Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello everyone and welcome to the 258th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have Laura Delano join us to talk about her book, Unshrunk A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, which tells the story of Delano's 14 year relationship with the American mental health industry and questions the dominant and rarely critiqued approach to pharmaceutical intervention in medical health while examining the iatrogenic repercussions such interviews may cause. Laura, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Thanks, jag. It's great to be here.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: So let's start at the beginning.
What was the experience that you had as a 13 year old girl that led to your harrowing journey through diagnosis, medication addiction and even institutionalization?
[00:01:01] Speaker B: So I grew up in an affluent town in New England where there was a lot of, on the surface, a lot of success and achievement and accomplishment. And I went to an all girls private school. I came from a family of economic means, so I had a lot of opportunities and I did well academically. I was an accomplished athlete. So on paper I had, I had it all together, so to speak. And at age 13, there I was, president of the middle school. I, I had all these responsibilities on my plate. And I had this experience in the bathroom one night where I was looking in the mirror, just looking deeper and deeper into my eyes. And I eventually lost touch with my body, with, with the, the present moment. And I was just staring at this stranger looking back at me and I realized, who is this girl?
I don't know who this is. And when I came to, I concluded this must mean that I don't have a real self and I'm just programmed to perform and to do well in school. But who am I? What do I care about? I'm just a robot. I had, it was just this total disintegration of my sense of self. And I, I didn't tell anyone about this experience. I tried to hide it. I, I tried to continue on doing well in school and in sports, but it wasn't long before I, I just, I began to fall apart at home because there's only so much you can hold inside when you've had such a profound and existential crisis as this. So I began to act out yelling and, you know, outbursts of anger with my parents. I began cutting myself. I began thinking about death. I just, I felt so out of control, like I had no power over this life that I felt trapped in, that I was performing in. And so my parents, not knowing what else to do because they were terrified and confused and scared, sent me to a mental health professional because of course that's what so many loving parents are told. When your kid is struggling, you're not an expert. You haven't gone to graduate school to help them. You don't have, you don't have the, you know, the, the knowledge to, to navigate this with them. You need to send them to a professional. And so that's what happened to me and, and ended up setting off this very long relationship to the mental health industry.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's. I did, by the way, want to remark, as I had mentioned to you earlier, one of the things that I really enjoyed about your book was that it was at once kind of unflinching in terms of its honesty about, you know, ways that the system failed you, professionals failed you, perhaps, you know, even people around you failed you, how you may have failed yourself. And yet at the same time there is this tone of benevolence throughout.
You know, I think somebody else could go through that experience and be quite angry. But you know, you still write pretty favorably in some ways about some of the people that might have led you down a different fork. And that fort came much, much later on when there was a pivotal moment that made you question the narrative of you are, quote, incurable, lifelong disease, end quote.
And begin to question whether or not the treatments might have been part of the problem.
But let's back up from that and talk about what some of those key points in that journey was.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: So, and thanks for pointing that out about the, the benevolence because that was, I do think this is not about bad people, whether it's parents or mental health professionals. This is about well intentioned people doing the best they can with the information and resources that they see available to them.
And so yeah, once I went to that therapist as a 13 year old, it wasn't long before I was then referred to a psychiatrist because, you know, I was really struggling. I was cutting myself and just out of control.
And it was at that point that, that I was told by this, by this doctor that my anger and my outbursts and, and my self injury and despair were symptoms of juvenile bipolar disorder and that this was an incurable condition.
But not to worry, there are medications that I can take to help me manage it. And so that story that I was given as a 14 year old kid by that point and by a stranger I'd never met before, who in the span of an hour literally told me that what my future held for Me, I tried my best to reject that. Something in me knew that the, the emotional challenges I was having were actually meaningful responses to the environment that I was in. But I didn't have the, the resources or the, you know, maturity to articulate that. And so I eventually did by the time I got to Harvard, because I, of course, kept playing this performance game, not knowing how to get out of it. I eventually did collapse into such desperation, really, because I felt by 18, I'd been hoping that Harvard would help me feel better about myself.
I could finally be proud of who I was and feel like I knew how I fit into all of this. Of course that didn't happen.
And so I really spun out. I wasn't sleeping much. I was doing, you know, drinking a lot and doing drugs and getting into all kinds of trouble. My grades dropped. I was thinking more and more about suicide. And it was at that point in the winter of my freshman year of College as an 18 year old, that I, I basically concluded that that psychiatrist must have been right all those years earlier. I must be bipolar. That's why I feel this way. And I went back willingly at that point and took the meds that I was, I was instantly put back on. And for the subsequent decade, I didn't once question that diagnosis.
And as I moved kind of further and further into this system of care, you could say, and two meds became three, three became four, four became five. I accumulated multiple diagnoses along the way, you know, with every step. I was so faithful in just in the, the doctors and these pills that they would one day help me feel okay, feel at peace, feel some semblance of happiness. And, and the more I turned my life over to these well meaning doctors and all their pills. And eventually I began to be hospitalized too, and programs and this and that. I mean really it became my job was treatment. The more I did that, the more my life fell apart. And so eventually I was told, and it's, you know, why I picked this subtitle of my book. I was told, you know, you're just so sick that all of this treatment isn't able to help you. You're treatment resistant. And that story was so demoralizing and, and just so hopeful. Felt me, made me feel so hopeless because here I had, you know, turned everything over to all this treatment, thinking it would help me. And now you're telling me that I'm too sick for. The treatment led me to the point where suicide felt like my only option. I mean, I really gave up on life because I Was convinced that my brain was so defective, that I was so sick, so diseased, that none of this great treatment would, would do anything.
So to get to your question, my turning point happened in my late 20s. This was back in 2010.
I was really a professional patient by that point. What I did was treatment. I couldn't hold down jobs, I couldn't take care of myself. I was completely dependent on my family.
I just went to treatment and I had a. I'd had a few experiences with an aspect of the mental health system that I hadn't encountered before directly, but I'd known about intellectually, but just hadn't experienced. And that is the power that mental health professionals have to strip you of your civil liberties, to incarcerate. Incarcerate you against your will, with no due process to make you take drugs you don't want to take to. You know, they have all this, these powers. And I ended up experiencing some of them. And that got me questioning these, these doctors I'd been turning to for care. And I realized this is also about control and I just hadn't seen this before. And my big aha moment came not long after that when I happened upon a book by a medical journalist that basically makes a compelling case that if you look at the long term data on psychiatric drugs in America, on the whole, they're making us collectively worse, more disabled. And there I was the previous 10 years. My life had completely fallen apart. I was profoundly disabled in mind, body and spirit all along, thinking it was me.
And in this profound agonizing moment, I, I realized, oh my gosh, what if it's not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it's the treatment? And that was really the turning point.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, you know, the other thing that I think about today is how many young people, and I think that's why so many are returning to Ayn Rand and to objectivism, which is all about individual agency and also about human potential. Right. Rather than victimhood. And I see like there's a trend among some young people where they are almost taking pride in or identifying with various diagnosis. It's like, you know, you're not a part of the hallowed oppressed unless you have some kind of diagnosis attached to your name. And I couldn't help but notice how in some aspects you describe experiences or moments. Like in the fourth grade, having torn a knee ligaments in tennis practice, your doctor prescribed you a massive amount of ibuprofen and you write, quote, I remember feeling proud for needing so many pills. Each one a symbol compounding the depth of my pain in the eyes of my parents, my friends, my teachers. I learned by them that feeling physically ill was a way to feel seen and to feel special. End quote. That was just such a remarkable insight. Do you think that there are ways in which young people today are encouraged to identify with their diagnoses in.
As a way of feeling special or different? And can that identification actually be part of the problem?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Oh, that's such a good question, Jag. And. And it certainly. That was my experience that I think because I was so desperate to feel like I belonged somewhere, to feel understood, to feel seen and heard for who I was, which I didn't even know who I was, which is why I was in this mess. I was desperate to.
To have, you know, this succinct way of describing who I was.
And a diagnosis, that diagnostic label ended up fulfilling that for me. And I think I shift in retrospect when I look back and I see, you know, I was this perfectionistic, you know, kind of overachieving kid in school and sports.
And when I became a psychiatric patient, I just applied those personality traits to being a patient and made it my. My sense of purpose was getting treatment. And the more. The deeper I went into therapy, because I did weekly therapy for most of that entire time, certainly through my entire 20s, multiple, one to two times a week. The more therapy I did, the more. The more diagnoses I accumulated, the more pills I was on, the more I felt seen.
And I think that speaks to the growing void in our culture for, you know, in terms of spaces where you can talk about how hard it is to be alive sometimes, because it is hard. Things happen in life. People go through difficulties. They're lost. There's loss, there's, you know, there's trauma. There are all kinds of things that happen to people. And yet, where right now can you really turn to talk about difficult experiences that isn't medicalized and professionalized and pharmaceuticalized? There really aren't that many spaces. And so I do think it makes sense that so many young people who are searching for a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of identity end up getting sucked into this massive industry of mental health like I did, because it's oftentimes the only visible place that parents and young people see for help. And. And, you know, in my case, when I look back, I see just how.
How the deeper I identified with being sick and, you know, accumulating all these labels, the more dis. You know, disconnected from the world around me and from a Sense of hope and possibility and, and, you know, autonomy and, and responsibility. I, I became, I, I grew because, because of that.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: So, obviously here at the Atlas Society, we focus a lot on philosophy. And 50 years ago, in her famous West Point speech, she warned. Ayn Rand, warned, quote, when men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they experience no emotions except one.
Terror. End quote. Now, you describe in your own words a quote, obsession with postmodernism during the time that you were suffering from this distress, getting sucked into this spiral of therapy, diagnosis, and treatment. In retrospect, might not such an obsession with a philosophy so hostile to concepts of reason, objective reality, and individual agency have left you a bit vulnerable to anxiety, dread, and a sense of hopelessness?
[00:15:10] Speaker B: I'm so glad you picked up on that in the book. And I, I, I put it in there because I hoped it would spark questions like this.
It's my, When I, when I found Michel Foucault and, and, you know, Judith Butler and, you know, because I was really the beginning, my generation, you know, the elder millennial generation really, I think, was the beginning of what has now become this, like, ubiquitous phenomenon of deconstructing reality. I was, I was, I, I came of age at the beginning of that. And when I found these, these ideas, I think what, what they, what I thought that it would give me, what I thought that deconstructionism would give me was a sense of power because I felt powerless. I felt out of control over my life. I felt, you know, lost and confused. And at least if I could intellectually take apart all of these social structures around me, you know, then maybe I would feel like I had, I had some kind of agency here. I think that was the, the trick that I fell prey to. And, and it definitely led me to spin further out because, you know, I was already on a bunch of meds, so my cognitive abilities were, without me realizing it, were were getting increasingly impaired. So my ability to think critically about things, my capacity to step back and reflect and, and use reason and, and logic, and of course, to feel connected to common sense, that was all going out the window because of how medicated I was. And so it was easy for me to kind of spin out into these late nights where I would just sit and I would deconstruct space and time and language, and nothing is real and everything's a social construct. And the next thing I know, I wanted to die. Because what's the point in living life when nothing's real? And, and I do think that, that unfortunately that, that hopelessness inducing way of viewing the world has spread a lot. And you know, there is some merit to the idea that, that the, the ideas that we, we, you know, the information that we learn in our lives obviously comes from a source and sometimes that source has, has corrupt motives. For example, let's take psychiatric drugs as an example. You know, the, the information that I was given, that my parents were given, that were given on drug ads on television is obviously spun and biased and, and corrupted arguably. And so in that sense it is good to question, to question things and where the sources of power that create information that, you know, we're told we need.
But I took it so far to the point that I just thought nothing was real. And, and I do think a lot of young people get sucked into this and coming back into objective reality, into my body, my, my, my, the physicality of my being into the, the present moment, into the reality of the here and now, which I could only do once I got off of all these meds, has definitely been a vitally important part of my journey out of that mess.
[00:18:25] Speaker A: So I'm going to dip into a few of our audience questions because as always, they are excellent. Elation asks, what do you think children are actually going through during their adolescence that pushes parents to send them to seek pharmaceutical help? Is it poor education?
Is it bullying? I would add to that. Is it hormones?
Is it, you know, overly permissive parenting? Any, any thoughts on, on what are some of the kind of situational environmental things that, that might contribute to a young person feeling depressed and acting out?
[00:19:05] Speaker B: I think it's all of those and a long, long, much longer list of other possibilities. I mean it, we definitely live in, it's very hard, I think, to be a young person in our culture right now between all of those things you just listed and you know, then throw in screens and social media and I mean, talk about losing touch with objective reality when, when most of your social relationships are mediated by a screen and exist kind of outside of the here and now, the visceral here and now where you can feel the, the body language of the person you're talking to. That doesn't, I think a lot of young people don't, don't even develop these basic innate social skills because they're spending most of their time hanging out with their friends virtually to the, you know, the food and processed food and, and how so much of what young people eat in schools and what is, you know, on display in grocery stores is not actually conducive. To, to mental and emotional well being. I mean the, the list is long, but I think the, the, the key thing is that the problems aren't inside these kids brains. And that is the, that's the kind of the core message of so much of today's psych psychiatric paradigm is that when, when your kid is struggling, something is wrong with them, presumably inside of them. And that's why we're giving them medications, that's why we're sitting them in individual therapy.
And so I don't, you know, the list of things happening outside of that person is very, very long. And I wouldn't begin to pretend to know the, the length of it, but that's the key shift to make is that if your kid is struggling, it's not about something being wrong with them inside of them, it's about something wrong in the relationship they have to the world around them. And that's that, that when you make that orientation, then it opens up all these possibilities to, and it opens up the ability to be curious instead of being told, oh, your kid has a broken brain, here's some pills. You know that. What else is, what's the point in looking at their relationships or their, the food they're eating or the school they're in? So that's the key shift, I think, that, that I made and that I think we need to make as a society.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: All right, the wonderful Candace Morena says, so amazing that you were able to pull out of that situation and be willing to write about it. Do you think that writing helped with your recovery?
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Oh, yes, for sure. I knew when, so when I emerged from this, you know, long relationship with the mental health industry back in 2010, I knew that it wasn't just about getting off of all those meds. And I hope we can come back to that because the issue of, of coming off of these drugs is a really important one because it's so important to taper slowly and to learn about all of that. But putting that to the side, after I came off of all the drugs and broke up with my therapist and left the whole thing behind, I realized if I'm really going to take myself back from this, if I'm really going to reclaim my identity and my life for, from psychiatrization, as I like to put it, I have to take my story back because I let all those doctors, well meaning, but all those doctors over all those years define my story, define who I was and what my life meant and what my suffering meant. And so taking my story back and actually Figuring out what my story was was absolutely essential to my whole process of recovering myself because the word recovery really makes sense to me. Not in a, you know, recovering from an illness, but really recovering myself from the mental health industry is how I like to think of it.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: All right, we are going to return to our audience questions, but I have so many because I found this book so very fascinating that I want to turn to some of those and also talk about what you raised in terms of how to actually wean yourself from these, these medications. But you had an interesting kind of analogy in the book. You note that the rise of talk therapy also coincided with the decline in religious belief in the west, and wondering whether there are ways in which therapists and psychiatrists have taken on the role of clergy providing absolution and spiritual guidance.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: I, I think that that is definitely a significant piece of this whole mental health puzzle. I think the, the loss, you know, really beginning in mid 20th century, but, you know, leading up to that, just the increasing loss of spaces where you could turn for, for comfort, for solace, for support, for guidance, you know, as, as those waned in part because people were losing religious faith and also in part because I think community spaces began to atrophy.
You know, Robert Putnam has wrote Bowling Alone many years ago, talked about this issue as those spaces in community, whether faith community or just your neighborhood, as they waned, people still needed a place to turn for guidance and support. And so I do think the therapy industry really began, began its rise at that point and to the point where now our society is so professionalized. And when it comes to thinking about help, and not just in the context of mental health, but, you know, helping the elderly, helping our children, we pay professionals to care for us in all these different contexts. And I think what that does when, when you turn care into a service, when you, when you commodify, just teaches people slowly and insidiously over time that they don't have what they need inside of them to, to not only help themselves, but to help one another. To help. I mean, the number of people who, who, whom I've heard say, well, you know, they came to me and they were feeling really suicidal, but I'm not a professional. So I, I told them, you know, go call a crisis line. And I'll ask, well, what, what makes you think that you don't have the capacity to sit with someone in, in suicidal despair? And people, it's like they hadn't even, it hadn't even occurred to them to entertain that idea. So I do Think this isn't me saying all therapy is bad, but I think we need to expand the arena in which we seek care and help, and ideally bring it back to the people, to people in neighborhoods, in authentic friendships, in faith relationships, mentors.
Because help is so much more than just a service you pay for. And I didn't know that for a long time.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Right. So, speaking of spiritual guidance, the one book I've read nearly as many times as I've read Atlas Shrugged is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It's the Austrian psychologist's story of surviving Nazi concentration camps by intentionally choosing his attitude and evolving logotherapy, which is based on helping patients find meaning in even the most deplorable of circumstances. So I'm curious, how did you happen upon that book, and how did it help you in reframing your emotional troubles?
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Oh, it's such a beautiful book. And to anyone watching this who hasn't read it, please pick it up. So. So that book was recommended to me by a reader of my. My blog because I began writing a blog that I called Recovering from Psychiatry. Well, actually, first it was called Journeying Back to Self, and then I changed the name to Recovering from Psychiatry. But I've been writing online and I would hear from readers all over the world who identified with my experiences. And one of them said, it's. It seems it sounds like you've read Viktor Frankl because of how you. How you talk. And I hadn't. So I got the book and I. And I devoured it. And it was such a essential piece of the puzzle for me and really extricating myself from the diagnostic paradigm of psychiatry, because what it. What Frankl helped me see was that the suffering I'd experienced both prior to the mental health system and. And during it was not.
It wasn't this meaningless symptom of an illness that, you know, lived inside of me. It was. It was. It had meaning. It was. It was telling me something meaningful about my life. And. And I had the power to make sense of what that suffering meant. That a power that no one could take from me. And so there I was, having grown up believing that emotional pain is a symptom of a brain disease. And now I'm being presented with the idea that my. My pain is here for a reason. It's a response. I need to explore this. I need to listen to what it's telling me about my relationship to the world around me and make meaning of it and turn it into something that might actually end up being you know, constructive and potentially transformative, which, which you can't really do when you're thinking of yourself as having a brain disease that's incurable. You manage it with meds and that's the best you get.
Of course, I eventually gave up on the idea that I could grow and transform when I was believing that story. So Frankel really helped me shift. Shift the way I made sense of, of my suffering. And he also helped introduce an aa, did this as well. But this idea that, that the answer isn't to look inwards and to try to, like, figure yourself out and, you know, think about your problems privately and inside yourself. It's. It's to go outward into the world. It's to be in the world. It's to be of service to, to get out of yourself. So, so those realizations were revelatory for me.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: At some point, you did a deep dive into some of the research that the approvals of all of these drugs that you were prescribed was based on and found to your surprise, that in some cases it was a lot more limited than you might have expected. Are there any examples from your book of that that you'd like to share?
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. I mean, I went into a few of the specific drugs I was on.
But before I give those specific examples, I think just might be shocking to some of you to watching. But what I realized is that I had taken for granted, I had just assumed for all of these years that if a psychiatric drug was on the market, it had been approved as safe and effective by the fda. That must mean that it was studied rigorously for many years, many studies, you know, all scientific processes and labs that had, you know, occurred to bring this drug to market.
When I actually began to look at the drug labels themselves and learn about the history of the dsm, this, this diagnostic bible, so to speak, of psychiatry that all of these diagnoses live in, I, I realized this is not actually a scientific process here. This is, this is completely subjective, literally and completely subjective. And, and, and, you know, just not based in anything, anything like rigorously scientific in any way. So as an example, you know, most drugs are only need about two trials.
Like most drugs are given to the FDA with two trials, they just throw out all the rest. So you can do as many trials as you want. They can all show bad outcomes for your drug. No one needs to know. You give the two ones that you've managed to get okay results to the FDA and they're approved. The drug is approved on the basis of two trials. These Trials last on average about six to eight weeks.
Yet there I was on these drugs for years. Most people take these drugs for years. These drugs have never been studied in combination with each other. There's. So there's no evidence based on, for safe and effective polypharmacy. And then, you know, just as a couple of examples. So I was on Ambien for years, prescribed for insomnia.
It was approved on the basis of, I think, three trials. One of them lasted one night and the other two were a little, were, you know, over the course of weeks and basically found, you know, 20 minutes difference between placebo and Ambien, you know, very negligible outcomes. And yet the FDA declared it effective. So we just assume, we hear these words safe, we hear these words effective, we hear these words studied, and we just assume, oh, it's rigorous and robust.
But when you actually look at the trials themselves and how they were designed and what they found, you're shocked when you realize it's.
This isn't very effective. And, and so that just blew my mind. And it's part of why I think, to me, this all comes down to informed choice. This is, we all need, we have the right to know these things. You have the right as a parent to be told. Just so you know, this drug was approved on the basis of two trials that lasted four weeks or six weeks. I'm going to tell your kid to take this for 10 years or more, but there's no evidence for it. We should be told these things.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
So, and we should be told about what the potential harms are. The whole concept of iatrogenesis was one I was not familiar with before the era of COVID and the lockdowns and the vaccine mandates.
It's the idea that there can be iatrogenic harm caused by interventions that are actually meant to help.
So what were some of the harms that you experienced from the many, many medications you were prescribed? I know we hear sometimes about, you know, weight gain or suicide, suicidal ideation with some of these drugs, or just a general loss of interest. So what, what were. I mean, and maybe just a level set of how many drugs you were on in total and, and generally at any one time.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Sure.
So by my count, I was on at least 19. I, I think I was on others too, but I haven't, I was never able to get all my records, so. But I can document in my record at least 19 over the course of the, you know, almost decade and a half that I was on, on these drugs. And I was on usually between three and five at a time.
At the end I was on five and, and, which is standard, I should say this. So you might, some of you watching might be shocked at this. This, especially if you have a bipolar label. It is par for the course to be on a polypharmacy regimen of many drugs. It's considered the standard of care, despite the fact that there's zero evidence space, as I said, for polypharmacy and the, I mean the effects on me, the adverse effects were so profound and what makes the, what makes the iatrogenic harms so insidious is that I, I didn't realize how harmed I was being by the drugs because the harm happened oftentimes gradually over years.
And also the harm often mimicked the adverse effects, often mimicked the diagnoses themselves. So you know, if, if I was having intense panic that may well have been caused from this, you know, super high dose of anti narcoleptic drug I was on. But my panic is being seen as a symptom of my illness and then I'm being medicated for the panic. So you know, just the list of iatrogenic harms is so long. But definitely the weight gain, a lot of, you know, physical issues, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, chronic headaches like achiness, you know, what might be be called fibromyalgia, digestive issues.
The, the more insidious, deeper harms I would say came from just how disconnected these drugs made me from my body, from my sexuality, from my capacity to feel bonded to other people, human beings. And because of that disconnection and really dissociation and like disembodiment that I felt from the drugs that then had all of these, you know, trickle down effects around, for example, because I was so disconnected and numbed out, I needed to drink a lot of alcohol, to socialize and do drugs, to feel something. So then I had substance abuse problems or because I had no sexual function, I would just seek connection with men and you know, get called promiscuous. But I was just trying to feel, not realizing it was the drugs.
Metabolic dysfunction, I mean, the list goes on. And again, the insidious thing is that so many people are experiencing adverse effects of drugs without realizing it because they're either being diagnosed with other drugs, you know, physical conditions that they don't link or because the adverse effects mimic the mental illnesses themselves. So it's really an insidious trap. And, and just really quickly, maybe this is the point to kind of resurface the the withdrawal issue, because one of the biggest iatrogenic effects of taking psychiatric drugs for any length of time is that your, your central nervous system can become dependent on them.
Not addiction in the sense that you're craving, you know, your next fix, but just purely, at a purely physiological level. Your brain acclimates to the presence of these drugs. So when you try to stop them, all hell can break loose.
It looks like you're having a relapse of your illness, but you're actually having withdrawal. You're in withdrawal, experiencing with symptoms of withdrawal. And a lot of people go back on their meds because they think, oh my gosh, I'm going to feel this bad off of meds. I must need them. This is why I need to stay on them. They don't realize if they tapered more slowly and hopefully we'll get back to that one. If we're able to talk about the nonprofit that I started can get that information to taper slowly, you can minimize the risk of destabilizing withdrawal symptoms. And doctors are not going to tell you how to do that because they don't even know.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Well, this actually links in with one of the questions that we received from my modern Galt. He says, I know many people are scared to stop their medications and for good reason.
What advice would you give to people who want to wean off and maybe talk a little bit about how your nonprofit is trying to meet that vacuum in the marketplace?
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, it's a. I'm so glad you asked that question. And it starts with educating yourself. So, so go to the FDA website, you know, download the drug labels for the drugs you're on so that you can first learn about the potential effects the drug is having on you before you even try to come off of it. Then the next step is to learn about how to taper safely. And I started the non. The nonprofit intercompass initiative a number of years back to help people with, with, with all. With this critical, critical issue of getting informed. And so learning about dependence and, and the fact that you know what withdrawal might look like so that you're prepared and you can see if you're having a hard time. Oh, okay, this maybe isn't me relapsing. This is symptoms of withdrawal and, and learning how to taper slowly, which for some people who've taken these drugs and for years, sometimes that might need to take years. Some people can taper off over months, but some people can't and need years to taper. And so our non profit inner compass, we Provide a free, step by step, self directed manual for tapering. So we walk people through how to read a drug label, how to prepare for a taper or so looking at your support system, your diet, your sleep, your stressors to kind of take the time you need to get really prepared. Because it is a dangerous, risky thing to come off a drug. It's also dangerous and risky to start one. And taking all the time you need to get really prepared is absolutely essential. So we walk people through all of those steps, we show people what tapering looks like, slowly we break it all down. And then we have a community as well of current and former patients and their family members who are all supporting one another as people try to extricate themselves from these drugs. But doctors do not understand safe tapering. It's wild. One in four adults and one in 10 kids, and it's like one in three teens are on these drugs, yet there are zero off ramps, safe off ramps within the conventional mental health system.
It's really those of us who've done it ourselves who've become the experts on this, which is shocking and should not be the case, but it is. And so if your doctor is telling you, oh, I know how to taper you slowly, there's a very good chance that they don't and they'll do it way too fast. So, yeah, educating yourself on what slow actually is is really important.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: All right, we'll put the link to your nonprofit in the chat. On our various platforms, we've been talking about how the side effects of some of these medications led to numbness, isolation. This in turn led to abuse of alcohol and various drugs.
It sounds that you benefited tremendously from AA and from the 12 step program, but at some point you felt like you moved, you needed to move on from that as well. So I'm wondering what are some of the benefits but also the possible limitations of such programs?
[00:41:56] Speaker B: I mean, I hold AA and the 12 step world very fondly in my heart. It played such a vital role for me back when I needed it. And I think what I still to this day carry with me from what I learned there is the, the importance of recognizing how fear drives you in your life and, and developing the ability to step back and recognize when you're making decisions from a place of fear and, and when you cause, you know, when you cause harm from those decisions that you made, really taking responsibility for them and, and acknowledging your part and doing your best to learn from your mistakes and, and those, you know, there's of course, the spiritual element of the 12 steps as well, that, you know, turning it over to a power greater than yourself and all of those things, that's the piece that I eventually realized no longer felt right for me only, you know, mostly because I realized I've been turning it over my whole life to mental health professionals. I think it's time for me to, you know, take my power back and, and, and look more inwards for, for the guidance that I need. And you know, some people could say, well, God, that's still God. You know, God is in each of us. And we could have a whole semantic debate about that. But I think the key thing that AA helped me with was, you know, growing up in therapy and being taught again by well meaning therapists. But, but basically over all these years that I was in therapy, I just learned, you know, in, in the, in these deep, deep ways to surrender responsibility for my actions, for my, the things I said, for the, for the, you know, my behaviors. I just. Because I was taught to see myself as sick. And this isn't your fault, Laura. You're not a bad person, you're not a lazy person, you're sick. So you really can't be held responsible for all these bad things you're doing to people.
AA helped me basically de. Indoctrinate myself of that, that message that I had learned from being in therapy for so long. And again, this was just my experience of therapy. Not all therapists do this. It just happened to be the ones I saw. And so AA really helped me kind of take back sense of responsibility for my actions and helped me develop the capacity to see how fear was driving so much of the decisions that I was making in my life.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: So one of the most striking statistics that you include in your book is how between 1994 and 2003, there was a 40 fold increase in diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children. What can possibly account for such a dramatic increase?
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Isn't it wild?
It's hard to fathom that increase increase. I mean, I, and of course this was the time period that I was given that, you know, juvenile bipolar label. So I, you know, the timing couldn't have been better for, for me to get sucked into this whole thing. You know, I think, I think the reasons are multi fold. I think in part the 1990s.
So H.W. bush declared the 90s the Decade of the brain. There were all of these, you know, very kind of well funded, well orchestrated governmental efforts to fund research into the brain where it's the final frontier of the body. We're going to conquer it. We're going to understand how it works. We're going to, you know, this, we're going to un, unravel all the mysteries of, of the brain. You know, there was just this, this hubris I think within the, the medical community that we would conquer our understanding of the brain. And, and so that brain based orientation, you know, was kind of happening in the background of what was also then, you know, a lot of, a lot of corruption. Very powerful key opinion leaders, psychiatrists at establishment, you know, institutions getting paid by drug companies to market this new, newly discovered epidemic of, of bipolar disorder in kids. And you'll appreciate this jag. While I talk about in the book, you might remember the one of these prominent psychiatrists who, it was eventually discovered in an investig, a government investigation, was hiding that he'd gotten millions of dollars from drug companies.
He began publishing papers in the 90s that said, you know, we have this, this epidemic of, of undiagnosed bipolar disorder in children. And we didn't recognize it before because mania looks different in kids than it does in adults. In adults, you know, you might think you're Jesus and have delusions of grandeur and you know, all those kinds of things. In kids, mania looks like anger, outbursts, irritability, you know, emotional lability.
Hello, talk about adolescence.
And so I was an angry, irritable kid and of course I was going to get that label because these papers were being published and put out in these guild journals that doctors were reading and then saying, oh my gosh, I'm seeing it now too in my kids, the kids that I'm treating. And the 90s also were, when direct to consumer drug advertising really took off, they, they removed some regulations and we were off to the races with, you know, ask your doctor. And to this day we are, we are one of two countries in the world. New Zealand is the only other country that allows direct to consumer drug advertising. So I think those kinds of things were happening that led to this boom that has dropped a good bit but is still, a lot of young people are still diagnosed bipolar today.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: So some critics, like those in the Washington Post have called Unshrunk a quote, treatise against psychiatric medications.
But you have clarified that you're not anti medication or anti psychiatry, but advocate for informed choice. How do you navigate the tension between critiquing the system and acknowledging that some people find these drugs helpful?
[00:48:14] Speaker B: It's a great question. And the, there's, there's a psychiatrist in the UK who's really informed my thinking on this. So so Joanna Moncrief talks about how the, the current way we understand psychiatric drugs is through disease centered model. In other words, oh, Prozac is an antidepressant. It's, it's acting against depression. And you know, of course, we're also told, oh, and depression is a chemical imbalance in your brain or, you know, there's faulty bio, faulty biomarkers and this antidepressant is targeting your symptoms of depression.
That there's zero scientific evidence to back any of that. The chemical imbalance theory has long been debunked.
These anti, antidepressant drugs are actually powerful psychoactive chemicals that, that work by disrupting normal brain function. So just like someone with social anxiety might feel helped by a glass of wine when they're at a party, you know, it's not because that person has an imbalance of alcohol or something wrong with their brain. They just are an anxious person and the alcohol is disrupting their, you know, their, how their brain is, is handling stress and you know, kind of artificially inducing a temporary state of calm for that person.
This is a similar way to, to, to thinking about psychiatric drugs, or it should be. And that's the case that the psychiatrist makes. So these drugs can feel helpful to people, especially when used in the short term, but it's not because they're fixing imbalances. It's because they're disrupting normal brain chemistry. And so for me, it's not about saying no one should ever take these drugs. They're all bad. Anyone who's taking them is making a mistake. It's about what are the, what is the language that we use to think about these drugs, to talk about these drugs? How is that language distorting our ability to make truly informed choices? And how can we people, how can we help people get good information about these drugs so that they can actually make a true choice about what, whether they want to take them. Because it's also about understanding the risks and the alternatives too. Because what is choice if you don't have options to choose from? And I think a lot of people aren't given all of this.
And so that's, that's the issue that I have here. It's not that some people find these drugs helpful. It's what they're being told about why these drugs might feel helpful for them that, that I take issue with.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: So on a previous appearance, you discussed the, quote, dark truth about antidepressants and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs.
What do you see as the biggest misconceptions about these drugs and how can we foster a more honest conversation about their risks and benefits?
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so similar to what I was just saying before, I think the misconception is that, that these are targeting symptoms of depression in our brain and that, and that they're, you know, relatively harmless. I mean, the number of anecdotal stories I've heard from people who say, oh, my doctor says he never, he almost never sees people have, have adverse effects from antidepressants, it's just not the case. I think, I think these, this particular class of drugs, you know, whether it's SSRI or SNRIs, these drugs that are classed as antidepressants can have really, really powerful disconnecting effects. Especially, you know, as I was talking earlier, for me, they numbed me out. They disconnected me from my body and from my sexuality. I had zero sexual function through my teens, twenties.
I'm really lucky that I regained it. A lot of people who take antidepressants don't seem to regain and who lose sexual function, either on them or when they stop them, because that can happen for some people a lot. A number of people don't seem to regain it, at least not for years. Some people say that they don't know if they ever will.
And when you think about how essential sexuality is to being human, not just in the crude having sex kind of way, but in how, how you're. You're this facet of who you are as a creative person, as a friend, as, as a lover of beauty and an appreciator of, of, you know, good food and the, the parts of you that, that enable you to feel desire and pleasure when those are disabled in you because of these drugs. I mean, think about what that can, what that might mean for you, especially if you're put on them as, as a kid.
So I think that's the biggest.
To me, the, the issue that is, deserves much more attention in our society when it comes to antidepressants.
This, the way they disconnect us in these oftentimes subtle ways but very powerful ways do.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: In terms of your blog, in terms of the response that you've gotten to this book, in terms of the work that you do with your nonprofit.
Is it mostly with children? Because I'm also thinking that a lot of women at a certain time in their life, when they start to go through hormonal changes, might experience sleeplessness or they may experience depression, and if they go and they seek help from a psychiatrist, they're going to be put on antidepressants.
Who do you feel are the biggest markets that need to, to hear this message?
[00:54:08] Speaker B: I mean, honestly, every facet of society because as you, as you describe with, you know, with women in, in reaching menopause, I mean, these drugs don't discriminate in who they're marketed to. It really is from, you know, poor foster kids who are basically controlled by antipsychotics to elderly in nursing homes whose, you know, behaviors that are inconvenient to the staff are tranquilized with antipsychotics and everyone in between. We are all being affected by this powerful, monolithic, medicalized, pharmaceuticalized mental health industry. So, so my work and, and the work of Inner Compass initiative is definitely aimed at everyone regardless of your age, you know, whether you're a man or woman, your class background, your race.
These drugs don't, don't discriminate and people are put on them for different kinds of reasons, of course, but it's really an epidemic.
One of the biggest public health epidemics that we're facing right now. Not the mental health crisis itself, but the iatrogenic crisis.
And the fact that it's still largely invisible to so many people is, is, you know, hard to, hard to fathom.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: So we've got just about three or four minutes left.
Candice asks whether or not there's anything happening in current events that make you either more optimistic or less optimistic about addressing these harms.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: I feel more optimistic than I have felt in the past 15 years that I've been doing this work. I think there's a lot of opportunity right now in Washington D.C. to spread awareness about these issues, to, to actually implement policy changes to, you know, help hopefully with, with public education, public awareness efforts. I, I feel really optimistic and, and I'm, I'm appreciative of the openness that I'm seeing to, to come to, to come to the table and really start a conversation about this drug based paradigm of care that, that our mental health industry is built on. I mean if you just look at the February 13th executive order establishing the Maha Commission, the particular line item there on assessing the threat, the prevalence of and threat posed by SSRIs, antipsychotics, they list a bunch of different psychiatric drugs. I mean, that's groundbreak. I mean I never in my wildest dreams thought that our government would, would name this as a, as a threat. And it's, you know, obviously provocative language, but I do think we are facing a huge threat to the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well being of our society. Because of how ubiquitous these, these drugs are. And again, these are not bad people prescribing them. This is a system itself that's, that's largely corrupted with good, good, well intentioned people in it who themselves have been misled really by their own education.
[00:57:28] Speaker A: Well, Laura, this has just been a magnificent interview and I really enjoyed your book. I also highly recommend the audiobook version which I think you voiced, you narrated.
[00:57:40] Speaker B: I did, yes.
That was, that was emotional.
[00:57:45] Speaker A: I can imagine. But anyway, highly recommend. Please go out and buy unshrunk and check out Laura's blog and her initiative. And we hope that we wish you the best of success and are just very admiring of what you have overcome and the resilience you've developed and grateful for the great work that you're doing. So thank you so much.
[00:58:11] Speaker B: It's such an honor to be on. Thank you so much for the opportunity and I hope we stay in good touch. So thank you as well.
[00:58:19] Speaker A: All right. And I want to thank everybody who joined us and all of the great questions that you asked. I hope you will join us. Next week, John White is going to be talking about his study of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era along with his first chance children's book, My Day with Abe Lincoln. So we'll see you then.
