Transcript of #678 - Psych Med Withdrawal Expert Laura Delano

Today's guest is an author and founder of the Inner Compass Initiative. She wrote Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. We talk about mental health, getting onto medicines, and then how to get off of them if you want to or need to. I had a fascinating conversation and I'm thankful for her time. Today's guest is Ms. Laura Delano.

Shine on me and I will follow you.

Uh, Laura Delano.

Yep.

Am I saying that correctly?

Yep.

Excellent.

Delano.

Yep.

Thank you for joining us today. Uh, you wrote a book called Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. Uh, I wanna talk about that today. Um, I wanna talk about my own journey with antidepressants and, uh, with trying to get off of the medications, um, and what that's been like for me. Or I want to discuss that with you. I also want to iterate that 1 in 6 Americans right now are taking mental health drugs.

Yep.

And that's even higher amongst college students. And I want to talk about how to properly get off medication, what that's like for people in that journey. But first, I want to hear about your story. You've had kind of a, so far, lifelong journey with mental health and medication. Is that fair to say?

Yeah. Going back to childhood.

Okay. And is it okay if we start there just so our listeners are like kind of clued in on how you got here?

Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Connecticut in an affluent town. I was born to a family who had a lot of resources. So, you know, private school, all my material needs met, like on paper. I just had this really, wonderful life. And I was always, quote unquote, good at school. Like, I could just sit down and do rote tasks, like, well. It never bothered me, or I never got bored with it. And so I just, I kind of was one of these girls who had it all together. Good student, I was a good athlete.

What sport did you play?

Well, squash was my main sport through college, but, you know, when I was younger, like tennis, field hockey, basically all the textbook prepster.

Oh, rich sports.

WASPy.

Yeah.

Yeah, picture the most stereotypical New England WASPy prepster, and that's right here. Literally down to the all-whites on the tennis court, that's me.

That's good.

So yeah, so I just had it all together. And then when I was 13, there I was, I was president of the middle school, I had straight A's, I was a nationally ranked squash player, I had it all together. And I was looking in the mirror one night brushing my teeth, and I just, Started looking deeper and deeper into my eyes. And then I just slowly— everything around me started to go black, and I left space and time, and I was just, like, floating in, like, what felt like outer space, looking at this girl in the mirror. And I was like, who is she? Who is she? Who is she? And then I realized this is a stranger. And I— when I came to, I was, like, terrified by this out-of-body experience. I didn't know what to make of it. And the only conclusion I could draw was, like, I must not have a real self. I must be a robot programmed to perform well. But, like, who am I? What do I care about? What really matters to me? And I realized I didn't know the answer. And I felt immediately like my whole life had changed, and I was just aware suddenly that I was imprisoned by these adults around me.

And I just freaked out and didn't know what to do, knew I couldn't tell anyone about this experience. And so I just pretended it hadn't happened. And I just tried to, like, continue on being the good girl. But that, you know, compartmentalization, like, wasn't sustainable. And so I eventually began spinning out. I started cutting myself. I was, like, fantasizing about death. I started acting out at home, like, hitting my mom and screaming and cursing. And my parents were just like, what has happened?

Did you think you were realizing something? Like—

So I'm— I love that you're asking that because in retrospect, I'm like, holy cow, I was having an ego death. Like, what could have been this profoundly liberating, like, I'm so much more than the self, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Like, it could have gone that way. But I think because, like, I grew up in this particular environment, like, no one was reading philosophy and, like, into psychedelics. I had no frame of reference to head that way. So instead I concluded I don't have a real self. And so I just, I couldn't, Bear that what felt like my reality for very long, and I did end up like really spinning out at home. I kept everything together outside of the home, but at home I would fall apart, and my poor parents just didn't know what to do. They were terrified; they were exhausted, and so they eventually, you know, realized like we need to take her to a professional. And this was in the mid-nineties. I was born in '83, so I'm an elder millennial. So then in the mid-nineties, not the whole mental health thing wasn't. a part of the cultural zeitgeist in the way that it is now, especially for young people. So it was this very private thing. We weren't meant to talk about it, you know, that I was going to this therapist.

Oh yeah, it was such taboo then.

Yeah. And, you know, my parents, you know, God bless them, like, because they didn't see anyone else having problems around them. They're like, oh my gosh, we're the only people in our town who has a daughter who's going through this. Of course, in retrospect, I'm like, we were all pretty messed up in this intense town that we were all in, but it felt very—

It sounds like kind of a microcosm over there.

Yeah. It was a very, like, Stepford Wives kind of place.

For sure.

And so they sent me to a therapist. The therapist sent me to a psychiatrist. I was 14 by that time. And in 1 hour, the psychiatrist told me, you know, all this anger and these outbursts and this irritability you're having, these are symptoms of mania. And the fact that you're cutting yourself and you're depressed, these are symptoms of depression. You have a lifelong brain illness called bipolar disorder, but don't worry, there are medications you can take. You can live a good life. She'd seen me for 1 hour. I was 14 years old. And she put me on Depakote and Prozac.

How did they diagnose that, just so I know?

Good question. It's literally through just observation. So you just describe how you're feeling, you describe what you're doing, and then the psychiatrist, in their subjective opinion, runs through the kind of checklist that they've been trained to go through with the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So it's like, oh, 5 out of 7 is this, 4 out of—

You said the DSM. What is it?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's copyrighted by the American Psychiatric Association. There's a lot of industry influence behind it. They get a lot of funding from drug companies, and it's literally— it's called the Bible of psychiatry, and it's what these diagnoses from— the diagnoses from the DSM are what open doors for people to get treatment for billing. It's a very powerful book.

Okay.

But it's completely subjective. This is not a scientific text. It's literally the opinions of psychiatrists. Like, that's what these diagnoses are made on the basis of.

Does that make it somewhat scientific, though, that it's at least psychi— it's not like just a random person guessing?

Yeah, well, for the DSM to be scientific, it would need to be both reliable and valid. So basically, the categories themselves would need to be real, meaningful, like, measurable categories, and the same person would need to be getting the same diagnosis from multiple clinicians. If those 2 factors were in place, you could say that this was a scientifically valid and reliable text, but it's not. They don't. If you look at— clinicians will give all kinds of different diagnoses to the same person. Bipolar disorder, as an example, like, there's no measurable pathology in your brain. There's no abnormal blood tests. There's no— it's just based purely on observation.

Were there, like, any, like, biological tests or medical tests that they ran to determine if you had bipolar disorder?

And there aren't any for any of these diagnoses.

No, there weren't?

No.

Wow.

To this day, there aren't. Even for something like schizophrenia. Like, none of these Diagnoses have any valid replicable— there's nothing, there's no test of any kind, medical test of any kind.

Yeah. It says right here, bipolar disorder cannot be measured with a single physical test, like a blood test or an MRI. Instead, doctors and mental health professionals measure and diagnose it through a comprehensive clinical evaluation. And you're saying after only 1 hour they had determined this?

Yeah.

And a lot of people get a diagnosis in 15 minutes. And what's amazing about it is that because we have all come to believe in these diagnoses as these lifelong incurable things, like, you can manage them, but once you have this diagnosis, you have it forever. Like, if you pause and think about that for a minute, like, to tell a 14-year-old girl who you just met an hour ago, you have a lifelong incurable disease in your brain.

Huh.

Like, it's a pretty potent thing to say to someone.

Yeah, especially at 14. She's got enough going on.

And isn't adolescence— I mean, in retrospect, I see, like, adolescence is literally when we have a crisis of self. Like, who the fuck am I? Like, how do I fit into this world? Like, how do I socialize? What do I care about?

Yeah, what do I listen to? Who am I? Yeah, how do I dress? Like, how do I find out what's going on inside of me? All of that stuff.

Yeah. And I think because the crisis I was going through was this deep existential spiritual crisis of self, I was especially susceptible to being told who I was.

Understood.

Because I was, and I think a lot of us are, I don't know if you relate to this too, but when I first got the bipolar diagnosis, I rejected it. As that 14-year-old girl, I knew intuitively, this makes no sense. I'm having a healthy response to this really intense social environment I'm in. But a few years later, 'cause I was put on those meds, Depakote and Prozac, so the so-called mood stabilizer. Depakote's actually an anticonvulsant that's not even to this day approved for psychiatric use in kids, but I was put on it back then, and it's a very widely prescribed psych med in kids today. And then Prozac at the time was not approved for use in kids, so I was just put right on it. And for the following years, I managed to not really take them regularly. I went away to boarding school. I kind of ran away from I tried to run away from what that psychiatrist told me. But by 18, I was still playing the game, the performance game, and I'd gotten into Harvard, and I was going to play squash at Harvard. Literally, it's almost cringeworthy how this Type A perfectionist New England girl, I was so trapped in this.

I knew it was all bullshit, but I didn't know how to get out. And so there I was at Harvard, And hoping, like, by then maybe I'd have figured it all out and I'd be okay. And of course I wasn't. And so it was at that point that I was just so desperate for relief because I was, like, doing tons of coke and ecstasy, and I wasn't sleeping, and I was, like, so spun out freshman fall of college. I was a total mess. And I was like, what is wrong with me? Like, I can't— I want to die. I can't live this way anymore.

So something was wrong.

Oh yeah, I mean, I was really struggling. Like, this wasn't like, oh, she was just having a little bump in the road. I was like completely a mess.

And were you still taking the medicines, the Depakote and the—

No, when I spun out that first fall of college, I was not on any meds.

Okay.

But I was definitely like drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs, just overall like not taking care of myself.

What things were showing up in your life that were like, okay, now this is— things are getting too too rough? I mean—

I mean, I think a lot of it was just I wasn't sleeping. I was really reckless in my behaviors. Just like, you know, I'd be like super coked up and I'd like climb to the top of a building and I'd be like stuck on a roof and I'd be like, what? And it'd be 3 in the morning, you know, like just these ridiculous things. And I'd hang out, you know, with like the bums in the square where, you know, in Harvard Square and and, like, smoke with them. And just— I just, like, wasn't— I felt so far away from my peers.

Mm-hmm.

And I was— I couldn't stop thinking about dying. Like, I just couldn't see a way through it. I just was so overwhelmed by this, like, deep sense that I was this fraud who would never fit into the world around her. And my mind wouldn't shut off. And, you know, just paranoid thoughts like, everyone hates you. They're just pretending to like you. Like, you're a piece of shit. You just—

Sounds like a nightmare.

Yeah. And you'll get a kick out of this. My breaking point was I came out as a debutante the winter of my first year at Harvard. And I was like in a wedding dress on stage at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. And, you know, the whole thing is So absurd. Like, the tradition of it is like—

Well, it's tradition.

Yeah, but it's like a meat market. Like, historically, it was like your daughter is now ready to be, you know, married off or whatever. And, you know, you have to curtsy and do these like wild spins.

Oh yeah, I'll go to like— sometimes they'll have those in the South. They've had them over the years. Oh yeah.

Have you been to them?

I've been to— in Natchez, Mississippi, my little nephew was in one for a bit. And so I'd go over there and watch him.

Was he like an escort? Of one of the girls?

Yeah, he was like, he had a sword or whatever.

Whoa, you had swords down there? Oh, we didn't have swords. That's cool.

They wield weapons at the ones in the South, so it gets a little bit different.

Of course you did. I love it.

Okay, so you're a debutante. You have all this going on on the outside, looks one way, but you feel a total different way on the inside.

Yeah, and that was the icing on the cake. Like, I'm literally on a stage doing curtsies. Like, what? This is a practical joke. Like, how is this my life? And like, how do I get out of it? So suicide felt like the only way out.

So it sounds like you had some psychosis going on.

I probably could have been given a psycho— a diagnosis of, like, psychotic disorder not otherwise specified or something. I mean, I definitely had— especially when I wasn't sleeping, I would have these very kind of expansive thoughts where I was, like, deconstructing reality.

Yeah.

And, you know, language is a social construction, so, like, the words I'm using to think these thoughts, it's all— I would just get totally swept up in all the postmodern stuff. Like, I just got all swept up in that. And so I just That winter, as an 18-year-old, I was just desperate for help. And to go back to this whole DSM diagnosis thing, that desperation drove me to just wanna, of my own volition, go back to psychiatry and just be like, tell me what is wrong with me. I need your help. I need to understand why I feel this way, and I need relief. And I always try to pause on that whenever I'm talking about my story because there's, I don't know if you felt the same when you were first diagnosed with whatever your diagnosis is. I can't wait to dive in more into it, but I felt such relief. Like, I'm not a bad person. I'm not a fuck-up. I'm not lazy. I'm sick. And now I have a treatment that's gonna help me get better. Like, hallelujah. Like, that's how it felt.

Oh yeah. I, um, yeah, I can relate to being like, okay, something is gonna come and help me. Finally, there's help is on the way. I can certainly relate to that. And we'll talk about some of my experience after a little bit, but I wanna hear more.

Okay.

So you get this diagnosis and this feels helpful.

It feels so helpful. I feel such relief, like immediate relief. I don't have to fight anymore. I don't have to keep desperately searching for answers and to figure myself out. This doctor knows what's wrong with me and he has the solution. I'm good to go. And so, of course, the kind of perfectionist type A person that I was, I immediately applied that to being a patient. So I was just, like, so diligent about going to therapy and tracking how I was feeling and reporting symptoms. And I just— it became very quickly, like, the void of meaning and purpose that my life had previously held was filled with a new purpose. treatment. Like, you're a patient, and your purpose is to get treatment. And so I, you know, was put back on meds. And then, you know, quickly 2 became 3. And, you know, I would be going in every week, sometimes twice a week to do therapy. I was going to McLean Hospital, which is like a 20-minute bus ride from Harvard. And it's like one of the oldest, you know, most established—

Hospitals.

institutions in the country. It's where Sylvia Plath went.

Oh, I can imagine it's prestigious if it's there, 'cause the best doctors are right next door.

Exactly. And so I think that's, with my background coming from a family with socioeconomic means, I always had the best of the best care, which is an important part of my story that we'll come back to. So yeah, I just had this new sense of purpose and momentum, and I was like, we're gonna figure this out together, my psychiatrist and me. But with the passage of time, inevitably, I'd be on some med, and then I'd have sleep problems or panicky feelings, and then I'd get on another med, or they'd up the dose, or they'd switch. And just before I knew it, I was on a handful of meds. But at the time, this felt like a really good thing because—

Like progress?

Yeah, because more meds is better. Like, the more they're caring for me and the more they're giving me, like, the better it's gonna be. Like, it just—

and so, yeah. If you're bleeding profusely, you would think that having more bandages would be helpful.

That's such a good analogy. This is exactly it. And what was really this, you know, what was insidious about that too, and now if you look at our culture of, like, how girls and young women in this kind of therapeuticized culture that we're in, at the time, what started to happen for me is I began to feel like the more meds I was on, the more special I was, and the more people would understand how much pain I was in.

Like the debutante of diazepam or something.

Oh my gosh, yes. I love that, totally. I'm up on this stage, look at me, I'm so sick, I have my, baggie of 5 pill bottles. And now I don't only have bipolar disorder, I also have social anxiety disorder and eating disorders that eventually came.

You can see I'm Elizabeth Taylor, yes.

Like, I am so important. I mean, and that's, I think now you're seeing with, 'cause this was again, back in the mid-late '90s, early 2000s. Now it's like, this is how girls and young women grow up finding a sense of self and belonging and purpose and meaning, like especially on TikTok.

Oh, it's like a character now.

Yes, totally. Here's my list of diagnoses. Here's my list of meds. It's like, oh, now I know how to slot in and where I belong and who my tribe is. And so that was really just taking off back in the early 2000s. And it was very much a part of my journey through my teens and 20s with all this stuff was how much of an identity it gave me.

Yeah, you were like Amelia Earhart out there. You were just out there flying through the—

Flying through the psych wards.

And landing who knows where. They still haven't found her.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so, of course, as I'm this good patient, doing everything my doctor's telling me, reporting my symptoms, we're up in the meds, this, that, my life isn't actually getting better. It's actually falling more and more apart. And I did manage to graduate college, but by the time I did, I had to take a year off. I'd been hospitalized. I was super suicidal. But because this, like, slow creep of meds and, you know, this, like, prescription cascade is the term that a lot of people use, it was just this, like, slow unfolding of it. I didn't even really realize it was happening. And just because my journey with psychiatry started when I was a kid, like, I had no reference point. I had no, like, baseline sense of who I was as a person. prior to meds because, of course, like—

You were just developing.

Yeah. And, like, I was having an identity crisis to begin with that got me on all of it. And so through my 20s, I just, like, kept falling more and more apart, and I, like, gained, you know, literally, like, £70 over—

over—

by the time I was in my mid-20s.

And was that attributed to medication, you think?

Well, the first— I mean, certainly the antipsychotics that I was eventually on, I mean, those are well documented to cause all kinds of kinds of metabolic issues. And, you know, tons of people on long-term antipsychotics end up getting diabetes. But I think what the meds also did is they— and I didn't realize this at the time, but they disconnected me from my body's, like, signals. So—

Your instincts.

Yeah. And I just— I didn't— am I hungry right now? Am I satiated? Like, I don't even know. But, like, this tastes good, and I'm kind of numbed out, So I'm gonna eat more of it. So I was definitely binge eating. It wasn't like the weight just came on and I wasn't changing what I was eating, but—

Well, your sensory system gets kind of hijacked in a lot of ways, I find, by medication.

Yeah.

For years, I couldn't tell sometimes how I felt about things, which is one of the main reasons I've tried to get off so many times is because I wanna know how I feel. Like if I'm gonna choose, like, or if I'm gonna get married or like, I don't wanna, partner with my wife. And then one day I get off meds and I'm like, I don't even like this. It's like you get scared. For me, I get scared of the choices I'm gonna make 'cause I don't know if they're fully mine.

Yeah. Oh my God. I feel, I cry all the time, by the way. So if I get teary, I had a feeling I would because I've heard you speak about that. Yeah.

I can't cry anymore on the internet or somebody's gonna come and get me. So I have to take it easy. But I'm here for you if you do.

I mean, to me, crying is such an essential part. I actually think that when I authentically cry, feel this, like, urge to cry, I'm like, do it, sister. I, like, say it to myself because people are so uncomfortable with crying. And as you just said, like, people freak the fuck out.

Yeah.

And they're like, what? Can't compute. What is happening? And sometimes I'll be, like, giving a talk to a big room of, you know, psychiatrists and people, and if I feel myself getting teary, I'm like, oh yeah, let it rip. Because I know it's gonna make them, like, so uncomfortable. And that's part of our problem. Like, that is part of why we're in this crisis as a society is that we are so disconnected from like what it means to be human, which is you emote and you cry sometimes.

Yeah. Oh, I was crying this morning at a Bible study.

Oh, wow. So you were moved to tears or was it like, was it, yeah, what was it?

People were sharing, different people sharing different stuff or me talking about something, just a mix of things. And sometimes it's like, it's not really crying. Sometimes it's sweat, I feel like, from the heavy shit I got in here. It's like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm holding up some heavy shit in here and sometimes you gotta sweat outta your eyes.

Oh yeah.

You know, it's like, this isn't tears. This is sweat from like, just me, like just from like how heavy some of this shit is sometimes. And I'm not even complaining about it. Like sometimes it's like, yes, part of it is like this feeling that you have to look away if you're tearing up or something. It's like, I don't know how some of that became such a shame thing, you know? Now if you're just being a crybaby about something, that's kind of different. But I think if you're just feeling something, that seems pretty normal to me. And sometimes feelings are heavy, and so your eyes got to sweat.

Oh my gosh, that's poetry. And I mean, it gets right to the heart of what I think the real crisis is that we're in here as a culture, which is we have forgotten what it means to be alive.

I agree.

And I think it's A lot of this has been fueled by the mental health industry, but it's more broadly just like consumer culture where we're just bombarded all the time with, do you feel uncomfortable? Like, buy this, eat this, do this. You know, it's just, we've been so inculcated into thinking that discomfort and pain is a problem to fix. And we don't even realize that it's happened to us.

Yes.

And then when you have these, like, I do think crying is almost like a, a political— it's like political activism, it feels to me, because when— it is such a powerful experience to feel a room of people, like, energetically unsettled when I'm crying with them, because they also feel me in my power. Like, I am crying and, like, incredibly centered in myself and integrated. And they're almost like, I don't understand this. I don't understand. And I think more of us who are in touch with tears, the sweat, the sweat of grief and rage and all of it.

Yeah, confusion.

Totally. Oh, and alienation and loneliness and—

Dude, if I saw my brain somewhere on the side of the road, it would be sitting there. It would probably be smoking. I'm gonna be honest with you. It wouldn't chain smoke, but it would be having one.

And it would be like slumped over.

No, no, it would be still hopeful.

Okay, okay.

But it would be, I think, and it would probably be eating some peanuts or something. It would have a little pocket full of peanuts.

No seed oils on the peanuts, I hope.

No, no, not at all. These are ones that he just picked out of a field.

Dry roasted.

They naturally grew dry roasted, those ones. God's, God's nuts. And then—

God's nuts.

And then he might be tearing up a little. That's fair. That makes me tear up to think about your little brain on the side of the road. Hey, look, he's hitchhiking.

He's headed somewhere.

Oh, and he is going to get picked up by a really cute old man in a pickup truck who's like, I'm going 20 miles south. And your brain's gonna say, that's my direction. Get on in, kid.

That's romantic. I like that a little bit.

Oh my gosh, here I am with the tears in my eyes. But I think, you know, I just— because I was put on meds as a teenager, and so many people are right now, like you said at the start, 30% of college kids have been on psych meds. We have 8.2% of kids collectively on some kind of psych med.

That's unbelievable when you think about it.

It's wild. There are 4 million kids on psych meds, and this is like age 5 and up, like tiny children.

Have we gotten lazy in how we try to solve psychiatric problems?

I think I wouldn't call it our laziness as much as I would say that modern society, like, modern industrialized consumer society, this, like, overly individualistic, you know, it's you on your own, you're meant to succeed and perform. It's the— this evolution of our modern culture itself that has actually made it impossible for us to, like, really deeply understand suffering in the way that, you know, in the grand scheme of human history, we used to understand it. And so I don't think it's about laziness as much as it is, like, there's been a collective forgetting of what it means to suffer and how to bear suffering and how to make sense of suffering. But the world we live in also makes it impossible for so many people who might actually want to, you know, explore what they're going through in, in a deeper way. It makes it impossible because, like, you got to pay the bills, 9-to-5 job. Like, you have mouths to feed, you have rent to pay.

Right. We've made this society that's so demanding of you to do that you don't even have time to be or to self-reflect or to have a relationship with yourself. Um, or, or sometimes with other people. You know what's hard? Dealing with a website. The amount of time and effort it takes to do it right is ridiculous. That's why I'm so grateful for Modify. Their team has handled my websites for over a decade now. They do it for us and they've done well, and they're the real deal. Louisiana-based, super easy to work with, and they just can't stop making websites. They've launched over 1,000 of them, always improving on quality, efficiency, and user experience. Modify Designs builds and manages high-performing Webflow websites for small businesses and organizations that want to look professional online without the headache. They offer on-demand web design from a top-gun team of experts, a dedicated designer from day one, and fast response times backed by unmatched support. If you're ready for the last website you'll ever need, head to modiphy.com/theo for 50% off your build-out cost. That's modiphy.com/theo. They don't fuck around. This was a video by James Lee the other day, and, uh, he investigates a lot of this sort of thing, just what's going on in society.

If you can't see this chart at home, it's just showing that since 1985, on average, rent prices have gone up 140%, whereas income has only gone up, it looks like about 38 to 40%. Yeah.

I mean, and if what's the— I'm so glad you pulled this up because this encapsulates the whole problem here. If you're struggling to make ends meet, and, like, you have— there's, like, a— there's significant— there's significant consequences to not being able to make ends meet. Of course you're going to feel depressed. Of course you're going to feel anxious. But what happens right now, the way our mental health industry has unfolded, is if you go sit down in front of a diagnosing mental health professional, you're going to be told you have an illness in your brain that needs pills. When, in fact, you're actually having A healthy, logical, commonsensical, natural response to what is the actually sick situation, if you're going to use that word.

Right. Yeah. It's more like that our society is sick or that our environment has an illness that we then get diagnosed with by looking at our society.

Yep. Yeah.

And feeling how we feel within that society. And I'm not saying that some people do not have real diagnoses. I'm not saying that some people don't have real issues, and I'm not denouncing anybody that's on medication.

Of course.

We're just taking a look at things. That's all we're doing here, and we're using our own journeys to kind of do that, right?

Of course, yeah. I think people often get confused when you're critiquing the diagnostic paradigm. People sometimes think you're saying that people aren't really struggling, losing it, going crazy, having breakdowns, and it's actually the opposite. by challenging this idea that all suffering is just, like, faulty brain chemistry, you're actually validating the reality of the suffering that people— and the madness and the breakdowns that people are going through. Because you're saying, like, you're having a very real response that may be, you know, completely derailing your life, but it's a response. It's not pathology. It's not you that you need to fix. What needs to be fixed is the situation and the culture. And I'm so glad you brought up the medication thing too, because people often, you know, hear me share my story or they read my book or whatever, and they're like, oh, she's anti-medication. She's shaming people who take medication. She's telling people to stop. Like you just said, like, this is not about being against these medications. I know tons of people who've been greatly benefited by taking these drugs. But what I am trying to do in my work is— get people to step back and question the information they've been given about the diagnoses and about the meds.

And because I believe that this is a problem of informed choice, we haven't been given all the information we need. And for people to make true choices for themselves, they need that information, which also includes information about not just the medications, but also alternatives to them.

Yeah.

Like, a lot of people don't even have options, like, because they can't afford them because they're trying to pay their crazy rent, you know, and they wish they had other options, but a lot of people don't have them. And like, I completely get why meds have become the first-line choice for so many people, 'cause they haven't been given anything else.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of functional medicine options out there these days. I'm not saying that those are as good or not. I'm just starting to experiment with some of those myself, but I know that there are functional medicine options out there. And also, I believe that there's bigger, darker entities at play that are happy if we are ill. It's easier to subjugate. What does subjugate mean? Am I using it right?

Yeah, to control, to dominate, to control.

Yeah, it's easier to subjugate if we're a little bit passive. If you're chasing the carrot the whole time, you know, it's easier. And it's interesting because we've come across some very, like, huge things that have happened in society recently, and you don't see a lot of, A lot of people—

Outrage?

Yes.

Protest?

You don't see much. You see some, but I think all of us are kind of shocked at like, you know, with the Epstein files, with choices that our government's making. When do people, you know, when is there something that gets us to stand up? And has that thing inside of us that makes us want to stand up, has that been compromised at some level that we weren't even aware? It was such a lullaby that we've been within.

Yeah, well, everyone's taking their outrage to their therapists instead of to the streets, instead of to their local politicians, instead to the voting booth.

Or everybody's putting a pill in their outrage.

Oh yeah.

That's what I want. Sometimes it's like, yeah, I just didn't know how to— I just like, what am I? Are these even some of my feelings that I'm feeling? I just didn't know. I haven't known sometimes when I'm on medicine. And, um, I didn't know how I felt about so many things in some ways. I didn't know what was being compromised inside of me at times, like how I, if it was affecting how I felt about, uh, family, how I felt about myself, if I could feel about myself. I, I've questioned even if antidepressants affect my relationship with my higher power too. And it's all kind of, um, yeah. So then when you take on the ideas that these antidepressants are, could be doing that, That makes— that's scarier than the, the reason why I got on 'em 20 years earlier was just 'cause I was getting out of a relationship and, and it was like kind of heartbreaking kind of stuff. So, okay, let's, let's get back into your story. You've gone through the debutante era. Where do you go from there?

Yeah, well, once I, you know, as, as I was saying, like after I had that total collapse, like around that time, then I went, back willingly to the mental health system, and I was basically just, tell me what's wrong with me and give me whatever you think I need to fix it. And so that was when I clicked into this new, like I said, this new sense of purpose and meaning. Like, this is what my life is about, just getting treatment so that I can finally one day feel okay in my skin. And so I really internalized this medicalized sense of myself. By which I mean this idea that I had a medical problem in my brain that had a medical solution, these prescriptions. And that just became the organizing principle of my life. I have a medical condition that I'm treating, and that's my number one priority. Everything else comes after it. And so the more I became this good patient, and the more treatment I sought, and the more therapy, more pills, my life is falling more and more apart. I'm getting physically sick, weight gain, you know, digestive issues, skin issues, my hair's falling out, sleep problems.

I'm getting more and more dysfunctional in my social relationships, just like really toxic situations with, with guys. I'm like losing friendships because I just can't stay connected and I can't feel bonded and I don't I can't feel intimacy, and my creativity's falling apart. Like, everything's falling apart more and more as I move through my 20s, being the good psychiatric patient on all these meds that are accumulating. And hospitalizations start, and I'm taking myself into the hospital. I'm just so desperate to lock me away from myself because I just feel like I can't live anymore. It gets to those points.

So you were feeling like that?

Oh yeah, totally. multiple hospitalizations. And by the time I was 25, I'd managed to graduate from college years earlier, but ever since hadn't been able to hold down a job, had been dependent on my family. And because I was born into a family who could take care of me, thank goodness, they kind of insulated me from what would've otherwise been, I don't even know what, like a group home, long-term institution. I don't even know what. And by age 25, there I was, like, totally disabled, almost £200, no friends. I'm, like, constantly, like, achy and getting sick all the time. I'm constantly thinking about, like, how meaningless this life is. And my psychiatrist says, like, you know, unfortunately, Laura, your bipolar disorder has progressed, and you now have treatment-resistant bipolar disorder.

Oh.

Which was, to me, The most hopeless message I could possibly receive because I had literally spent all of those years leading up to it focused on treatment because I believed it would one day help me. And I'd been told, like, you have this brain disease, like, this is the only thing that's really going to help you. And now you're telling me it's not going to fucking help me? Like, what? And it was at that point that I overdosed. Like, I, you know, it was not— it was I'd been suicidal for years, but in many ways, thinking about killing myself, similar to booze, when I was told a booze bag, thinking about killing myself ironically kept me going longer. Whether it was like, at least I could get—

Like why?

Between alcohol and suicide, it was like, at least I can get shit-faced tonight so that I don't care about what a mess my life is. And with suicide, it was, I always have that power. to end it so I can go another day. So it was like these, these, these two dark companions on my shoulders that had ironically, like, kept me going. And, you know, eventually it flipped, and I was like, it's time. I have poured my heart into getting help, like all these meds, all these hospitals, all these professionals. Look what I've put my family through. I'm a total mess. I can't work. I can't— support myself, and if this is all that's in store for me for the rest of my life because I have this incurable brain disease, this isn't a life worth living. And when I flatlined and medevac and—

Really?

Oh yeah, my parents were told, sign a do not resuscitate, she'll be a vegetable. It was like, God, I mean, this was a God thing.

And had you taken a lot of medicine that day?

Oh yeah, yeah.

On purpose?

I took a month's supply with a bottle of wine.

What kind of wine was it? Do you remember?

It was red wine. I don't know what kind. It was just like—

Probably something nice if y'all were rich, I bet.

No, but weirdly my—

Like something that came off a pirate ship or whatever.

Oh, that would be cool. No, it was like, you know, probably Barefoot. You know that one?

Oh, those were good for a while.

That was the era. This was 2008 when I tried to kill myself.

Yeah, Barefoot was popping.

Yeah, yeah.

And here you were barefoot, probably taking pills too. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. You're kind of shoeless, dude. I don't even think they let you keep your shoes because they have shoestrings in them.

Oh, oh yeah. If you're locked up in a psych ward, that's like, definitely they take any laces that you have.

Did you go to a psych ward?

4 times.

No way.

Yeah, yeah.

Can you take me into just what that's like a little bit?

Oh, I just laugh because people have this— if you haven't spent time yourself on a psych ward or visiting someone on a psych ward, you have this like, oh, it's like the spa. Like, go away and get some rest. People are gonna take care of you. You're literally all— any possession you have that could be— that they perceive as a potential weapon is gone. You're on this thin plastic mattress. And by the way, I should clarify, all my psych ward experiences were in fancy private hospitals.

Wow.

So I've been in state public institutions visiting people. I can talk about those in a minute. But my experience was the spot—

The nicer style. The nicer style.

The top of the line. you know, just a thin—

It sounds nice.

Okay, well, if you want, let me walk you through the day. So you wake up in the morning on your, like, stiff plasticky mattress.

And do you have a celly or not?

Um, is a celly a—

A roommate.

A roommate.

A celly.

Like C-E-L-L-Y.

Yeah.

Basically, yeah. So sometimes you'll have a private room. Like, I had one hospital I was in, you had your own private room. But at McLean, I had a roommate. And, you know, glaring fluorescent lights overhead. When you first get in, they check on you every 15 minutes, like, through the whole night. They shine a flashlight in your face to make sure you're still alive. And you're like, really, dude? I was just in here 15 minutes ago. But you wake up in the morning, and, you know, you kind of, like, stumble down to the nurse's station to get your morning meds, go into the dining room, and you get Like, even at a fancy place like McLean, like, it's not nice food. It's, like, you know, dried-out French toast and cereal boxes and that kind of thing. And then you basically just spend your day being coerced into going to these, like, super cheesy groups, like emotion regulation and anxiety management and, you know, family skills. And you're sitting there with, like, 22-year-old— Like, very bubbly young women for the most part who were like, here's the mood chart. Can you point, Theodor, which one you resonate with most this morning?

And then you pick the, like, sad face or the anxiety face.

Yeah, or the vape face. That's what I was thinking.

Oh, I wonder if they have vape faces on, because I haven't been locked up in so long, like, vapes didn't even exist. A vape face. What would it look like?

It'd just be a regular face, just kind of nonchalant or Mildly Chalant, just hitting a vape.

Oh, no.

I think anyway.

I don't know.

I'm just thinking out loud, but that's the one I'd probably pick most of the time. But I'd be aiming probably for the joyful face. Okay, so you're in there, and is any of it like you're doing family of origin work? Is there some more depth in there about it?

There's no depth happening there. It's all these, it's all very superficial. you know, my mom and I are getting into fights, because there's a whole group of patients with you, and it's like a 30-minute— so there's no deep work, there's no meaningful exploratory—

And is anybody chained up or anything like that in there?

People do get restrained if they are naughty.

Who's naughty in there? Was anybody? Any pervs in there?

Oh, thank goodness. There were definitely some per— I mean, I crossed paths with some strange guys in some of my psych ward experiences. But one restraint story, I talk about it in my book, is she was this young woman who was a student at MIT. I can't remember what part of Asia she was from, but she was from somewhere in Asia. She was really quiet. She'd gotten admitted because she was— I didn't even know why she'd gotten admitted at the time, but she was admitted. She didn't talk to anyone. She was just very quiet. And then one day someone delivered her flowers and the nurse, they obviously will check to make sure there's nothing bad in there.

Paraphernalia.

Yeah, paraphernalia. That was the word I was looking for. They gave her the flowers and she read the card and then she just threw them across the hallway and started screaming, blood-curdling screams, and she wouldn't stop. And the staff tried to get her to stop and just screaming, screaming. screaming. And then eventually staff literally physically picked her up and carried her and put her in the quiet room, and she got quiet.

Damn.

Which probably means she was injected with a tranquilizer.

Dang. They hit her with that dart, huh?

Yeah.

Were you able to find out what was in the card? What was so upsetting?

No, I never— because she never talked to any of us afterwards. And it was And I have tons of friends who I wasn't locked up with, but who I know from my work who've been restrained, put in 4-point restraints specifically. So I'm thinking of one guy I know, this big hulking guy. He'd been put on meds in college because one of his best friends died of an overdose, like an accidental overdose, and he was super spun out about it, as anyone would be. And so he wasn't— able to focus, and he started taking stimulants, and then he stopped sleeping. And any human being who stops sleeping is eventually going to get psychotic because that's literally what happens to any human brain. So he ended up getting sucked into the mental health system that way and got a bipolar diagnosis and eventually a schizophrenia diagnosis. And he was just put on all these meds, and he would take them for long periods of time, and then he'd stop them abruptly because he didn't know about withdrawal. And we're going to come back to that, I'm sure. And so he'd get all messed up, and then police would get involved, and then he'd be put in— what will happen sometimes to patients on wards is they'll get put in 4-point restraints.

So your wrists are restrained and your ankles are restrained, and they pin you down on your stomach, and they pull your pants down, and they inject you with a so-called medicine in your butt cheek.

Nuh-uh.

And just knock you out. And they'd leave him— he would tell me, they'd leave me for hours. I'd piss myself. That kind of thing happens.

So sometimes if things got severe, they would medicate people right on the spot.

Yeah, against their will. Yeah. And that never happened to me because I was always so compliant and I always did what I was told. And so after my overdose, when I was in a coma, it was like a wild thing.

Really?

I was intubated. Yeah, it was crazy. Catheter, everything. And I woke up, I go into all of it in my book. I really want you to read my book, Theo, 'cause I feel like, we have, just from hearing what you've shared online about, I just, yeah.

Okay.

It's, I love my book. I'm so proud of my book and I wrote it to help people.

Check back in with me in 2 months. Give me 2 months to read it. Will you?

Totally.

Is that a fair amount of time?

I also did the Audible recording. It's my voice. So if you like to listen to stuff when you're working out, but it's heavy and dark. And I go into this—

I've dated some heavy, dark women.

We heavy dark women, we're the way to go, I think. We're intense. We're a little, it takes a lot of energy to be with us. If my husband was here, he'd be like, but we—

No.

And I didn't mean it like that. I meant I've dated some heavier, darker women. That's what I meant. But I've also dated some women who have, who kind of like, yeah, are a little bit, have a lot more Eeyore in them than Tigger, I guess you would say. But anyway, we got to move on.

Anyway, back to the psych ward. That wasn't time to be on a personal basis. No, but so there I was on the psych ward after my overdose, waking up from a coma and death. That choice I made to kill myself, I hold it—

So it was an active choice to take your life?

Oh yeah. And to this day, I have deep respect for that choice I made because given the story I had been taught to believe about myself, that I had this treatment-resistant, incurable brain disease that I would never be able to manage, it was the logical choice to make.

Right. So that's something that I think as listeners that we got to understand a little bit more is that, or I'm not telling anybody to understand it, but this is something I would suggest because I'm realizing this more now, is that you're in this idea that there's no way out.

Yep.

So you're just kind of managing something and it's getting worse. So at a certain point, you've kind of medicated yourself into a corner, and it's like, what do you do then if there is no solution as far as you've known?

Well, you're being— yeah, exactly. You've been told there's no other solution. And that's the thing, is that I didn't realize at the time that that was a story I had been told that wasn't actually true. And I think, too, the urge to die, because I was suicidal for years, it was like I was saying, it was like a companion. Part of my life. And I realize now my urge to die was always actually a profound urge to live, just in an entirely different way from everything I knew. And so death felt like, I thought that meant death, but it actually meant really like a more symbolic death of the life that I was living, not literal death.

So you're saying, I want this, this, this version of life that I'm living, I don't want to live anymore.

Yeah. And so you think that means I have to kill myself. But I see now, I just didn't know what else it could mean. And of course, all these years later, this is another place where I'll get teary-eyed. That was 18 years ago.

Oh, I can't even imagine.

And had you told me in that, at age 27, after my overdose, like my life would look the way it looks now, never would've believed you. Like, no way. Like, no way in hell is it, it's not possible.

Wow.

And so, it took another 2 years after my overdose for my turning point to happen, for me to actually kind of wake up from all of this. And, oh yeah, sorry, my suicide attempt was 25. 27 was when I woke up. So yeah, I was 27. The previous 2 years after my overdose were like more of the same. I was still a mess, living with family, like totally disabled.

Did you try and get any pets, or what modalities did you use?

Oh, I couldn't have handled a pet. I wouldn't have been able to.

Really?

Yeah.

What about even a little gerbil or something like that?

Oh, gerbil. Wait, do you say gerbil down here? We say gerbil up there.

Nuh-uh.

Gerbil!

Yeah.

I like gerbil way better.

Oh yeah, gerbil.

Gerbil. It doesn't sound as nice as gerbil.

Yeah, gerbil sounds like it's from the streets or something. It's like he's from Memphis, you know what I'm saying?

No, but I picture him with little spectacles on and like a cup of tea.

Oh yeah.

Mr. Gerbil.

Yeah.

But anyways, no, I couldn't have had a gerbil. I couldn't have had a plant. I was like, taking a shower once a week was a really big deal. And yeah.

Oh, I've been that depressed before, a long time ago, but I've been that depressed where every moment feels so heavy.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like a war. You are literally fighting a battle every day, and when you put your head on the pillow and you haven't died, you're like, I did it. I won the battle today. And it's not sustainable. And that, of course, brings me back to just how some— it's not a coincidence that we have 65 million Americans on these meds, because you can only bear suffering for so long before you need relief. And that kind of like that sound of those pills in that capsule, it can really just, it brings so much promise until it doesn't.

Right.

And so for me, that turning point happened in 2010. I was 27. I was just gotten out of my last hospitalization, my second to last hospitalization. I'd quit drinking because, And by then, like I'd said earlier, booze became like a, you know, my go-to way of not killing myself was like getting drunk every night.

So you were on all these meds and drinking?

Oh yeah, 5 meds, including 3 milligrams of Klonopin. I was on 2 mood stabilizers, an antipsychotic, and an antidepressant, plus the benzo. Drinking, like for some reason I loved Harpoon IPA. Do you guys even have that down here?

No.

It's like a New England IPA beer. This was like before, the whole microbrewery thing happened. I'd either drink, you know, like a 6-pack.

I love how you're on all these pills and then you're like, and also I'm gonna have a Harpoon IPA.

6 of them. Like, I mean, I— it was— I was a machine. I don't know if you— if with antidepressants, if your tolerance for alcohol—

Bro, you're like Ric Flair, dude.

I don't know who that is.

You're like sick Flair.

Wait, tell me who he is.

Ric Flair was like— is— sorry, I'm saying was. Ric Flair is this famous wrestler. He's actually never— I've interviewed him and he's actually—

Oh, him.

He's actually a great guy. And he's also actually never taken drugs, but he just likes to drink.

But he has a robust bod.

Yeah, he has. Yeah, he's a blonde. He's a blonde and he likes to drink.

That's an amazing outfit.

And he loves alcohol being a part of his lifestyle and stuff. It's always been a part of his lifestyle. That's why I'm saying that. I love you, Rick.

Well, a lot of people who've been on long-term psych meds end up becoming total booze bags like I did. And they're told, oh, you have alcoholism. But when they eventually come off their meds, and this was my experience too, I eventually realized actually the combination was kind of leading me to act in these crazy ways. Now that I've been off these meds for so long and I'm in my body and I am in touch with my body's signals and needs, like, I couldn't imagine ever drinking the way that I did back then. Like, sometimes I would drink like 2 bottles of wine in a night and I'd be totally blacked out, but apparently no one ever could tell. I would like act normal until the very end and then like crazy shit would happen and ambulances would get called on me and I'd wake up with like charcoal on my shirt in the emergency room. My stomach would be pumped.

Oh yeah, you're like John Daly, it sounds like, at a barbecue.

And I don't know who he is either.

Oh, he's a famous golfer who likes to party.

Okay.

There he is.

Oh, oh, he's cute.

Yeah, he is cute.

Look at that outfit.

Yeah, he's handsome, I mean. But he has a bar. He has a bar down here. He has a bar here in town. But he likes to— he likes to party.

Oh, he looks awesome.

He used to live at a Hooters. But yeah, he likes to party, dude.

Yeah, well, that— I would have been like with them, like out all night. People— and— but I, I think the combination of all the meds and the alcohol was like def— Definitely. I don't know how it interfered with metabolism, but it made me able to drink a lot more and black out.

As you say that, I remember when I first got prescribed antidepressants, I got onto Zoloft and I could drink. Suddenly I could go out to drink. I'd never even really liked drinking.

Interesting.

But I was living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time with some people I had met in the ocean or whatever.

And the ocean.

Yeah, I met some folks in the ocean and they let me stay over with them. And then, um, but anyway, suddenly I could drink and I was drinking gin and tonics or whatever, dude.

Like, yeah, it's interesting.

Like, I was like Jimmy Buffett's godnephew or whatever.

I don't know what is happening in the body to enable that, but I think this, this ends up happening for a lot of people. But so, so in 2010, like, I, I eventually did make the decision to stop drinking. thinking that if I remove alcohol, maybe this treatment-resistant bipolar won't be treatment-resistant anymore, and my meds will finally help me, 'cause I've been self-medicating with alcohol, and that's why the meds haven't helped.

Sure.

So that was the headspace I was in. So I quit drinking, and within a month or two, I'd gotten enough clarity of mind from not being blackout every night to realize, holy cow, I've been on these meds since I was a kid. Like, I don't know who I am. Like, everything you talk about so powerfully, like, what do I really care about? Like, what does my body— what would my body actually look like? Would I actually be in this, like, 200-pound body? Would I actually feel connected to people? I just started asking these questions because I felt such a difference from just not drinking anymore. Um, and that was when I began to bring it up with my doctor. Maybe I could come off some of these 5 meds I'm on. I was literally on 5 meds prescribed by one doctor at literally the top psychiatric hospital in the country, the best of the best care. And the doctor didn't want to do it. We don't want to rock the boat, ba ba ba.

The boat is shipwrecked. The boat is the Andrea Gail. What are we even fucking talking about?

I know.

The boat just started in A Perfect Storm with Mark Wahlberg. The boat ain't doing well.

And but what's so tragic about it is that because the boat was like me showering more often and like not being in the psych ward, it felt like the Queen Elizabeth on her first voyage.

Okay, so we feel like the boat's doing better.

It felt like I am rocking it. Like, I'm not in the psych ward, I'm alive, I showered twice this week.

Let's go.

And I didn't like binge eat 2 boxes of cereal.

Yeah, with your hand.

I'm doing great, yeah. Oh yeah, when you hand finish a box of cereal, It's the hand and you got your elbow up and you're just— and then you even get the power.

Elbow up is a rich thing. That's like having pinkies up when you drink a martini or whatever. If you eat a box of cereal elbow up with your hand—

How do you get to the bottom?

Huh? You just get in there. You put your dang head in there like a man, like a woman.

Oh, I see. You're going like this.

Well, you just do whatever. No, I don't know if you even cut it open from the side and eat it from the side, whatever you have to do, but you get in there. Is pornography causing a problem in your life? Do you find yourself watching porno for longer periods of time and having trouble stopping? Is porn affecting your relationship or dating life? Well, you're certainly not alone. Watching pornography has become so commonplace today, and oftentimes men use porn to numb the pain of loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and depression. Shame and stigma prevent men from talking about these issues and getting help for them. I want to introduce you to my friend Steve. Steve is the founder of Valor Recovery, a program to help men overcome porn abuse and sexual compulsivity. Steve is a long-term sexual recovery member and has personally overcame the emotional and spiritual despair of abusing pornography and has dedicated his life to empowering men to do the same. Steve is an amazing person and he is a close friend of mine. I mean that. Valor Recovery helps men to develop the tools necessary to have a healthier sex life. Their coaches are in long-term recovery and will be your partner, mentor, and spiritual guide to transcend these problematic behaviors.

To learn more about Valor Recovery, please visit them at www.valorrecoverycoaching.com. Or email them at admin@valorrecoverycoaching.com. Thank you. So wait, you get diagnosed with treatment-resistant bipolar, but they keep you on medicines?

Well, for me they did. But what is so wild about the whole treatment-resistant thing, and it's why it's in the subtitle of my book, because to me this is one of the core problems is that there's a whole industry of treating treatment resistance. So for a lot of people, especially people who have a treatment-resistant depression diagnosis, that's when you start getting told about electroconvulsive therapy, electroshock, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS. Like, that's when you get into the medical device realm. And they're like, oh, all these pills didn't work, so now let's put this giant magnet on your head and shoot powerful current, powerful magnetic pulses through your brain. Or like, let's put electrodes on your skull and shoot electric currents through you. So there is—

You have investigated those things before.

Yeah, I go into ECT in my book and some of the other medical devices in it because it is the It's a treatment for treatment resistance. I never— no one ever suggested those to me, and it just speaks to the, like, kind of illogical nature of a lot of this. But yeah, and had they offered ECT to me, I probably would've said yes. But actually, like, the conventional kind of, like, protocol for people with a bipolar diagnosis is that ECT can induce mania. I doubt there's any, like, actual evidence base for that, but that's probably why they didn't.

Okay, got it. How do you start to put the medicine in the rearview mirror?

So I began bringing it up with my doctor, like, I want to see what my baseline would be off of these meds I've been on since I was a kid. And he said no for a few months. And then— and then this was May 2010— then I stumbled upon a book that had this old phrenology head on the COVID So, you know, like those old, like, early 20th century drawings where there are, like, different compartments in the skull.

Yeah.

And it had in each different compartment a different psychiatric drug name. And so the COVID pulled me in. I was like, whoa, I've been on that, I've been on that, I'm on that now. And I was like, what's this book? And it was called Anatomy of an Epidemic. And I just felt compelled to buy it. So I bought it, and I started reading it, and it blew my mind. And so basically— yeah, there it is. So In a nutshell, this journalist sets out to answer the question of why, when you look at long-term outcomes of psychiatric medication use for schizophrenia, do people in developing countries, quote unquote, where they don't have all these medications, do better than in the US and other developed countries, quote unquote? And he ends up discovering, if you actually look at what evidence base does exist for long-term medication use, it makes a pretty compelling case that, on the whole, these drugs, long-term, are making us sicker.

Hmm.

Physically more disabled. And so, there I was on long-term meds, 5 of them, through all these years, my life falling apart, and it all clicked, and I was like, oh my God, what if it's not treatment-resistant mental illness, like, what if it's the treatment?

Oh.

Yeah. And then once that was removed, like, I couldn't unsee that realization, and it, like, haunted me. And of course, I first went through this state of, like, shock. It can't be true. Like, it can't be true that all this medicine maybe has been hurting me, because I just had never— it had never occurred to me. And so that was what gave me the confidence to go back to my doctor and be like, I don't really care if you don't want me to do this. I'm do it. Are you gonna help me or not? And he was totally unsupportive and basically, you know, made me feel like this was the biggest mistake. But he was like, I'll, you know, I'll allow it. Like, he just, you know, he was willing to bring me off.

And was this the same doctor that had put you on them?

Yeah. I mean, I saw so many doctors over the years, but it was the one I was seeing with the 5-med regimen.

Okay, got it.

And this gets us to the topic that I'm so excited to connect with you more about here is when I made the decision to come off my meds, I had no idea how hard it would be to get off them.

Amen.

No one told me. My doctor certainly had no idea. I had no idea that using these medications, which are psychoactive chemicals that work by altering how your central nervous system works. Like, if you use them for months, especially years, your whole body is going to adapt to them.

Is that true that some of them alter how your central nervous system works?

All of them. All antidepressants, mood stabilizers, benzos, they cause— it's basically they create physical dependence, which is different from addiction in that When you're addicted to something, you have cravings for it. You seek it out, even though you know it's causing problems. Physical dependence is a purely physiological state where your body changes itself to accommodate the presence of this drug such that when you remove it, it's destabilized.

Oh yeah.

And so no one told me, no one told you either, I'm assuming.

Well, I'm just shocked that, I'm shocked that there was never an exit strategy when you get on the drugs. I'd been hitchhiking or whatever to see this girl that I was in love with or whatever, but she didn't like me. And like, my— I was like kind of heartbroken or whatever. And then, um, so I went to a doctor in town because I wasn't doing that good. Like, I was sneaking in people's yards at night and petting their animals and shit. I wasn't doing great. And so this— so anyway, the doctor put me on this medication because I was like pretty heartbroken. I think a lot of it was other childhood stuff that I'd attached to this relationship, um, unknowingly. And so I was pretty heartbroken, but I was heartbroken in a bigger realm kind of than just this specific thing. But this was the epicenter of it, sort of. This had launched it. This was the match really. And so I get on these meds and then everything's kind of fine, but there was never a checkup later. I ended up leaving South Carolina a few months after that, and there was never a check-in back really to figure out if you stay on 'em.

And so I was just on 'em for a long time. Was it a psychiatrist who prescribed them or a generalist?

Like your primary care doctor? Do you remember?

I can't remember. I can't remember if I— I think it was a psychiatrist. So I think I'd went to someone who could actually prescribe medicine. So it was someone that at least knew what the medicines were. But then I got on it and then I've just been on it for years. And there's times where I've gotten off to try and, like, I tried plant medicine a few times, which got off to like do plant medicine experiences. And some of that helped a lot. Like doing ayahuasca helped a lot. But the thing that I didn't realize was I wasn't getting off of them correctly.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the thing that I, most recently, when I tried to get off, I didn't get off of them correctly. And I was talking with this guy, Dr. Mark Horowitz is his name.

Oh, you've talked to him. Yeah, Mark's a close friend and colleague. I was just talking with him earlier today.

Oh, were you really?

Yeah, we're very close. We've worked together on a lot of this.

And he's like, out of the blue, one of my friends recommended him to come and podcast sometime. And so I've kind of just been emailing with him, but I've been emailing with him in some mild consultations. about medicine.

Great.

And I got off and I thought I'd titrated down well, 'cause I went from like 10 milligrams to 5 and then to nothing.

Oh, Theo. Oh my goodness. Which one? Was this Lexapro that you were on?

This was escitalopram, then the generic Lexapro, I think. And when I tell you I hit this thing that was like, I didn't care about really anything and I started sleeping in and I started, Things that I cared about became like I didn't even, I didn't know if I cared about them. And so I just kind of didn't care about them. I started envisioning futures for myself that were kind of careless sort of, or mundane maybe, not even like peaceful ones, just like nonchalant about everything. And that got a little bit spooky because I knew that that wasn't real. or how I really felt it. And it was too much. And just the sleeping in, I hadn't slept in since I was like really in my 20s, really. It was like, so what am I doing? And so he said that the titration has to be different. So I'm still in consultation with him, but I recently had to get back on. I've been off for about 6 months and I really had tried my best.

And was 10 the dose that you had been at for a while or had you been at a higher dose?

I've been at 20 before that for a while. And then at 10 for probably a year or 2. But in the end, it's like 25 years, so I've been, you know, 20-something years. Anyway, there's a lot more to it, and I still— I'm gonna try again at some point, but not without better consultation. But, um, let's get back. So that's what's been going on with me about it. Yeah, but let's get back into your story. So, um, what was the toughest parts about getting off of these, uh, for you?

Yeah, I mean, because my doctor had no idea what he was doing, and I didn't know anything about physical dependence and withdrawal.

And what year was this?

This was 2010. I was 27.

Nobody knew.

Yeah. And so I came off 5 drugs in 6 months, which is cold turkey.

You're like the Jesse Owens of getting off drugs, like a triathlete.

Well, and this again brings— I can't not mention class here. The fact that I had the socioeconomic resources to be completely disabled for years, like years. Coming off 5 meds in 6 months blew up my life for years. And— but I had a family who could take care of me, and so many people don't have that.

Yeah.

And so it was— just to describe a little bit about what it was like, I mean, things were bad on the meds. Like, I had all kinds of health problems and, like, super, you know, emotional instability and cognitive issues and all of that. But that all went on overdrive. Like, I couldn't talk. I'd We'd be sitting down, wanting to have a conversation, and I'd have an idea in my head that I'd wanna speak out to you, but the words wouldn't come out, or they'd come out and they'd sound really weird. I just couldn't translate thought to speaking. I couldn't absorb words. I would get—

And did you quit cold turkey?

In 6 months, but 5 meds. So, it's basically cold turkey. That's so fast. I just wanna make it so—

Yeah, maybe warm turkey.

I go back in, just to paint a picture, And Mark's work you referenced, we've worked closely. He's a close colleague of mine. And so I come from the layperson world, like the ex-patient world, and he comes from both that world, 'cause he himself was on this stuff, and he's also a psychiatrist. The protocols that he writes about and uses came from the layperson community, because it was—

What does a layperson mean?

Layperson means a non-doctor. A non-medical expert. Patients.

Just a blue-collar pill taker.

Totally. Just like, you know, bottom of the social hierarchy, of the medical hierarchy, like the patient. We patients ourselves who basically had to— and I didn't do it the right way. I did it the wrong way because I didn't know, but it's been over decades that patients have had to figure out how to do it the right way, just through trial and error and figuring it out. And Mark's tapering guidelines and the very, very few number of other practitioners who know how to taper safely all come from the ex-patient community, because what we realized is to get off these meds successfully, if you go to your average doctor, they'll say, A, they'll say, oh yeah, you can do this in 2 weeks or 4 weeks or 8 weeks, and B, they'll say, and you just cut it, you know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again and then stop, and then they'll just like, do a kind of linear thing where you're on 100, now drop to 90, 80, 70, 60. But what people figured out just through what it felt like is, my gosh, you know, at this higher dose, I can come down like that, but the lower the dose gets, the harder this feels.

I've gotta make smaller reductions in my dose and maybe space it out a little longer. So it ends up looking like this hyperbolic curve. For anyone listening, it's—

Like a ramp, almost like a skater's ramp.

Yeah, exactly. Or like a bowl, the inside of a nice salad bowl, just so you're not making a straight line, a straight diagonal line.

Or like a staircase.

Yeah, it's not like that. It's more of a gentle curve, and the lower that you get in the overall dose, the smaller the reductions you make. And this is literally the opposite of what most doctors tell their patients. They're like, oh, you're on a low dose, you can just pop off. And the reason why this is the case is now research is verifying what patients figured out through experience, is that the effect that these drugs have on the central nervous system is not directly correlated with the dosage size. So, like, if you go from 10 to 20 of Lexapro, Mm-hmm. you're not doubling the effect that the drug is having on your brain. Going from 0 to 10, It has a significant effect on your central nervous system. It disrupts your central nervous system in a much more significant way than going from 10 to 20 or 20 to 40. So, the higher the dose, the less disruption is happening to your central nervous system.

I see, but that last 10 or whatever, that's a severe space.

Yeah, so the lower the dose you get when you're coming off, the more of an effect the changes are having, which is why, like, you experienced going from 10 to 5 to 0, like, blue, you know.

Just melancholy. Everything was a melancholy thing. And it was very bizarre. I almost cannot even explain it. I tried to fight through it and, like, I was taking different, doing different things in the morning, trying different modalities. It was just too much. And it just became too much. And so I just said, you know, I'm gonna live to fight another day. So I'm gonna get back on my meds.

How long did it take for you to make that choice? Like, how long were you off for?

Well, for the first like 6 weeks, everything was kind of okay, it felt like. And then it got like— it was just manageable, a little bit of like depression here and there, but it was stuff that I'd done before that felt manageable. And then, um, and then it just got too bizarre. Just the melancholy was a little too much.

But you knew it— what, like you said earlier, like, this doesn't feel This feels like otherworldly. This feels like this is not me.

Right. I knew it wasn't me. I knew it was something. I knew it was me experiencing something because of something that was going on medicinally. And so I thought it would go away. And I was emailing with Dr. Horowitz and he is like, no, it could stay around for a long time. And at a certain point I said, I just can't battle this anymore. It was causing me some troubles even with my sobriety, just being able to, with my, just being in recovery and stuff like that, it was causing me just a lot of confusion.

Yeah.

So anyway, so I'm back on, but okay, let's get back into where you were talking about.

So yeah, I knew none of what we just talked about when I came off. So I came off really fast and then just intense magnification of all these cognitive problems and emotional upheaval and digestive issues and weird boils on my skin. weird smells coming out of my body. Like, it was just— it was crazy. And, like, back then I couldn't have been under these lights. These bright lights would have set off, like, a panic attack. So I remember, you know, going to the grocery store, which was a big deal to go to the grocery store. And, you know, all the sounds and the movement and the colors.

Yeah.

I'd be like, I'm— it would— my body— it was like my body thought I was being eaten by a tiger. Just like being in a grocery store. So my my fight-or-flight response was just completely on overdrive.

Yeah, your shit was hijacked.

Yeah. And of course, most people who come off their meds fast, because there's no— until Bobby Kennedy, our country hasn't really paid much attention to this. So most people, when they feel that way off their meds, think they're having a relapse, quote unquote. They think like, oh my gosh, my illness is coming back.

Ah.

Like, this is a sign I need my meds. And everyone's telling them that too. The doctor's telling them that, their loved ones are telling them that. Like, you feel horrible off your med, this means you need it, go back on it. And then they go back on it and they feel better, quote unquote, 'cause they're not like having a panic attack in the grocery store anymore. So then they think, oh wow, this medication's really helping me.

Yeah, but I didn't feel— it's so funny you say that, 'cause I didn't think exactly, I didn't feel like, oh man, that girl broke up with me again. It's not like I went back to that feeling. It was just, I just feel like I'm off this thing that I can't, that I need to have now. So I just felt addicted.

It's amazing that you had that, that you had that sense so strongly. I think some people definitely do. They know like, this is not me, this is these drugs. A lot of people don't have that. Like, I think they are so, disconnected from their instincts. And this was definitely the case for me too. I just was so disconnected from my own intuition about stuff that I just couldn't— when you describe how you felt those 6 weeks in when you were like, something's wrong, this is not me, this is not my usual down stuff. That's That was your instinct, like, you know, ringing the bell. A lot of people don't have that. And so then they go back on and they stay on for another 10, 20, whatever years, 'cause they're like, I don't wanna feel that way again. 'Cause they just don't know if you did it slower, it might look very different.

Right.

Yeah, and that's what I'm hopeful for in the future. What about, were you able to maintain a relationship during any of this? What was that like for you?

I mean, I basically dated guys who were as lost and destabilized as I was. So not a pretty picture. And we were all just seeking relief. Not all, it wasn't multiple of them at a time, but in each of those dark relationships, we were basically just running away from pain together.

And did medicines cause intimacy issues? Because I know a lot of Like a lot of guys, there's fear with guys. If I get on antidepressants, it's like, it can affect my, like, it can call— it can maybe cause intimacy disorder. Can you look that up, Trevin?

Well, yeah, it definitely causes sexual—

Oh, this says right here, it says, yes, mental health medications can absolutely cause intimacy and sexual issues. This is a very common side effect, particularly with antidepressants and antipsychotics. It often happens because these drugs affect the brain chemicals that control mood, desire, and physical arousal. Does this similar stuff happen with women, kind of? And if it's too personal, we can take it out.

Oh no. Oh my God. I will bare it all. 'Cause to me, the more vulnerable we are in the stories, in our stories, it's the more helpful it is. So no, yeah, I had my first orgasm at the age of 27. I had zero sexual function on psych drugs, and I didn't even realize what I was missing because I been put on them so young.

No way.

So I just assumed and was being told that my inability to feel bonded to guys, bonded, intimate, aroused, all those things, was my illness, my quote unquote, my mental illness. So I never put it together. And thank God when I got off, I regained my sexual function. And I talk about it in my book, of all the betrayals, of all the loss, of all the the disconnection that I experienced from being on long-term psych meds, it was the taking of my sexuality, especially in my teenage and 20-something years, that was the hardest to make peace with. Because sexuality is about so much more than just sex. It's how you are in the world, your vibrancy, your vitality. It's how you create art. It's It's how you appreciate beauty and music. It's, like, all tied into sexuality, and that does get suppressed and disconnected for a lot of people. And I just wanna name, too, that for a certain percentage of people, and we need more research to better understand this, when they come off antidepressants, they lose sexual function. So they don't even necessarily have sexual problems on meds. When they stop, goes away, and it's called PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, and it's devastating.

And there are a lot of, like, actually, can I call out a clip to look up?

For sure.

Google PSSD, Lauren Friedman.

PSSD is a condition where sexual side effects such as genital numbness, low sex drive, and weak orgasms persist for months, years, or even decades after completely stopping selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or related antidepressant medications. I will say this, I did notice that, um, my orgasms was different. They was different, man. They was just— I mean, it just— they was different, man. They was not— they was— they was just different, you know? They were just like— like the PSI on them was low. That's— I just felt like the PSI on them was low.

And when you were off for those months, did it change?

Oh, when I was— when I got off them, that's what I'm talking about.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Yeah.

When I got off the antidepressants, that was when it—

yeah. Yeah.

There was just like, it was just like, yeah, it was just, it wasn't, it was just not, it was just barely just, it was not much. It was just, it was low. It was low, man.

Is there time? It's a short clip. Is there time? Yeah. There, that Lauren Friedman. Just to contextualize this, so my organization, Inner Compass Initiative, we helped organize a summit on mental health and overmedicalization in DC on May 4th that Bobby Kennedy came and spoke at, and he made these big policy announcements about deprescribing at the event. And this panel was—

About deprescribing?

Deprescribing, yep, about helping all these guidelines that don't exist, that Mark Horowitz's work and our work that don't exist in the government, in the public health system. Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, they wanna focus on that and actually get good guidelines in and train doctors and all that. So, this was a panel of young people, and her clip, well, I'm gonna talk about it another time. I'm gonna cry, but you gotta listen to this.

Yeah, let's watch this. And I remember Joe Rogan sent me this one night. He sends me this stuff to kind of keep me updated on, some of the awareness about this stuff. Let's go ahead and watch it.

PSSD is not just a loss of sexual function, but a loss for some people of emotional function as well. That has been the case for me. Before this, I was a super emotional, empathetic, loving, caring, like Sylvia Plath reading and resonating girl. And the day I woke up with this injury, I quite literally felt my soul leave my body. Like, I'm so serious. It was the most unbelievable, inorganic thing I've ever experienced, and it's a common symptom of people who have this condition. To this day, it's been years for me. I'm 23 now. I can't feel love for my own mother, which is the hardest thing on earth. I can't feel connection or love for my friends, or even pleasure in music, which was the bane of my existence. I was a songwriter. since I was a child. It was my outlet. And it's been completely neurologically severed from these medications. And I'd just like to say there's a reason that, you know, every song on the radio, every movie on your television, every piece of art since the beginning of humanity centers on sex and love. And not just romantic love, but platonic, familial love.

And that is because These are the most central, intoxicating, worthwhile, and fulfilling parts of the human experience. These aren't luxuries. And to remove someone's ability to participate, not just physically through sex, which is completely horrific on its own, but to remove someone's ability to emotionally connect with another human being is a crime against humanity. And I say crime against humanity because there is evidence that Eli Lilly, who created the first SSRI Prozac, knew their drug drugs could cause permanent sexual dysfunction and emotional numbness in children especially. And they withheld this from the public because they knew it would be a threat to the bottom line. I mean, I hope I'm not the only one who believes that there's nothing more criminal or dystopian to withhold from patients and parents of patients that your medication can permanently chemically castrate and emotionally numb its user for the rest of their life. Wow.

Is that true that Eli Lilly was hiding information?

I didn't know that until she's— she shared that, but it would not surprise me because Drug companies have known all along as well about withdrawal, and they suppress that. So, they— it would not surprise me. I mean, we know, especially in the last 6 years, that pharmaceutical companies are happy to not give us the full story.

I don't believe that any of these drug companies can be trusted anymore. I don't know how you could. I don't know how any of us can trust them. I think that's why there's so much outside medicine and internal work Like outside medicine, like functional medicine, natural choices, homeopathic, or homeopathic, and then, and just internal work that people are trying to do now to steer clear of drug companies.

Yeah, and I think just one thing that I didn't know when I started my journey on these meds, nor did my parents, is that if you actually read the drug labels themselves that are right on, you know, .gov website, like it's called the Orange Book. If you Google FDA Orange Book, You can look up any FDA-approved drug and look at the drug approval package. I mean, they redact a lot of stuff, but even looking at the complete drug label, if you actually read the whole thing, which is not easy— some of these are 50 pages. This is not like the little pamphlet you get at the drugstore, but the actual comprehensive drug label. You'll be shocked by what you read. Like, as an example, if you were going to guess how long a psychiatric drug is studied for in humans, like in the drug trials that get them approved as safe and effective? How long would you guess?

That a psychiatric drug is studied for?

Is studied for.

I would guess 10 years.

6 to 8 weeks, sometimes 10, sometimes 12 weeks.

Wow. That's heartbreaking. It's brave of her to just speak exactly what she's feeling. That it's so rare that we're hearing sort of this voice, I guess. That's what's kind of surprising to me.

I think until recently, it was rare to hear someone like this speaking out, but I've been doing this work for 16 years, and I feel something profound shifting in our culture. People are waking up, especially young people like Lauren, who are waking up and realizing the betrayal And I want to be clear, like, this isn't about bad doctors or mean doctors or evil doctors. This is about a massive information problem that is affecting us patients and our families and the doctors themselves. This is about prescribers who have not been given comprehensive information either. Like, I bet if you asked your average psychiatrist how long they thought the evidence base was for the safety and effectiveness of your average antidepressant, and they wouldn't even realize it's 6 to 8 weeks or 12 weeks.

It's unbelievable.

We have an information crisis that has made it impossible to be properly informed on the patient side and on the doctor side. And I think it's a big part of why we are now in a situation where we have more suffering than ever before. Rates of suicide have shot up, especially in young people. In veterans, suicide crisis, we have, you know, it's 23.1% of Americans have a psychiatric diagnosis of some kind. And so we have this mental health crisis, and everyone concludes like, oh my gosh, people must not be getting enough treatment. They're not getting treatment. But if you actually look at the numbers, more people are getting more treatment than ever before.

Than ever.

So what is the real problem, do you think? Do you feel like it's like that there's compromised institutions that are flooding us with pills that are trying to get us all hooked? Do you feel like it's a big pharma pressure from the top and compromised studies and documentation? Do you feel like it's that we've all been convinced that there's something wrong with us? What have you learned from looking at this? What is the real crisis? And I guess the crisis is that we're on the medication. The crisis isn't that there's a crisis.

I think the list you gave is a great starting point. I mean, it's so— I wouldn't pretend to have all the answers, like, at all. It's such a big— there's so many reasons why people are suffering right now. So, you know, certainly socioeconomic reasons, political reasons, of course, like, reasons about tied into the food we're eating, the screens we're sitting in front of. The rigid kind of conventional schooling systems that young children are sent into every day through the most critical years of their lives. They're just being sat in seats under fluorescent lights, expected to—

Oh, if you think about it all, it's crazy. I was even thinking about this the other day. I was at— we were on a road trip and we stopped at a gas station. A lot of the things in the gas station, especially the candies, they're more like plastic than they are like a food. Well, like, say if you were to take like real food and then you were to take like a piece of plastic, something that was made with plastic, if you put like some candy in between them, the candy is way more like the plastic. And just the fact that we haven't even really thought about it, like we've just thought that all of this is okay. Like if you had a handful of plastic, would you just eat that?

Well, we are eating microplastics all day, every day.

I know, but it's just, it's almost shocking to me that visually some of this stuff even looks the same. And we're still like— like, people would buy gummy worms, right? And I like gummy worms sometimes, but it's also the same thing I'm using to fish with pretty much when I'm fishing, which is a plastic lure, right?

Yeah.

But when you think that that's how it's like— I don't know, some of it's just baffling to me when I think about it.

Yeah, well, and that your average kid, you, you know, give them the choice between this like glaring shiny plasticky piece of candy and like a beautiful apple grown on a neighbor's tree, like, which kid is going to pick the apple? I think it speaks to how, I mean, this has been unfolding for all of modernity, really, for all of industrialized society. This isn't like, oh, a few years ago things got bad. I mean, we've been slowly and slowly and slowly over decades losing connection with our bodies, with each other, with neighborhoods, with communities, with meaning, with purpose, with spirituality, with God. as our culture becomes increasingly individualized, mechanized, systematized, industrialized, institutionalized, and it's been this frog in slow boiling water where we haven't even realized what's been happening to us because it's unfolded over so much time. And so I think the reason we're in this so-called mental health crisis is vast, and I'm not going to pretend to have an answer to that, but when it comes to the role that the mental health industry plays in it. There are 3 critical misunderstandings that our whole culture right now is having. One is we are medicalizing problems that aren't medical, like that heartbreak you felt.

Like, I'm gonna get teary-eyed. The heartbreak you felt, it's like a young 20-something guy, you were in love. I don't even know the details. I don't even need to know. To have your heart broken, to feel that pain, that grief, that, you know, terror of, like, what is my future gonna hold? To call that a medical problem? No! It's a social problem, a relational—

Yeah.

I mean, it's half a chapter of Romeo and Juliet.

Totally! I mean, imagine if, like, people in Shakespeare's—

Not the end chapter. Not the end chapter.

No, no. But, you know, imagine if people in Shakespearean times were, like, going to doctors to—

We wouldn't even have Shakespeare if they had medicine. If they had antidepressants, we would not even have Shakespeare.

That is it right there. We wouldn't have Van Gogh, Shakespeare. We wouldn't have beautiful art, music. We wouldn't have creative human expression.

Yeah, he'd have been like, give me liberty or give me—

Lithium?

Yeah.

Oh man, I was on lithium. That, out of all the drugs, that was—

Were you?

Oh yeah, so it totally messed up my thyroid. I reversed it when I got off everything, but to— There are the symptoms. So we're medicalizing. So this 3-part misunderstanding that our culture's having, And this is what Bobby Kennedy's addressing at HHS right now, which is really exciting to me. And this is what I think our culture is waking up to. We're medicalizing problems that aren't medical. We are—

When we say we, who do you mean though?

Your average teenage girl who's convinced she has an incurable brain disease, 'cause she feels insecure and she's, you know, nerve—

Right, just 'cause you're having adolescent feelings or things that are part of just adolescence and of being human, We've taken just things that are part of being human and made them into—

Quote unquote symptoms to treat.

Symptoms to be treated.

Okay. And don't get me wrong, there can be, like, you could have a brain tumor that's making you hallucinate and like you can have an actual physiological problem, but you would go to a neurologist and get the tumor treated. You wouldn't be told you have an incurable mental illness.

Right. And some people may have some severe mental illnesses. I'm not talking about that. You know what I'm saying? and radio parts and shit, you might have something going on. Or if something really traumatic has happened, you could have some PTSD. I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm not saying any of that. We're just saying that there's been an overabundance. Even if you look at the numbers, there's been an overabundance of things that are normal human feelings that have now been medicinalized.

I want to— to what you just said though, even in those cases, that you think of as the most extreme, like the guy who's talking to himself on the subway with his pants falling off. Like, I'm thinking about a guy I knew. He lived in a group home that I used to work in years ago. You know, he'd been living in group homes for decades. He was on tons of psych meds. He talked to himself all the time. He heard voices. He was— if you had him, you know, he couldn't live independently. He was what any average person would call, like, a chronic mental patient. Like, he wasn't allowed to be around knives, all that stuff. One day I was sitting with him on this, like, stinky old fake leather sofa in this, like, ratty group home he lived in. And I was like— I don't want to say his name. I'll make up a name. I was like, hey, Bill. I was like, what— how did you ever start medications? Like, what was happening at the very beginning when you first went to a doctor? And he was like, oh, I was— I was 15.

or 16, and I'd smoked some grass that got me really scared. He was in his 50s when I was talking to him. And, and I, I saw ants coming out of the television, and I told my parents, and they took me to Waltham State. And Waltham State Hospital was a state hospital in Massachusetts. They admitted this teenager on an adult ward, loaded him up on antipsychotics, and the rest is history. Decades later, he looks to— if you saw him on the street, he had crazy hair everywhere, he was disheveled. And I can't help but wonder, if you actually go back to the beginning, for every person you see on the subway, on the street corner, who you think in your mind, like, this person has severe mental illness, quote unquote, if you go back to the beginning of their story, something happened to them at the very beginning, and they and they either didn't get their needs met or they were given something that they shouldn't have had. And then just systemic year after year after year of not getting what they actually needed and getting a lot of what they didn't need. Who wouldn't be that scary guy on the street corner?

Yeah, you'd be out there pleading in whatever words you have left inside of you and whatever organizational abilities you have left. You'd be out there trying to show people something is wrong here.

Yep.

And it's like, ugh.

Yeah. So I think we have this view we have that seriously suffering people are sick, quote unquote, is a deeply ingrained story that is just one story. There are multiple ways to see people who are in deep crisis. Yeah.

And that kid could have just been high and was telling his parents something that he thought when he was really high.

He literally was. And the rest is history. 40 years later, he's a chronic mental patient. who talks to himself. He wasn't talking to himself prior to smoking the bad grass. And you might have a doctor say, oh, that triggered an underlying mental illness, or it was a bad reaction to pot.

Yeah. Which we've been there, yeah.

Oh, yeah. And so he—

Oh, I locked my coworker in the freezer and called the police on him once.

You did?

Yeah.

What did you think he was going to do? What was happening in your head that made you do that?

I thought— well, we had smoked some weed together, and we was working at a gas station together, and I thought I thought that he had set me up and was going to do something bad to me.

I always got paranoid when I smoked pot too.

So I tricked him to go in there and then I called the police on him.

Was he so cold when they came?

Yeah, he was cold, but whatever. He was fine. He was a little thick, but he'll be all right. He's still all right. Shout out Andrew. Shout out Andrew.

All right.

My bad, bro. My bad. Still, still my bad.

But so we have this crisis where we're medicalizing problems that aren't medical.

Okay.

Number 2, I think what's also creating this massive misunderstanding is that long-term use of these medications is not actually evidence-based, if you actually look at what evidence does exist, and you factor in how corrupt the evidence base is. So we are oftentimes confusing adverse effects of medications for a worsening of the condition. So, the very thing that happened to me, I kept getting worse and worse and worse, and everyone saw that as, your illness is progressing. Now you have treatment-resistant mental illness. No one ever said, maybe these 5 meds you're on are fucking you up a bit. No one ever said that. So, that's number 2. We are oftentimes misunderstanding that the worsening that people have on meds might actually be the meds, not an illness. And then number 3— Wow.

No.

We are mistaking what happens when you stop your meds for relapse, when it's actually withdrawal, like we were talking about before. So you get off your meds, you feel horrible, you are told you need to get back on, see how horrible you feel? You get back on, you feel better, you think, oh, wow, my medication is helping me, I'm going to stay on it forever. You don't realize, no, actually, I was in withdrawal, and then I got out of withdrawal when I went back on it. Part of this crisis that we're in, I truly think, is tied into these 3 misunderstandings, but that's changing. I really think we're waking up to the realization that this isn't working here. This mental health industry isn't helping us in the way that we want it to, and it wants to. And maybe it's because we're looking at this in a distorted lens. misunderstood way. So, yeah, and the work of Inner Compass Initiative, which is the nonprofit I started a number of years back, is all about— we're not anti-medication, we're not telling people to stop their meds, we're not shaming people for whom meds are helpful. What we provide is comprehensive information and resources so that people can make true choices for themselves, especially around—

Hmm.

tapering off safely, if that's what they decide to do?

Yeah, it's got— you have to have some support in it. You know, I thought even that I had a good strategy, a good plan. I was taking good medicines along with it, like some functional health choices, but I just wasn't— I didn't do, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't do it well enough.

Well, you did the best you could with the information you had, just like I did, just like millions and millions of people who try to get off their meds do, because 'Cause you didn't have, of course, you made the choice that you made to come off in the way that you did, 'cause no one gave you information otherwise. And that's what we're working hard to change. And I think it is changing. And what's beautiful about tapering is that it's open source. Like, we have a free step-by-step tapering manual on our website.

You do?

Oh yeah, we published it 8 years ago, been sitting for free on the internet. We don't market it well, which is not great, basically the protocol that psychiatrists like Mark Horowitz are now incredibly getting into the clinical world.

What is the practice for tapering off of antidepressants or off of psychiatric meds?

Yeah, well, so the number one most important piece of it is that—

And this is not doctor's advice, also want you to know.

And we're not telling people to do this, but the key thing is that But it should be based on how you're feeling. So everyone's different. There's not like, oh, this is the protocol, go follow it, good luck. Depending on each person's individual physiology and all of that, it's going to look different for everyone. But the basic underlying philosophy is what we've found in the layperson withdrawal community is that tapering between 5 to 10% per month of your dose. So let's say you're on, 100 milligrams of Seroquel, and you want to taper 10%, you want to see how that goes for you. You cut— so you would cut 10% of 100 in month 1, which is 10 milligrams, so you cut to 90 for the first month. Then in month 2, you cut 10% of 90, so you cut 9 milligrams, so now you're down to 81. In month 3, you cut 8.1 milligrams, and you might be wondering, like, how the heck do you do 8.1? And that's where it gets tricky, because drug companies aren't required by law to manufacture psych drugs in taper-friendly forms and formulations.

They're not?

No.

And I— that may change under Secretary Kennedy. I hope it does. But right now, people have no choice but to, like, make their own liquid mixtures and use slip-tip syringes and do this wacky stuff at home because they can't Unless you go to a compounding pharmacy, which is expensive, and you need a psychiatrist who agrees to do it, there's no way to make 8.1.

Yeah. Well, I'm even splitting my pill just like this, like any layperson ever.

Oh my gosh, Theo, I have to—

Just splitting it with my thumbs, putting my thumbs in the middle of the pill, both thumbs, the thumbnails.

Oh my gosh, Theo, I wanna nerd out with you on this because that's not a reliable way to make—

I know it isn't, trust me.

So you're on the A 10, is that right?

I'm on a 10 milligram dose.

And it's that little white round tablet. I remember it well. I was on it for a long time. So, someone in your situation has a few options. You could either go to a compounding pharmacy and have them make a— if you were going to cut 1 milligram, make you a 9 milligram tablet, which you could do, but then you have to keep getting new prescriptions all the time, each month, But you could do that. You could get the liquid from the manufacturer, which does come as a liquid.

Okay, and let me just say really quick that I wasn't aware that when you're getting off antidepressants, that some of them, you can get them in a liquid form so that when you're titrating off, you have the access to be able to measure kind of smaller and smaller amounts. Okay, just wanted to say that.

Yeah, but it's not— some people have a hard time switching, and there are all kinds of weird fillers and preservatives. What a lot of people in a situation like yours do is they— and this is not me telling people to do this, this is just describing the reality of what people do.

Mm-hmm.

Like, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are doing this. They have no choice but to do this. They put their tablet in a measured glass of water, so you kind of figure out the ratio of, I'm putting 10 milligrams of my tablet into X number of milliliters of water, they break it down in the water, they stir it up and make it a suspension, and then they remove 10% of the water, and then they drink it.

Oh, and that's how they start to titrate down.

That's— and it shouldn't have to be this way, but that's how it has had to be for decades.

Right, because the medical industry is not offering a solution.

Yeah, they're not incentivized to get you off their products.

Yeah, which is kind of crazy. And sometimes it's like I put— like, sometimes I think I've just kind of put these feelings that I had 20 years ago, that I just kept kicking them down the road 20 years, you know?

Oh my gosh.

So that's one of the craziest things too, is sometimes I'm like, why do I still have these old feelings? It's just because I keep just duct taping them down with these antidepressants. Now that's not scientific, that's just me sharing how I feel. And we're not off, we're not saying that We're just stating that that's what the state of medicine is right now, is that people are having to figure shit out for themselves because it's gotten so confusing out there and so unhelpful out there for people that want to be away from some of these, what feels a lot of times like a sentence.

It totally does. It's a perfect way to put it. And I think what you just said is so powerful, and it doesn't need to be scientific. For it to be valid and true and meaningful. Like, this idea— this gets back to the medicalization crisis that we're in. We live in this world where if it isn't scientific and medical, it's not legitimate. If it isn't, you know, clinical research, it's useless data. I can tell you right now that there are tens upon tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of data points out there in the layperson, i.e., the patient and ex-patient community online of data points of, like, very valid information about how to safely taper. We are— it's all out there for free on the internet, and until now, the medical industry hasn't considered it legitimate because it's not research.

Mm-hmm.

But I think returning to— there's so many other— knowledge comes from all kinds of sources, and it can be valid from all This idea that anecdotal information is invalid is preposterous to me. Like, your experience is the most important thing for you. Like, what I went through, no one knows me better than I know myself. No one, I don't care how many degrees they have after their name, no one could possibly understand what's happening inside of me better than me.

Yeah, I'm a fucking researcher, dude.

Totally.

People are like, oh, well, you're not a scientist, whatever, but it's so much of science. is so compromised. So many things are so compromised. It's like the last— it's like you need somebody just to wander in the woods and come out and tell you what they saw. And I'm not saying I'm that guy. I'm saying we are all that person for ourselves, for sure. And then individually, we all have to be that person more than ever these days as information gets owned and compromised and—

Surveilled.

And surveilled and—

Censored.

For sure.

And altered. Oh, totally.

It's like the last thing we have is our voices, the voice of someone who's had an experience, and then you trust for yourself. Do you believe their experience? Do you not? And that's like, that's what we have. That's all we've really ever had in a lot of ways. Um, but yeah, I think that, I think a lot of people are like, uh, a lot of people that want to get off medication, they don't know what to do. And a lot of, a lot of times we just say, we throw our hands up at it. Um, I've tried like 4 times.

Oh my gosh. Well, I, if I can, if I can be like, a buddy to you in this because you need friends and fellows who've walked the path.

That's what I was going to ask you.

It's like the 12-step world, having mutual aid. So part of our nonprofit, besides providing all kinds of information and resources, we have a community too where people who've been through it themselves are all supporting one another.

There is a community there?

Oh yeah, totally.

Where are you finding that community? Just online?

Well, our nonprofit has one, but they're all over Facebook. They're— especially now. I mean, back in 2010, I was, like, one of 3 people on the internet who was talking about getting off psych drugs. Like, no one was talking about this back then. But in forums, like, kind of weird, Reddity kinds of secret forums, tons of people were messaging each other, but it wasn't, like, visible on the internet. Now there are hundreds of Facebook groups.

Mm-hmm.

People helping each other for each specific drug. You could totally Google escitalopram withdrawal support, and you would probably find 5 groups with 10,000 people each in them.

Yeah. I think part of me, I tried a little bit too much to just do it myself, I think.

Yeah.

You need that. You need— but you definitely— because having friends who've been through it not only helps you get information that maybe you didn't have before, but it also helps you stay connected to hope. When you're in a a really bad patch if that ends up happening in the withdrawal process. So it's like having someone who's been there, done that, they're 5 years down the road than you, be like, I see you, you've got this. There is a through here. Just keep putting one foot in front of the next. You need that hope. And you also need the validation of like, oh gosh, I wish I'd been able to be there for you when you were 6 weeks in and suddenly things got really weird and wacky and you're like, what's happening to me?

Yeah.

To have people who are like, I've seen that 1,500 times. What you're describing is not unusual. This is totally 6 weeks in.

Right, it changes the way you— changes your perspective. It helps your perspective.

Yeah.

So what suggestion would you give somebody who right now who's thinking that I would like to try to get off of antidepressants? And again, we're not doctors. So I'm not a doctor.

I'm not a doctor. I'm an ex-patient. That's my resume.

There you go.

Yeah, totally.

Someone who's tried to get off antidepressants a lot, or 5 times, but hasn't been successful yet.

Yet. Yeah, totally. And if you're— I mean, what I would say is this is only— each person, him or herself, is the only person who should make this decision. Like, sometimes people really think I'm telling them to come off because I'm talking about withdrawal. I'm like, I have no idea what's best for you. You're the only person who knows what's best for you. But if you are someone who, in your heart of hearts, your instinct is telling you, I need to give to see what life is like off this stuff, or like I don't like this adverse effect, or I want to have a baby in a few years, or whatever it is. It starts with getting informed. Check out our website, theinnercompass.org. There's tons of information all over the internet on physical dependence, like understanding how these drugs change our our brains and bodies, how to taper slowly and safely, understanding the evidence base. that your drug was approved on the basis of? You need all this information to help you think clearly about what the next right step is, so get informed. Once you're informed, take a look at your life circumstances. Is this the right time, or do I have too much stress going on?

Am I in a divorce? Am I about to move? Do I have a lot of work stress going on? If you can, find a time where as many stressors as possible are removed. Number 3, I mean, communicate with your doctor. Ideally, if you can get them on board, that's great. A lot of people don't have the support of their doctors, unfortunately. I hope that changes, but if you can help your doctor feel confident in supporting you by showing them you're prepared and you know what you're talking about here with how to taper safely, having their support and partnership, especially 'cause you need your prescriptions written differently when you're tapering, that's really important. Building out a support system, family, friends, fellow withdrawal people, mutual aid, as much support as you can build.

Or your withdrawiers. Some people call them withdrawiers.

Oh, I love that. That's so great. Yeah.

I just made that up. I don't know if it's great or not. It seems, it's a little cringey, but it's also—

And it is. You are, like every single person who is a warrior who's—

This shit was wild, bro. I'll say the last time I'd done it, I was surprised. Well, I remember, I remember.

Can I ask you about that?

Yeah.

I know, I remember. I don't know if it's— I remember it was last— was it last fall you had, and you talked about how hard it was and how you went back on.

No, that was probably the previous time that I went back on. So this was just recent. I just got back on like 2 weeks ago.

Oh, it was that recently? Okay. And since you've gone back on, does it feel— do you feel—

I feel safer.

Yeah.

I just feel like, you know, like you're playing freeze tag or whatever and you're off a base, you can get tagged.

Yeah. But it's like, I feel like I got back Wow.

So, it's like, I feel like I have my foot on like a base, you know? So, it's like, but I'll get back out there, you know what I'm saying?

Oh, you totally will. You'll know when the time is right. And yeah, all those things I said are important. And then also just the lifestyle piece, like it's, you know, it sounds obvious, but just the food you're putting in your body is gonna shape how this experience goes for you and ensuring you're eating, you know, healthy fat and gut-friendly food, 'Cause maybe you already knew this, but 95% of our serotonin receptors are in the gut. So like we have this idea that, you know, Lexapro's like just targeting serotonin receptors in our brain. No, it's like, it's influencing the entire body, especially the gut.

Yeah, I had started buying, they got a little deal over here on the corner where they're selling, you know, previously used cabbage or whatever it's called. What is it called?

Oh, you can't, sauerkraut?

Sauerkraut. That's what you're talking about, or whatever it is.

Pre-seeds, fermented cabbage. Yeah. Nice. I love sauerkraut.

I like to call it somebody else's cabbage. That's what it seems like. But yeah, I was eating that. I had a good basket, you know, a couple of good jars of that. So I had like a strategy, but it just, I didn't have the right strategy. So next time I'll get a different one.

Well, the taper speed really is everything, like how you're actually making the reductions. Is everything. And that's the beautiful thing is that that's all for free online right now. You don't need some special medical expert to tell you how to do it. You can figure it out for yourself online.

Amen. Laura, thanks so much for joining us today and chatting.

Oh, I'm so happy to be here.

I really appreciate it. I've heard you mention a few times RFK Jr. during this chat, and I know that you were working with the Maha Institute, right? And that was this past May. What were you guys doing together? Take me through that and take me through what is he doing or what is his movement doing right now for mental health?

Yeah, well, I mean, Secretary Kennedy's long been aware of and engaged with this crisis we've been talking about here. He's long seen that we have so many millions of people on long-term meds, meds with no off-ramps and all of that. So when he was confirmed as HHS Secretary, and my husband Cooper and I, who we work together at Intercompass Initiative, we saw him talking about it at his confirmation hearing, and around that time, we realized in this very— it felt very surreal because we'd been operating under the assumption, for me, for 15 years at the time, the government's never gonna be a partner in this. Like, we just have to work on building stuff outside.

And like, yeah, we're all realizing that on every facet, it feels like.

Totally. So I'd just been solely in that headspace through my career, and I still think that's like the most essential work to do is like building new things outside of the system, so to speak. But when Bobby came in, you know, we realized like, wow, This is actually a surreal opportunity to partner with the federal government, to support them, to assist their efforts, to actually try to get policy changes around this overmedicalization crisis, as they're calling it, and how to help people who have decided for themselves that they want to taper off, how to help them do it safely.

What policy changes would actually help?

Well, what Kennedy announced on May 4th at this event that we organized with the Maha Institute— yeah, here it is right here. he laid out this plan.

The US Department of Health and Human Services on May 4th, 2026 announced efforts to curb psychiatric overprescribing at a Maha Summit on Mental Health and Overmedicalization. As the closing speaker, Secretary Kennedy Jr. laid out a new action plan to promote appropriate psychiatric prescribing and drive deprescribing when clinically indicated. Today, we take clear and decisive action to confront our nation's mental health crisis by addressing the overuse of psychiatric psychiatric medications, especially among children. What is actually happening here, do you find? Or is this just talk? Is this just rhetoric? No.

Well, he announced a few specific next steps that HHS has set out to undertake.

Okay. We will support patient autonomy, require informed consent and shared decision-making, and shift the standard of care toward prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health.

There should be more. I don't know if it's on another page, but there should be more, like an actual breakdown of— I mean, the announcements he made were around developing guidelines for SSRI tapering, training clinicians in how to do it safely, enabling through insurance that the coverage of deprescribing so that doctors, prescribers can get paid to deprescribe through billing codes and all that.

Amen.

And I think getting federally funded health centers equipped to support people in deprescribing. So there are tangible policy next steps that HHS is—

Aiming towards.

Has committed to work towards, and I think, That, which really is surreal. Like, I never thought this would be a possibility.

Yeah.

That, I think, in combination with this cultural awakening, I think leaves me feeling really hopeful that substantive change can happen. And of course, his announcements led to all kinds of media headlines. Kennedy's going to ban SSRIs and they're going to deny access. and removed from the market and yada, yada, yada. None of that is true. None of what HHS has set out to do is about removing, banning, denying access. It's literally about creating more options.

I mean, 90% of the media is owned by the same groups. So, I'm not surprised, probably. I'm not surprised that Bayer Monsanto doesn't own half of the media, or, you know, it's all a shell game. Right here it says, the changes, new training, reimbursement mechanisms, and clinical guidelines nudge clinicians to help patients getting off medications and to consider non-pharmaceutical interventions like therapy, nutrition, and exercise. Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default. We will treat them as one option to be used when appropriate, with full transparency and with a clear path off when they're no longer needed. Amen to that, man. I've known Bobby for a while. I've always believed that his heart is in the best spot, and I don't know what it's like when you take your heart into a fucking den of spiders. But I love this idea because— oh, it says, let me be clear, if you're taking psychiatric medication, we are not telling you to stop, Mr. Kennedy said. We are making sure you and your clinician have the information and support to make the right decision for you.

Exactly.

Agreed. Because here's the thing, imagine you get onto an on-ramp onto a highway and you can never get off of it. And here's the option you do have. You can pull your car over and park and get out and walk. You're still on the fucking highway though. And now you just don't have the vehicle you were in. That's what it feels like a lot of times.

It's even worse. The only option people have now is to open their door and jump out while their car's going 80 miles an hour, AKA cold turkey withdrawal.

Like, I mean, but that's it. But so yes, there should be a way to get off of these. I mean, I applaud that you guys are doing this work and the fact that it has to come from just a layperson trying to figure it out. You know, that it's come from like, it's a conspiracy theory almost to trying to get off your medicine.

Yeah.

What is your life like now? What is your medical regimen like now? And how are you feeling these days?

Well, I don't have a medical regimen.

Really?

Yeah. I mean, I haven't— it's been a while since I've been to a doctor. And for me, and when it comes—

I don't blame you, first of all.

I just find for For me, God bless the emergency room if I break a bone or I have some kind of horrible medical crisis of some kind, but I grew up just thinking that the best way to care for myself was to see doctors. And I think a lot of, especially the generations above us, I'm elder millennial, you're like a young Gen Xer, right? So I think we—

We're semi-neighbors or whatever.

Yeah, totally. So the generation above us, especially, you know, this idea that I'm taking good care of myself, I'm going to all my checkups and wellness visits, this, that. And people just have this idea that, like, that's how you take care of yourself. There, for some people, sure, that may be true, but there's so many other ways to care for oneself. And for me, my own philosophy for how I care for my body is, how did my hunter-gatherer ancestors live, and how can I Get as close to that as possible in this modern industrial era that I'm in, because we haven't evolved for, we haven't evolved for all this bright lights, all these screens, all this factory food. Like, our bodies have not evolved for this. And so—

Oh yeah, and the timeline of history, if you were to look at history as like a 24-hour clock, human beings, I guess, have been here for like since 11:59 PM.

Oh my gosh.

Is that right? Looked it up before.

I'm sure it's something like that.

If the 13.8 billion year age of the universe were condensed into a single 24-hour day, humanity has been around for less than the final 2 seconds before midnight.

And then I wonder if— can you— is there a way to calculate in the scale of human— as long as humans have existed, how much on the clock would, like, industrial— the kind of industrial era be?

If the entire existence of modern humans were condensed into a single 24-hour day, the industrial era would be less than 2 minutes at the very end of the Wow.

Which is profound when you think about it. We have not evolved for the world that we live in. It has escalated so rapidly. Right.

Yeah. So quickly ago, we were basically raccoons.

Totally. Totally. Women were birthing at riversides and in bushes.

And now it's going to happen again just because our healthcare system's so bad. So oddly enough, we are making our way back because of corporate greed. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Full circle. Full circle. But I think I keep that in my mind.

Oh, yeah.

And people often ask me, so now everything's great? Is that right? You don't have bipolar? Everything's happy? You're good now? And I always have to say, no, no, no, no, no. I'm still the same me. I'm still the same dark, complex, slightly paranoid me that I've always been just because of of the way I grew up, and I'm not happy and balanced and put together and high-functioning all the time. The main difference is that I'm not afraid of my emotional pain anymore. I don't view it as a problem to fix. I view it as a signal and a message to listen to. Like, what is my anxiety telling me about my life? What is my despair telling me about my life? And sometimes it's as obvious as, like, I literally haven't been outside today. I've been my computer. I, like, need sunlight and to get off this screen that's messing up my body. But sometimes, like, there isn't a clear reason. It's just, like, thinking about how many potentially millions of people out there have stories like yours and mine, where we were sensitive, like, alive, vital young people who had things happen in our lives that left us hurting.

And here we are, here you are 20-plus years later. You know, here I am, dig— after digging myself out of this, like, near-death, like, experience.

Yeah, you fucking went through it.

How many millions of people are having a similar experience and don't even realize it, you know?

Oh yeah. I, I, I mean, I also, I noticed this for sure about myself. I was hypersensitive for sure. So being hypersensitive and hyper-aware, I mean, you're basically, you know, you're a mouse. I'm a rat, but you're a mouse, you know? I'm not like a rat, like in prison, like a snitch or whatever, but I'm just a rat.

Rats are very smart and cute. When I lived in Boston, I used to go in the back alley and save the baby blind rats that were wandering around.

That's 'cause you were doing— you were on dope. So let's be honest.

I was on a lot of meds, but I actually still would do the same thing. I love animals. But no, I think—

But we're all mad. Well, yeah, our whole group is, we're all red.

I think all human beings are born this way. I think we are born as sensitive. Can I read you, and maybe this is a way to tie it all together. Can I read you the last, this is, it's like a paragraph, 2 paragraphs. I have to see if I can find it in my book here. It just, it ties in. So this is towards the end of My book, it's just a paragraph.

Okay, take your time with it.

What will it take for our society to begin questioning the collective assumption that the industries that have made trillions off our worsening pain, among them health, hospital, pharmaceutical, biotech, and tech, are the very ones we should trust to provide us resolution? 2 things are undeniably true about our society today. We're growing ever more unwell in mind, body, and spirit, and the business of health is thriving. Industry has subjugated the natural world around us through commodification and profitization. What's left for it to conquer is the space between our ears. It is now a radical act in our medicalized, professionalized world to look in the mirror for answers and to turn to your neighbor in times of difficulty. And to open your door to them in return. Or if you don't yet know the person who's living life next to you, to bring a pot of homemade soup over and introduce yourself. For thousands of years, we wrote poems and plays and made music and comedy and art out of our suffering that we shared with one another in community. Today, we take it to a doctor and the pharmacy under the false premise that it can and must be obliterated.

Yeah. I think one day a smile will be in a museum somewhere. And people are like, can you believe that people used to—

Totally.

The edges of their mouths used to turn up when they used to feel something?

That was all the people cared about.

Blasphemy. Thank you, Laura. That's beautiful. And thank you for— yeah, thanks for caring. Thanks for sharing what your journey's been like.

Well, thank you also for sharing your journey with so— like, the more we share our own stories, especially, like, the vulnerable parts of what we go through, I think the more it helps other people realize that the struggles they've had are not meaningless or wasted or, you know, that they have value. Like, I often say, to me, the suffering that I went through when I realized it was actually medicine for someone else. And this gets to the 12-step, the whole ethos of the 12-step world. You take your own pain and you get out of yourself and you use it in service to other people.

Amen.

I think so many people don't grow up with that opportunity, and it's free and it's available to all of us at all times. It's not easy to be with your pain and to share it with with people, but it's medicine. It really is.

Yeah. My friend James Bashara always says, we are the keys to each other's locks. That's what he says.

That's beautiful.

It's a nice statement.

That's beautiful.

And he's like a damn janitor, man. He's a keychain of keys, that guy. He really is.

Amazing.

For a suggestion for parents who have a child that was like you, right? What suggestion do you give to parents who have a child that, is going through some things that seem like mental, that seem emotional, that they're saying, okay, let's take them to talk with someone, with a therapist or with a psychiatrist or with a—

LMHC, licensed mental health counselor.

Yes. Or someone like that. What suggestions do you offer to them?

I mean, I think the most important one is never let someone with letters after their name convince you they know your kid better than you. As a parent, no one knows your child better than you. Your parental instincts cannot and should not be violated. And I think it's what happened to my parents and to so many parents. When your kid is struggling and you're terrified and you're in so much pain watching them in pain and you're confused, you're at a very susceptible moment in your life as a parent and well-meaning, because I want to be clear, these aren't bad people. Mental health professionals are not bad people. They came to this work because they want to help. So I want to be clear about that. But I think parents often end up disconnecting from their instincts about their kids because they believe that that expertise comes from the institution. Like, I'm not a trained professional. I don't know what to do here. As a parent, you have deep, deep wisdom. That doesn't mean you can just figure it out alone. Of course, support is necessary, but I think just keeping that in mind and never losing touch with that through whatever lies ahead is really important.

I think another thing that parents often get Kind of trained to do is to see their kid from this perspective of something is wrong with my kid. My kid has a problem to fix, as opposed to seeing their kid from the place of what is happening to my kid, or what is happening around my kid in their environment, or what is happening in my kid's body, what they're eating, or what they're watching, the screen exposure, whatever it might be. So if parents can kind of stay connected to a kind of curiosity of, there's a reason why my kid is having a hard time, and it isn't because their brain is broken. It might not be clear what the reason is, but to just be curious and to remember that they're having a response to the life they're in.

Hmm.

I think that's really critical. And then I think getting support from other parents, I think in the same spirit that we were talking about about before, the 12-step world, the mutual aid world of withdrawal, parents finding one another in their own communities and supporting one another and mentoring one another, I think is a really— it used to be how it was. We all lived in little villages together.

Yeah, there was community.

Totally.

Community's so important. It's like if your grandmother's around watching your children, or if your families live close to each other, then other family members are involved.

Human beings evolved that way. Like we said until 2 minutes ago, In Homo sapiens history, that was how we lived. And so just keeping that—

And here we are, this outlier. We are like an astronaut right now.

Seriously.

So far away from what we're supposed to be. The umbilical cord is stretched, yo.

Do you know that when I gave birth at home, my husband and I, we waited hours before we separated the umbilical cord from my placenta? I'm going to go there with you right now. And we burned it. We didn't cut it.

Did y'all smoke it?

No, but we did freeze my placenta. But my husband, I asked him to chop it up into pieces, 'cause this is like a whole— in the kind of home birth world, a lot of women will be like— 'cause mammals, female mammals will often eat their own placenta after they give birth.

Some of them are also perverts as well.

Probably.

Dolphins are.

Probably.

But go on.

But yeah, Cooper, chopped up my placenta for me because I was thinking maybe if I want to do this down the line, I'll put it in a smoothie or something. But then he put all the pieces in a big mass in our freezer. It's almost 6 years later. It's still in there.

No, it's still in there?

Yeah. And then when we tried to—

Here, I'll buy a couple grams of it.

When we tried to burn the umbilical cord, like our son was, you know, breastfeeding, like the placenta's in a stainless steel bowl that Cooper's holding. We have this candle, we're trying to burn it. And we didn't think about, we didn't know It got smoky and we were like, oh please, fire alarm, don't go off.

Yeah, 'cause you're like, it's like grilling kind of a meat sort of.

Yeah.

It's tripe kind of or something.

Yes, that's what it is.

Dude, people, yeah, people act like it's a—

It's like pig intestine.

Wait, what?

Pig intestine kind of.

Well, I mean, yeah, people act like it's kind of like a magical deal. Now I think if you chop it up and smoke a little bowl of it with your husband or with your stepdad or whatever, that shit's kind of, that shit's wild.

I bet you've never talked about this on your pod before.

No, I haven't, dude. Dude, that's— it's fucking bizarre. I'm just trying to pretend like it's normal shit.

But this is what life is about, just being your authentic full self.

Oh dude, if I had like £7 of placenta right now, I would definitely dry one out and smoke it with my boys or whatever. I don't think that counts as a relapse.

You could probably sell it for something.

Oh, you could trade it right now to one of our politicians for something good, probably for a favor. What I did want to ask—

Anywho.

Yeah.

Anywho. Okay, so that is the first one. Did you have any other suggestions for parents?

I think just taking all the time you can to get informed. If you are taking your kid to a mental health professional of some kind and your kid is being given a diagnosis and/or, you know, being put on a medication of some kind, just knowing that you have— it's your right to take whatever time you need to look into what's being offered to you. Like, the, the, the— just because the doctor is saying something and telling you to do something, you know, doesn't mean you shouldn't take whatever time you need to first get educated. You know, my parents were never told we're giving your daughter this bipolar diagnosis despite the fact that this is totally subjective. It's just my opinion based on looking at her. It doesn't mean she has anything wrong in her brain. I'm going to put her on these meds, but just so you know, we've only studied them for a few weeks. They weren't told that. And the chances are your doctor isn't going to tell you those things. So take whatever time you need to inform yourself. Our website has a lot. But there's plenty other resources out there too.

And you can find more resources at our website too.

And the website is?

theinnercompass.org.

theinnercompass.org. Do you hold— did you hold a resentment against your parents?

Oh gosh, no. I mean, if I was in their shoes, I would've done the same thing. They were terrified. Like, I was slicing my arms up and screaming and freaking out. And they saw no other option.

Yeah.

They saw no other option. I completely understand why they made the choices that I made. I mean, I wouldn't change a minute of anything that happened to me. I don't know if you feel the same way, but I feel like every painful experience I went through brought me to my purpose in life, which is this work, my writing and this nonprofit and just doing what I can to help inform policy. Life, what I've realized is that the objective to living isn't the absence of pain, it's purpose. It's finding meaning, it's connection to yourself, to your body and your instincts, to people around you, to nature, to God, to art.

Yeah.

I mean, standup comedy to me, Yeah. Is such a— I can't imagine the courage it takes, but I can imagine if you're tapped into your flow, the gift that you have in this world to take your life experiences and turn them into art for people and to use your art to draw attention to the world around us. What a fucking gift. And I imagine if you hadn't had that horrible relationship and whatever other painful experiences you've been through in your life, you wouldn't be the comedian that you are. I feel that way about my writing. Pain is what makes us fully human.

I agree with that. I think it's like, yeah, having some fuel. It's kind of so dark to think that those types of things are fuel, but it's also a blessing to know that they're that they can turn around and be a fuel like that, you know?

Yep.

That a worm can turn into a bird or whatever. No, what is it? Butterfly?

Caterpillar? Caterpillar.

Caterpillar.

Maybe there are some worms that turn into stuff though.

I don't know.

But yeah, the caterpillar.

I doubt it, but thanks for trying to help me.

And the whole analogy of like the phoenix and the lotus, like the lotus, these symbols that have these ancient meanings in cultures around the world, it's the burning of the bird, and it rises out of the ash. It's the mud and the muck that this beautiful flower grows out of. Like, this is not me being romantic and, like, Pollyanna-ish or being like, everything happens for a reason. It's all great. It's just naming what it is to be alive in this, like, crazy fucked-up world where fucked-up things happen all the time. Yeah.

And we've gotten so used to them, and this isn't how it's supposed to be. And this is not how it's supposed to be. We all feel that this is not how it's supposed to be, and we're all mildly kind of pretending like this is how it's supposed to be, but I think we're just sick of pretending.

And yeah, the pain that we think is a symptom of illness, so much of it is, it's like we're the canaries, and those of us who get labeled mentally ill often are the canaries in the coal mine. Like, we're feeling, we're sensing, we are sensing like, this is not okay, people.

Well, yeah, you're an astronaut. You're like, if you were in 2010, if you were thinking about this stuff, like, and talking about it, you were like an astronaut. You were like Neil Armstrong. You were out there like, just like an emotional person, like out in outer space trying to like have some idea of what's going on. Like, you know, and we need the— we need people to be out there to be like the Paul Revere's of something. And I think more than ever in our world, we need Paul Revere's and Paulette Revere's. But I wanna say thank you so much. Unshrunk, that's the book. You gave me 2 months to read it. I love this very Sense and Sensibility type of COVID on it. Pride and Prejudice energy up front. I like that a lot.

Thank you. Thank you.

Or what is that book called? Little Women. It has a very Little Women energy on the front. I like that. Um, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment and Resistance. Uh, can I keep this copy?

Yeah, I want to write you a message.

Yeah, thank you. That's very sweet of you, Laura Delano.

Yes.

Yep. And Cooper Delano, that's your husband?

Davis.

Cooper Davis? He changed his name?

What happened? He's untraditional. He kept his name.

He kept his name. Okay, tight shit, Coop. Um, tell him we said what's up.

Oh, I will for sure.

Inner Compass Initiative, uh, you can find them out at innercompass.org, helping you make more informed choices about all things mental health, diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. Do you remember the day that you felt you were free from medicine? Was there one day or one thing that happened that made you be like—

I wouldn't say it was when I felt free from medicine, but it was when I felt free. I was probably 2 years off meds, still really struggling. And I remember sitting on my couch just so overwhelmed by, like, physical and mental agitation. It felt excruciating, and I just wanted to, like, rip my skin off or, like, binge eat or just do something to get relief, to fix the problem. And something came over me as I was sitting there, and I realized they still own me. This industry of mental health that trains us to think that discomfort is a problem to fix. It still owns me, even though I've been off the meds for a couple years now. And I said, freedom is in, this is where freedom is. It's not in getting off the meds, it's in how am I with this pain? So I just decided to sit there, and I just sat there for like, at first it was just 10 minutes, and I just sat. I guess you could call it meditation. At the time, I wasn't like, I'm gonna meditate. I was just like, out of almost outrage, like, I need to be with this.

because I've spent my entire life thinking I can't and shouldn't be with it. And I just sat there, and I did it. And 10 minutes later, I felt more centered in myself. The pain wasn't gone, but I was like, I fucking did it. I'm powerful. And I just kept doing it more and more until eventually I was sitting for, like, an hour, and I would just sit. And my mind's going to all kinds of crazy places, paranoid stuff. I'm— it's not like this is— this isn't, like, peaceful, relaxing time. That was when I realized I'm free. Amen.

Yeah, we were one of the most powerful things that God created, and we outsource our power all the time. I do it all the time. I outsource my power.

It's why I named the nonprofit Inner Compass Initiative, because to me it's about taking that back, reclaiming it, the orientation you need to get you through your life. is in here.

And who is Unshrunk for? Who would— is someone who's thinking about getting off of medicine, someone who's just curious about your experience?

Anyone who is themselves engaged with the mental health system in some way, like in therapy, on meds, or if you have someone you love who is. And so it's a big number, but really, I mean—

No, that's not that huge. That's specific.

I think 60 to 75 million people.

Good.

Anyone, if your life has been touched by mental health, mental illness, it's a story to read.

Yeah. Laura Delano, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Oh, Theo, it's so meaningful to be here. I'm so glad to do this.

Yeah, it's nice. Yeah, I'm hopeful that I'll get off of antidepressants at some point. I just have to, it's almost like you went out on the battlefield and you came back.

Yeah.

And so you gotta just—

you're restocking your supplies, replenishing your reserves. And I'm here if I can help you. I really mean it. Like, I nerd out on this stuff. Like, I'm glad that— anytime.

I'm glad that I met you. I'm glad that, uh, I'm gonna just continue to just kind of share whatever's going on as I kind of navigate this, and I'll see if I can't do even a better job of it for listeners that are curious about it, or other people that are curious about it, even my friends, you know. And yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm just happy that we got to speak today. And thank you so much for spending time with us.

Me too. Thanks for having me.

You bet.

I found I can feel it in my bones.

But it's gonna take a little—