than you have. And those things that you don't yet know.
• 1:45:38
  And then you might have your clergy member who is sort of safely outside the interactions of the community and can give you the view from 30,000 feet or provide ancient wisdom. All of these things were non-economic.
• 1:45:56
  And then we went through some sort of accidental revolution where suddenly almost nobody lives near their community of origin.
• 1:46:07
  And it's much harder to make friends because actually that's a difficult process and you can't just drop people into an environment and have it work.
• 1:46:14
  Friendships actually evolve organically too. And so what are we going to do?
• 1:46:18
  Well, we can supply you with all of the things that your clergy members and your friends and your family once provided for a fee, we'll just turn it into a transactional thing. And the answer is, okay, yeah, that's better than nothing.
• 1:46:32
  But it's a far cry from a group of people that inherently cares about you because your fates are tied and because your history is interwoven and(...) all of that. And so what you've done is you've really rediscovered this sort of normal way of being a human being that most modern humans don't know anything about.
• 1:46:51
  (...) We've gotten used to the idea that you can source whatever you need in the market and it's just a broken concept.
• 1:46:59
  And I will tell you, I think there are very good psychological professionals in the world and rotten ones and everything in between. But I have come to believe that the ones who are really good, it has almost nothing to do with their academic training. It has to do with whether or not they are compassionate and insightful about people and motivated to help.(...) And the point is, their degree is a red herring.
• 1:47:31
  This person either is good at that job and would have been whether or not they had the degree. I'm not saying they don't learn anything in that process, but my guess is the good ones would have been good if you just sat down next to them in a cafe. It didn't require the official designation as a professional for them to acquire those skills.
• 1:47:53
  I think you're right. And it makes me think of the word expertise, which comes from the Latin word "experitus," which means tried, proved, known through experience.
• 1:48:08
  And to the very origin of that word is this, that you gain expertise through living something and experiencing something, immersing yourself in something. It doesn't come from the institution or from licensing, from how many letters you have after your name, yet we've just slowly lost touch with that.
• 1:48:28
  And so in this world that I'm in of people extricating themselves to varying degrees and varying ways from the mental health industry, we talk often about layperson expertise, which is kind of redundant because expertise, the word itself is lay.
• 1:48:51
  And especially in the context of tapering off these drugs, because currently as of March 2025, there are zero guidelines for safe tapering within the American Psychiatric Association.
• 1:49:08
  There's no training in medical school about how to safely deprescribe. Doctors are taught to put people on these drugs, not bring them off. And so those of us lay people have had to figure out for ourselves and scramble around and crawl our way out and make mistakes, figure out ways to do it successfully for decades.
• 1:49:28
  And we have accumulated this rich anecdotal evidence base of how to get off these drugs. Sometimes multiple drugs that you've been on for decades, the most miraculous stories of friends of mine,(...) what they've gotten themselves off all through figuring it out for themselves. And what's fascinating is that the research is now catching up with what we all figured out through experiencing it, which is that it looks like, and at least in the case of antidepressants and antipsychotics, probably with all of these drug classes, the rate at which these drugs interfere with receptor occupancy function with receptors in the brain is hyperbolic.
• 1:50:17
  And so basically what that means is that lower dosages of a psychiatric drug have much more dramatic effects on interfering with neurotransmitter function than higher doses. And at a certain point, it's basically redundant drug for the purposes of occupying or interfering with receptors.
• 1:50:36
  So what that means is when you try to come off of these drugs, you might be able to go faster when you're at higher dosages, because removing the drug doesn't have as much of a dramatic effect on your central nervous system. But as you get lower and lower, people often find they have to incrementally reduce the amount that they're removing.(...) So if they're cutting 10% of drug X, let's say they start on 100, you know, they drop to 90, but then they calculate 10% of 90. So their next cut is nine. And then they cut 10% of 81. So their next cut is 8.1. We figured that out without any brain scans and measuring anything. And now research is finding this to be the case, which I find fascinating.
• 1:51:24
  Could you I did not quite follow. It sounded to me like you said, that from higher doses, it is easier to escape than lower doses, but I didn't quite understand why that was.
• 1:51:40
  So I did understand what you said, which is that you've figured this out empirically, which is cool. But I'm curious to the extent that we understand why it is that way. What is it?
• 1:51:51
  Yeah, it's so so what what researchers are finding is that the the rate at which a psychiatric drug interferes with neurotransmitter function, so let's say an SSRI, the rate at which it interferes with with serotonin receptors increases exponentially. So when you take, you know, when you go from zero to 20 milligrams of Prozac, which is the lower end of a dose, your average Prozac dose, the the drug is interfering with with the function of of serotonin receptors at a very rapid rate.
• 1:52:42
  And an exponent so you know, for if you picture a hyperbolic curve, you know, the drug, the curve is very steep at the lower the dose that you're on.
• 1:52:56
  Yep.
• 1:52:57
  So as the dose gets higher and higher, that rate slows down.
• 1:53:02
  So you saturate something?
• 1:53:05
  You said, yeah, receptors get saturated, receptors get saturated, but also some.
• 1:53:08
  And this is an area that I'm not, you know, super,(...) because I don't research it myself.(...) You know, I can give some links to good articles for and for the show notes. But the higher the dose, the the less interference the drugs have with certain with receptor function until eventually there is a saturation point where literally,(...) there is redundant drug in so far as, you know, occupying a receptor is concerned.
• 1:53:39
  So what you're telling me is that you are finding that saturation point. So you can it's relatively easy to come off the drug until you get to the point where decreasing the drug actually materially impacts how much it's interfacing with the receptors, at which point you have to start being very careful.
• 1:53:59
  Yeah. And that material impact is exponential.(...) So it gets more significant dramatically faster. It's not a it's not a linear impact. It's a hyperbolic impact.(...) So ironically, the lowest doses of these drugs have the most significant impacts on neurotransmitter function. So people will often be told, you can't get off the last five milligrams of your Alexa Pro, that makes no sense. That's a sub therapeutic dose.(...) So then the person thinks, well, gosh, I must just have a really bad depression. And that's therefore I should stay on the drug. No, it's actually quite the opposite, the lower the dose, the more of an effect changing that dose will have on your central nervous system function, which is why what we have found in the layperson withdrawal world is that a hyperbolic taper rate, where you're making cuts that get progressively smaller over time tends to yield a much better outcome than if you're just cutting the same five milligrams every month.
• 1:55:06
  You're getting you're making that cut gradually smaller, which means in theory would go on for, you know, infinity never acts. So at some point, you have to jump off.
• 1:55:16
  But this is something that is not officially recognized by any, to my knowledge, at this point, any guild body of in America right now, the UK is much further along. They've, they have they published the Maudsley guidelines in the past year or two, that actually talk about this hyperbolic tapering methodology.
• 1:55:41
  Nice, officially acknowledges dependence and the need for tapering. They're much further along than we are over here.
• 1:55:48
  And you know, one of the things that I hope happens in the near term is that we really prioritize a public awareness campaign about the importance of tapering carefully off of these drugs, because given how many people are on them, given the increased awareness,(...) politically about health, and how we can help people recover from chronic disease.
• 1:56:14
  A bunch of people are going to start thinking about getting off of their psych meds. We want to make sure that they get good information about how to do that as carefully and safely as possible, because right now, it's very hard to get that information, if not impossible. In the mental health system itself, you really have to go outside of it into layperson communities, such as the one we have at inter compass initiative to get that information.
• 1:56:43
  I have a suggestion.
• 1:56:45
  Does the inter compass initiative have a mascot?
• 1:56:52
  Give us one a tapir. Okay, am I is that like an African mammal? Am I thinking of the right thing?
• 1:57:03
  I don't think there are any in Africa.
• 1:57:05
  There's, they are in Central and South America. And then there's an Asian tapir as well. It's a very odd looking creature.
• 1:57:13
  And they're, they're furry, right?
• 1:57:15
  Yeah, they're mammals.(...) Yeah, they are odd toad ungulates. Very odd looking creature. But anyway, I think it would help.
• 1:57:22
  I love that.
• 1:57:26
  Someone recently, someone, you know, we've had like a turtle people talk about turtles a lot.
• 1:57:32
  Someone recently said, Oh, a picture of a turkey that's really cold with an across through it don't call Turkey, but I think tapir is tapir is the best I've heard.
• 1:57:43
  Yeah, all right. Good. I'm glad I'm glad that we've achieved at least that much.
• 1:57:47
  (...) So all right, tell me more about what you have discovered either your own experience or what you have discovered working with other people figuring out how to taper them off their drugs.
• 1:58:03
  What is the what is the state of that art?
• 1:58:08
  Hmm.(...) Yeah, so I started in 2012. I I've been writing my blog for two years by then. And very few people were talking about becoming an X mental patient on the internet at that time.
• 1:58:21
  So people really found me.
• 1:58:24
  And so I just was, I talked to so many people over those first two years who were desperate for help coming off that I just slowly kind of found my way to a philosophy of tapering that was based in part on what I didn't do. So learning from my own mistakes, in part based on learning from what I was seeing other people do in the tapering world.
• 1:58:52
  And then, you know, also, just more broadly, you know, understanding metabolic health and the importance of that realm of things. And so I realized at some point, all these people are reaching out to me for help coming off of these drugs, figuring out how to be an adult in the world because I was in my late 20s. And so I began consulting with people that was the only word that felt right to me, I didn't like the idea of a coach that felt too kind of power, the power differential there felt too significant.
• 1:59:26
  This was just me taking what I'd learned and offering it to people to take relief as they saw fit. And so I began working one on one with(...) individuals and families who many of whom had already gone to their doctors for help coming off only to have been brought off far too quickly.
• 1:59:47
  And then they took to the internet to figure out what the heck is happening to me. And they found us or other people who wanted to come off, but their prescribers wouldn't work with them. And so so basically, in a nutshell, when I work with people, you know, which which I do outside of inter compass initiative, I always say the taper itself begins with preparation. Before before you even think about making a reduction in dose, it's really important to take time to think about what are the stories you're telling yourself about your own suffering about these meds about the word medication itself. What does that evoke in you when you think about this substance as a medication versus a psychoactive chemical, you know, there's so much disentangling there to do, so that you can really kind of separate yourself from as much as you can from any of those kind of like ideological boxes that you might have gotten into as a patient.(...) And then it's important to spend time getting informed about the drugs that you're on, actually learning how to read the drug labels themselves, which I sure as heck was not taught how to do. And you know, when when I actually went into them, which I did for my my book, I write it quite in depth about some of the drugs that I was on.
• 2:01:13
  It is I cannot recommend highly enough but ready yourself for a whole slew of emotions to actually go to the FDA.(...) I think it's drugs at FDA. If you Google that phrase drugs at FDA, look up your drug, download the complete drug label and actually read it. You will be shocked at all the things you haven't been told.
• 2:01:36
  (...) For example, you know, I was on Ambien at one for now at one point for years, I was on Ambien, which is not even approved for use beyond two weeks. I was prescribed it for years and years and years.(...) It was based it was approved on the basis of three studies,(...) one of which lasted one night and used a normal population of people who didn't even have sleep problems. And the assumption was a sleep lab will create sleep problems.
• 2:02:12
  And the and the outcomes were measured.
• 2:02:18
  And I can't remember exactly what the difference was with the placebo group, but it was it was like 20 something minutes.
• 2:02:28
  You know, you fell asleep 20 something minutes longer. Later. On on placebo, things like that. You know, so you when you actually look at the data that was submitted to the FDA to get you know, to establish the safety and effectiveness of all of these drugs, you realize like, wow, I have not been told this before.
• 2:02:52
  And which really begs the question, you know, at what point are we actually going to step back as a society and say, what is effective to us? What is safe to us?
• 2:03:04
  And define those terms, because the things that these drugs are approved for, I think a lot of people would say are neither safe, safe enough, nor effective.
• 2:03:14
  (...) So so I when people want to come off their meds, I encourage them to start by learning about them in the first place, by learning about dependence and and the fact that the human bodies organizing principle is homeostasis and what that means for the fact you've been taking this drug for as long as you've been taking it. Look at your your your diet. I know a lot of people who have found that a meta, you know, understanding metabolic health for some people, a ketogenic diet has been transformative for others, like a less, you know, removing gluten and dairy inflammatory foods, learn about all that.
• 2:03:54
  What's your support system? Who's on who's by your side? Who's in you in this?
• 2:03:58
  Do you have enough support? Where are things out with your prescriber? Are they on board? If not, what do you want to do?
• 2:04:05
  There's so much you can do before you start your taper to lay the foundations for the most successful possible experience for you. And and then the the taper itself really in a nutshell is about listening to your body and determining the speed based on how you feel, which might mean you can get off in a relatively, you know, is like six months, eight months, 10 months, it might mean you need five years of tapering, you're not going to know until you're actually doing it and listening to yourself and paying attention to what's happening for you as you reduce your dose and then, you know, acting accordingly based on how you're feeling, which which most what I've heard, most people who come to me who've tried to taper with their doctors, the sense I get is that doctors are not yet in a place where they can, where they really get that. And so they'll say, Oh, I'm going to use a schedule where we'll get to off in 10 months.
• 2:05:08
  Or however long it is,(...) the schedule should be as long as the person needs.
• 2:05:15
  And that's really important to the success. So those are the kinds of things that I will talk about with people who come to, you know, our organization to me. But the way I see it,(...) this information should be freely available to all people. It's a right. This should not be something you have to pay to get.
• 2:05:37
  You should have the right to freely access everything you need to know about these drugs and how to get off them as safely as possible, which is, which is why intercompass exists because we believe that people haven't been given the information they need and should be with no paywall.
• 2:05:56
  A couple questions.
• 2:05:59
  I realize a lot of what you know about tapering now you learned through the error of not starting there.
• 2:06:08
  In your experience, both your personal experience and the experience you've had with others that you've helped, how long into the process of weaning yourself off these drugs, do things start to improve past where you were on the drugs?
• 2:06:30
  It's a great question. And no, there's no one answer. I mean, I've, I've, I have friends who've somehow learned about slow tapering upfront, so they never actually tried in the past to come off and they did it too fast. They got destabilized.
• 2:06:48
  (...) If you find your way to good, reliable information on tapering at the outset, you know, I know people who've managed to taper off in a way where their life does not get any worse at all in any kind of significant way. And, you know, they, as they get further down, feel progressively more alive and embodied and, you know, and connected. I know other people who, especially for people who come off too quickly upfront, and so they're further destabilized, you know, they, it's variable.
• 2:07:29
  Some people recover quickly, you know,(...) weeks, months, some people literally need years. I have one friend who was basically bedridden for seven years because she went to a detox facility, which a lot of people do. And unfortunately, the kind of addiction industry, quote unquote, has to my understanding, no idea how to safely taper psychiatric drugs.
• 2:07:57
  And I think that's a good question. Taper psychiatric drugs. They ripped her off,(...) prescribed antidepressant and any anxiety drug, basically cold turkey, and then like discharged her and they're like, good luck.
• 2:08:10
  Seven years later, she's, you know, finally kind of like, whoa, I went to the grocery store this week. So it's variable.(...) But I do think the more informed you are upfront about how to do this as carefully as possible, the greater odds you the odds you give yourself that it'll be a streamlined process as it possibly can.
• 2:08:33
  Good. So what I'm hearing is there are a lot of ways to do this wrong. If you do it right, it is likely it may be a long time before you're all the way there, but you can start being better. Pretty soon.
• 2:08:46
  If you possibly I mean, but I feel like I hear stories of people who tapered slowly,(...) super, super, super slow, and they still have struggles. And then, you know, to play devil's advocate, I came off really fast and I was super fucked up. But here I am.
• 2:09:05
  And so it's just this is where it's so hard to even talk about this issue because it's so diverse, so mysterious, so subjective.
• 2:09:20
  Yeah. And I mean, one of the words of advice I'll often say is try as hard as you can not to stay attached to any kind of timeline.
• 2:09:30
  The cliche like be here now,(...) one day at a time as much as you can, because it will drive you crazy. If you're like, well, I be healed by Christmas or by my son's graduation or you might be, you might not be.(...) The only way you're going to find out is by getting there bit by bit. It's so frustrating to hear, but it's just the mystery of it all.
• 2:09:54
  I really appreciate your point about the full drug label and the horrors therein.
• 2:10:02
  (...) I will say this is one place in which Heather and I though I didn't feel naive at all. I was pretty, I've been long aware of the hazards of drugs and as I've probably discussed with you, the dangers of the safety protocols that drugs are put through the broken mice and all that. But the more I dig,(...) the more it turns out that safety and efficacy is just a completely gamed landscape and that the industry that produces these drugs has rigged it to the point of absurdity.
• 2:10:42
  So I was talking on a recent podcast with Toby Rogers, who you know through Brownstone.
• 2:10:49
  And he was telling me that the aluminum adjuvants that substituted for the mercury and other heavy metals that were removed from vaccines and the safety testing that said that that was acceptable was based on data from literally four rabbits, one of which the data was lost for. So that's now three rabbits and there's no way you can get statistical significance out of three animals no matter how strong your results. So the point is it was designed not to find a problem. Oh, and the cherry on the top of that story, if I recall it correctly, is that the aluminum did go everywhere in the rabbits. It didn't have an elegant process of leaving the body, of course, because the body has no experience with it. So anyway, I would just say if you are like me and you assume, well, there's a lot of testing done of these things, and I'm sure there are horror stories, but in general, a drug doesn't make it to market without some level of safety testing.(...) The answer is, oh, you'll be just shocked if you look at what was actually studied and figure out what a reasonable extrapolation from what was done would be. It's preposterous. You can't imagine how broken our safety testing system is and efficacy isn't any better.
• 2:12:22
  Yeah, it's a cold, hard truth to face when you have been an unquestioning faithful believer that if I'm being given something by a doctor, it must be good for me, which was literally how I spent my teens and 20s. And once you click with the fact that it's up to you to take the time you need to really educate yourself about all of this, it's on the one hand, scary, and also who has time for that.
• 2:13:04
  And I get why that doesn't feel realistic for a lot of people. And I have a lot of research in my book, and my editor kept wanting more and more over the years that I was writing this book.(...) And I realized, okay, I'm naturally inclined to read dense pharmacological information and kind of be able to figure it out. Not everyone is. I get how hard this is to do. And maybe there are ways that we can all, those of us who nerd out on reading drug trials can help our friends and family with summaries or whatever else.
• 2:13:51
  But the hard reality is that it's up to each of us to take that responsibility into our own hands, and we can do it together and support one another. But that can feel lonely and terrifying, or it can also feel empowering and liberating and clarifying.
• 2:14:15
  I applied those principles when I eventually decided to have a baby, which my body didn't signal to me in such a subtle way. I almost don't even want to put words to it because it was so deep and profound and primal, like what the signaling felt like. But coming off of five psych drugs, you know, in a total of 19 or more that I'd been on, I can count 19, there were probably more, plus a decade and a half of oral contraception.
• 2:14:47
  It took me, took my body about nine years before I felt like, ah, yes, it's ready.
• 2:14:56
  I'm not saying that's going to be the case for all women, of course, but for me it was.
• 2:15:00
  And by then, because I've been living these principles in my own life about, you know, before I put something in my body, I'm gonna learn about like, where does it come from? Who stands to make money off of this? And what and, you know, it's just been my kind of orienting principle to life. I also apply this to conception,(...) pregnancy, birth, early, you know, raising a baby and realize how we as girls and women are, you know, I grew up without any understanding of my cycle. I thought I could get pregnant at any time.
• 2:15:40
  I had no idea about how my cycle worked.
• 2:15:45
  I just was, I never learned it. And then of course, on the pill, through my teens and twenties, no way to develop a relationship to my actual cycles. And so I think(...) this whole philosophy of caring for oneself and listening to oneself and making decisions for oneself and one's children, it does come down to like, you're the only person who can save yourself, basically.
• 2:16:15
  Which, you know, yes, is a hard pill to swallow, for lack of a better phrase. But once you really sink into it, you're like, wow, I have the power to do this. And I must.
• 2:16:32
  Well, two things. One, you said, you know, who has the time to look into these things? And of course, they're almost designed to trigger exactly that reaction.
• 2:16:46
  But on the other hand, none of us can afford the cost of ignoring it. If you're going to take these drugs, you and Heather and I have now seen this multiple times, drugs that we were certain were safe.
• 2:17:05
  And then it turns out that they actually have significant consequences in your life. Heather believes based on very strong evidence that has emerged that Cipro, which we took when we were(...) working in the field.
• 2:17:19
  The Flora Quinn alone, sir. Right.
• 2:17:21
  And so she, you know, had an Achilles tendon bust and her other one, she's ready for it to happen anytime, you know.
• 2:17:28
  So the point is, that's like months of debilitation and limitation of a body that was healthy before you took this.
• 2:17:40
  And, you know, that information wasn't even available at the time.(...) So the fact that they have found a font small enough to get you to ignore things that they already do know should not dissuade you. It should get a magnifying glass and look at the fine print because what's in there has an impact on your life like you won't believe.
• 2:18:06
  Yeah, something else I wanted to, oh, yeah, yeah. One more thing I just wanted to make sure is in this podcast somewhere. You talk about the fact that many of these drugs, there's no long-term data.(...) That is in and of itself negligent, but it also hides a whole second layer of this racket.
• 2:18:26
  If you have somebody who is experiencing some sort of dysregulated psychological state and you have a drug that has a psychological impact and you say, well, I think we know what to do about your dysregulated state. You just take one of these in the morning and one of them at night or whatever they tell you.
• 2:18:47
  The point is, well, anything that has a impact on your mind will feel novel and it will maybe disrupt whatever dysregulation you had. And so the point is if what you're trying to do is to get a study to say, actually, people who suffer from this pathology had less of it in the eight weeks following they're initiating this protocol and then we're not going to measure anything, what you don't spot are all of the cases in which it was just simply the novelty of something that felt different that caused a disruption of a pathology that then came right back later on. And so, you know, what a wonderful business model to have drugs that don't work, but can be used to create a study that makes them look as if they do work and then it's almost impossible to get off them.(...) Right?
• 2:19:41
  Brilliant. And I think to this idea of work, which is such an interesting word because of course what does work mean, it's entirely in the eye of the beholder.
• 2:19:53
  I think these drugs for a certain percentage of people can feel really helpful, especially when taken for the, for the, in the short term, because they do have real effects on the body. I mean, if you get panic attacks when you fly in an airplane, putting aside the fact that like human beings, are we meant to be in the sky like close to, you know, in these giant machines and all the chem, like putting all that aside, if you get panic attacks, it might be really helpful to take a Klonopin before you fly across the country. And, and, and, you know, if you're informed about that Klonopin, like all the power to you, if that is the choice you make. But where I think we get, we get all twisted up as a culture is the fact that we,(...) it's really the language that we use to talk about both these diagnoses themselves and about these drugs. So when you're being told, Oh, you have a mental illness called anxiety disorder or panic disorder.
• 2:20:57
  It's a, it's a brain-based illness. And like, here's a medicine, you know, that is a misleading, that is an untrue statement that is misleading you and, and will that story itself will shape what your experience is of yourself, of the drug. But if you say, if you're the kind of person who freaks out every once in a while, for whatever reason, like benzodiazepines interfere with the GABA system, basically your body's fight or flight, you know, mechanism in a way that will help you feel sedated for if you use it in a one-off way.
• 2:21:38
  And like, here are other options at your disposal. Now make like, it's up to you to make the decision that's right for you. That Klonopin might be the right decision for some people, but it's about being using straightforward language that is not marketing language.
• 2:21:56
  And, and then, yeah, giving people the other options as well, so that they actually are able to make a choice because they can these drugs, you know, I know a lot of people who say, for whatever reason, I feel helped by my by this drug and who am I to say no, you're more you're not. But it's about the words that we're using to talk about them and to make sense of them.
• 2:22:20
  And then beyond that, it's totally subjective. Like if it's helpful for you to feel like I think about the effects those drugs had on me, they numbed me a lot.(...) They disconnected me from my body a lot. They quite they dulled my thinking a lot.
• 2:22:37
  There are plenty of moments in my life where that was helpful. But it wasn't because they were fixing an underlying pathology. They were just like someone having a glass of wine when they get anxious at a party.
• 2:22:48
  That wine might be the best thing you can do to go interact with your friends. But it's not because you have an imbalance of some chemical in your brain.
• 2:22:56
  Because you have a wine deficiency.
• 2:22:58
  That's a great point.
• 2:23:03
  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's very insightful.
• 2:23:11
  Seems to me, I don't know how much more there is that you want to cover. I think I see two more things, at least.
• 2:23:23
  One is I just I hope I hope I'm not telling tales out of school. If you want this removed, we take it out. But I do want to say that I have noticed in the time that I've come to know you through Brownstone that I've gotten to observe you with Cooper, your husband. And you have a very unusual relationship to be sure.
• 2:23:49
  The degree to which you are beautifully matched to each other is evident.
• 2:24:00
  And I don't know what you think about the degree to which you two have, I don't know, evolved together. I don't know how long you've been together, but you, you obviously have struggles that most people don't have based on the fact that you have left this pharmaceutical modality and have had to sort of discover yourself already as an adult.
• 2:24:32
  And having a partner who is ready to ante up and become part of that sort of dynamic process seems to me, I don't want to say necessary, but certainly it looks useful.
• 2:24:47
  But is there anything to say about(...) the role that your relationship has in the highly functional way that you are now interacting with the world?
• 2:25:03
  For sure.(...) And I love the question.
• 2:25:06
  And it will Cooper, because he had his own trajectory through(...) the at the time ADD, but now ADHD vortex, which led him to his own polypharmacy ride.
• 2:25:28
  You know, we met because we each had had these experiences and then bumbled along enough post coming off of these drugs to find our way to work in this field of people who are rethinking the mental health industry.
• 2:25:48
  And so by the time we met each other, we, we were both kind of through this profoundly disruptive and lengthy life chapter that had basically taught us how not to be in our bodies, the kinds of relationships not to have the way not to treat ourselves, we'd learn, we'd had so many fuck ups and mistakes made so many mistakes and learn so many lessons that by the time we met, we were both I guess I would have I was 34.(...) And he was 34.
• 2:26:29
  We're both like, okay, like, we know what matters, each of us knew what mattered to us, what we cared about our philosophy of living. And so it just felt like it did feel a bit like destiny in the sense that it made it all extra worth it everything we'd each been through.(...) But but I think what has helped us navigate eight, I guess eight years now together,(...) where we work with each other, because Cooper is the executive director of inter compass initiative.
• 2:27:01
  (...) And we run, you know, our group support program together for withdrawal and all that.(...) So working with your spouse from home together for years, day after day, has has enabled us to get through enough difficult experiences together.
• 2:27:24
  And, you know, in my case, especially just all my deep wounds that I still haven't healed that maybe I'll never heal, but that's kind of beside the point, I don't necessarily care anymore about that. But the deep patternings, like the grooves of these patterns in me from childhood and psychiatry, that are still there, and can crop up their nasty heads every once in a while. Like, for example, I'm primed to distrust everyone and everything all the time, for all kinds of reasons, but it's my like base baseline operating assumption is do not take anything at face value ever. When that comes up in a marriage, it can, it can make for some difficult conversations, but we have, we show each other grace. And we don't take ourselves so seriously, because we've, we both know the trenches we've come from. And,(...) and we know what matters to us. And so I think it's, it's, we have our struggles as all couples do, but we, we know enough from having struggled enough that they don't have to really mean anything about our bond to one another.
• 2:28:46
  And I think that, you know, for anyone who's been through their own struggles,(...) and maybe worries as I once did, will I ever be able to be in a relationship? Will I ever be able to trust anyone will ever will anyone ever want to be in a relationship with me? I have found that leaning into my, my wounds, my, you know, the dark side of me, like just owning it, leaning into it, not trying to deny that it exists in me, or compartmentalize myself, like that's actually where that's what's helped. And Cooper doing the same. That's what's helped deepen our bond is what's helped me my work helps me write my book.(...) Just leaning into the darkness I have found is, is, is an essential part of being fully human.
• 2:29:36
  Being in relationships, being in your body, being in the world,(...) just owning it.
• 2:29:43
  We're all fucked up in our own ways. We all have our struggles. On varying to varying degrees.(...) And the mental health industry is as powerful as it is, I believe, because we've all managed to really be tricked into thinking that it's just you having a hard time to go deal with it. So you can fit right back into this beautiful, happy balance put together social order. And of course, that's pure illusion.
• 2:30:09
  Yeah, I think that's exactly right is that you you have a lot better evidence from your own life from inside your own skull than you have about the next nearest person. And so, you know, people do have the sense that they are experiencing something that nobody else is maybe less so now that the internet allows an awful lot of sharing, but maybe less so now that the internet allows an awful lot of sharing, but the tendency to think, to not figure out that most of the stuff is going on with other people too, and they're just, you know, not showing it.
• 2:30:46
  That's really important. I do wonder, now that I hear you talk a little bit about your relationship with Cooper, if part of what I'm seeing is this.
• 2:30:56
  Heather and I got together very young.
• 2:31:00
  And that always struck me as weird at first.
• 2:31:04
  In retrospect, I think it's great because you grow together, right? You go through being young adults together, and that allows you to form a bond that you can't if you get together later. But you and Cooper both had some sort of a developmental interruption from pharma.
• 2:31:25
  And so, I wonder if you didn't do something like that later on, because you had to figure out how the circuitry works, and having you both do it allowed you to form a very unusual and very functional relationship.
• 2:31:40
  I love that. Yeah, it does feel like we're(...) youngins in many ways, which just makes it easier to embrace oneself when you fuck up, because we are figuring it out.(...) And I think I'll always be figuring it out. And that's great. I don't have to pretend I figured anything out ever. I can cry if I feel like I need to cry. I can say that I feel awkward right now in this encounter. If I feel like I'm being awkward, I can just name it. I don't need to pretend. I'm like, "Wow, just being real. Who'd have thought?" It actually feels pretty fucking nice.
• 2:32:24
  Well, you and Cooper, I used to tell people that I had a piece of advice about marriage. And it's not a very nice piece of advice, but do not even consider marrying anybody who doesn't have a sense of humor about themselves. And I think you and Cooper both show an excellent sense of humor about yourselves, which is, of course, the best tool you could hope for to figure out how to navigate a life that is constantly confusing and full of difficult or impossible to solve puzzles.
• 2:32:59
  Humor is essential. And there's a lot of... I mean, some of my ex-patient friends and I, we will laugh so hard cracking jokes about psych word experiences and all the ways that the programming of being psychiatrists plays out in the most awkward, ridiculous ways in life today. And we just laugh about it. And I do think that humor, we need much more of it than we have. I'm a really bad joke teller. I don't even know how to tell jokes. I'm not funny in that way, but I do like talking about... I mean, there's so much dark humor to share in about experiencing the inside of the mental health industry.(...) And it's an important part of the kind of reclamation process, taking yourself back. I mean, that's why I wrote my book. I realized I gave the story of my life to the system through these critical years where I was meant to be figuring out who the fuck I am and how I fit into this world.(...) And so if I'm going to take it back, I have to figure out what really happened back there for real.
• 2:34:17
  And the beautiful thing is stories are always changing. And I'm sure five years from now, if I reread "Unshrunk," I'll be like, "Wow, I don't make sense of myself in that way anymore." And like, what a beautiful thing. Nothing...(...) Whenever boxed into any story of self, it's always evolving as it should be.
• 2:34:36
  Perfect. Well, I will say getting to know you has been delightful and I'm looking forward to seeing you at future Brownstone events.(...) Your book,"Unshrunk," is out as of... Did you say the 17th of the 18th? 18th of March 2025.
• 2:34:58
  People should pick up a copy of this book. And I'm looking forward to the sequel in which you tell us what you've figured out in the next five years of this crazy journey that you're on.
• 2:35:11
  Where can people find you?
• 2:35:14
  You can find me at my website, lauradelano.com. You can learn about and connect with Inner Compass Initiative at theinnercompass.org.
• 2:35:25
  Please join us there. We have a community of wonderful people who are all supporting one another through this journey. We have a free step-by-step tapering manual that you can use to literally teach yourself. Everything I started to talk about on this call, it's all there for free. We have tons of resources on how to read a drug label, on each drug class.
• 2:35:50
  Please come find us there and find me at my website. And thanks so much for having me on, Bret. It's an honor to be here and you and Heather are really important friends in my life. And I'm so grateful to know you both.
• 2:36:02
  Well, it's been wonderful. Thank you for joining me and thank you for writing this book and for helping people get out of a really diabolical situation. It's noble work and I admire you for doing it.
• 2:36:19
  Thank you. There's a lot of hope and no one's ever sentenced to any stories. So I hope any of you out there who feel that way and trust that there's something for you if you just keep going, keep being open.
• 2:36:34
  Excellent. Well, Laura Delano, thank you so much for joining us and for everybody else. Thanks for watching.