In this episode, Tudor speaks with Laura Delano about her personal journey through the psychiatric care system. Laura shares her experiences with overdiagnosis, long-term psychiatric medication use, and the challenges of withdrawal. Together, they discuss the lack of objective testing in mental health diagnoses, societal pressures to medicate, and the importance of informed choice. Laura also introduces her advocacy work supporting others in safely tapering off medications and highlights the need for community, self-acceptance, and critical examination of current psychiatric practices. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
Learn more about Laura and order her NEW book 'Unshrunk' HERE
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Today, we have one of my most awkwardly favorite subjects
because I try to educate people as much as I
can about the psychiatric care industry and what these drugs
are doing to people who are being overdiagnosed, over prescribed.
And I feel like sometimes I'm just yelling into this
echo chamber and no one's really listening. And then last night,
(00:24):
I think it was last night or over the weekend,
I was on X and I saw this tweet from
this woman and I was like, yes, yes, this is
someone who can speak from true life experience and has
created an entire career over helping people who don't need
to be on these medications get off. So I have
Laura Delano with me today. I'm so excited about it.
(00:47):
I'm so excited about what you do.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Laura.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Toodar.
I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Your story is interesting because, like I said, you are
someone who was put on medications, and I guess when
we're talking about this, kind of explain what we're talking
about with psychiatric medications and what your journey was from
age fourteen to twenty seven on these medications.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So, yeah, when we talk about psychiatric meds, we're talking
about antidepressants, benzodiazepines, So you know, Prozac is an antidepressant,
Klonipin is a benzodiazepine, and then mood stabilizers like lithium lemictal,
anti psychotics like brispert al sarahquell, and then stimulants like
ritalin and adderall and sleep aids like Lunesta or ambient.
(01:31):
So those are the kind of broad drug classes, and
for me, I ended up taking all of them over
the years in varying combinations, and as a fourteen year old,
what got me into this, this whole long relationship with
these medications that I ended up having, was that I
was just a struggling girl who was angry and confused
(01:54):
about who she was, and I felt overwhelmed by despair,
and I was injuring myself and spinning out at home,
and my parents just didn't know what to do, and
they were scared and confused and they felt very alone
with the experience, and so they sent me to a therapist,
who eventually sent me to a psychiatrist who, in the
(02:14):
span of one session told me that I was bipolar
and because I was angry and having anger outbursts and
rage issues.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Those were symptoms of mania.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
And then the despair and the cutting and the you know,
the down feelings that I was having were symptoms of depression.
So like that, in the snap of a finger, I
was told I had this lifelong illness that required meds,
and I was put right out the gates onto on
a mood stabilizer and on an antidepressant that that list
grew over time.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, I've had a very similar experience with someone that
I love in my family who went and said, you know,
I've forgotten literally first appointment, I've forgotten a few things
I've had some where I get distract did easily when
I'm working, and then forgotten things at home and without test.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Without that's what blows my mind.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
There's no I mean, you can't do a blood test,
but there's no actual written exam.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
There's nothing.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It was a fifteen minute appointment in the doctor's office.
Immediately five medications, one of which was adderall, which is
someone who they said, oh, well, you're anxious, but you
also have ADHD, so we're going to put you on
an anti anxiety drug and adderall at the same time,
and it was just like, this clash of chemicals inside
(03:34):
of this person's body seemed shocking. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, And what happened to your family member is how
it is for literally every every single person who gets
a diagnosis in this country. It's based on completely subjective
observations made by the clinician. There are no tests of
any kind, no lab tests, brain scans. It's it's these
(04:03):
these these emotional difficulties, these behavioral struggles, These get translated
into this medical language you know, of symptom and condition,
and we just take for granted that that's what they are,
that there must be some pathology in me if a
doctor's telling me I have this, But when you step
back and you actually think it through, you're.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Like, wait a minute, this doesn't really make sense here.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yes, And that, I think is what you just said
is key, is that we always assume the doctor's right.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
If a doctor told me this, then this must be
the case.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
And honestly, this was how I felt up until I'm
a cancer survivor. And when I went to the first doctor,
they had this kakamamie idea of what they were going
to do, and I was like, man, that sounds intense,
like I think I'm going to go to a few
different people, and I had never really been that person,
which this also sounds crazy, but I'd never really had
a big medical experience before, so I had never been
(04:56):
that person to go get two and three opinions on something.
But that was that moment where I went man. Medicine
is different depending on who you talk to. Every different
person has a different impression of how to solve your problem.
But when it comes to something psychiatric, what I think
is so key and what I love about what you've
(05:16):
done in your book that is unshrunk a story of
psychiatric treatment resistance is that I don't think a lot
of people, including parents, understand, and I don't think it's
explained to us what the side effects of these medications are.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
You're totally right, and we're not only not told about
the side effects, but we're also not told about the
evidence base upon which these drugs are approved to even
begin with. So, for example, when I was put on
these meds as a fourteen year old and my parents
and I were told I would need them for the
rest of my life, no one said and just by
(05:53):
the way, these drugs have actually only been studied for
about six to eight weeks before we approve them. No
one ever said, just by the way, this combination we
have you on has never been studied for safety and effectiveness.
So it's both the evidence base itself that we're not
told about, and then, as you said, the long list
of adverse effects, which you know are in the drug labels.
(06:17):
They are spoken quickly at the end of drug ads.
It's not like no one knows that these drugs have
problematic side adverse effects, but we're I think we're so
desensitized to that because we hear all those drug.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Ads day in and day out, and the.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Long list of symptoms at the end, I think it
doesn't sync in in the way.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
That it should.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
And I think and also because so many of the
adverse effects mimic psychiatric conditions themselves or you know, other
health conditions.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
We just we have this.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
We're trained to not kind of think critically about how
the pharmaceuticals that we take are going to be altering
our bodies, and instead, when we have problems, we end
up getting new diagnoses that end up needing more medications.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So that's another one that I love.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
This is now this is causing this, so we're going
to add this, and that's kind of I think that's
how Ambient actually gets added to the protocol sometimes because
oh wait, this stimulant won't let you sleep.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Well, let's put this on and now you'll.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Sleep, and you'll sleep in this weird drug induced coma
that doesn't actually give you good sleep, and you might
make yourself a meal in the middle of the night
and crochet a an entire throw for your couch, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Like it was bizarre. Oh my gosh, tutor, when I
was on Ambient. So I was on Ambient for years,
you know.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Of course this drug is not approved for more than
two weeks. And I would, without fail, blackout after about
twenty three ish minutes, and I'd wake up in the
morning and I would have empty bowls, It's empty cereal
box bowls, spilled milk everywhere. I'd write weird things in
my journal. And then, as you said, too, that's scare up.
(07:56):
I ended up feeling so sedated during the day that
they have started on Provigil, which is an anti narcileptic drug.
So I was literally on an insomnia drug at night
and an anti narco elliptic drug during the day. At
the same time not to mention like two or three
other meds too.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
I mean it was wild and I never and then
who are you as a person?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, yeah, that's the question, And especially for those of
us who end up on these meds as kids when
we haven't even had a chance yet to forge a
sense of ourselves, you know. And adolescence, which was when
I got psychiatrized, as I like to put it, that
was I was just waking up to self, to my body,
to how I fit into the world around me. I
(08:35):
had all these questions and these struggles that I now
see were these meaningful, deep, profound questions. And because I
got diagnosed so young and I got put on these meds,
that process was interrupted, was disabled, really, and so I
had no sense of, no baseline sense of myself through
these critical years of my life, my teens, in my twenties,
(08:56):
which in turn made it hard to then extricate myself
from it because I didn't have an old me to
look back to. You know, sometimes people will start meds
later in life, and you know, they realize, like, hey,
this I don't really I'm not really the way I
used to be, Like I'm not the same mom I
was five years ago, or I'm not the same you know,
(09:16):
person at work. Maybe something's going off with these meds.
When you're a kid, you don't have anything to compare
yourself to, and so I think it's it's especially insidious
for young people.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And I think in our generation that's when it really well,
you're a little younger than me, So I think that
I didn't go through. It wasn't until I think maybe
I was in high school, that the younger generation was
coming in using Riddlin and that they there was like
this real push for Riddlin. I remember that being and
I don't remember people in my class being on medication
(09:48):
or talking about it, but it was almost like a
badge of honor for the younger.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Kids, like, well, I'm on Riddlin.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know, I have a special dispensation here because I'm
on this or I'm on that. And then that kind
of expanded, and I think it became incredibly normal for
us to go, oh, is this person struggling with coping
with something, Then there's got to be a med for that.
Where the quick fixed society and you're right, those ads
were very so so quick and so fast and so
(10:15):
constant that even though they said, if you're feeling the
thoughts of suicide or harming someone else, go to a doctor.
We just kind of forgot about that, and I wasn't
so the first and this may be a place you
don't want to go, and you can tell me to
stop if you don't want to. But the first school
shooting was right after I graduated from high school. I
was in college at the time. I was actually graduating
(10:35):
college at the time, and I interviewed a psychiatrist who
met with those with Dylan and the other kid now
his name escapes me, but met with them or read
their file. The one that was nineteen read his file,
and he was like, look, kids have not become less depressed,
and they've become more violent since we've been giving them
(10:57):
all these medications.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
He said.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I forced the FDA to say these ads had to
say you might be considering suicide or harming someone else.
He was like, I guarantee you if you look at
every school shooter, they have one of these medications in
their system.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Why don't we talk about that.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
It's such an important question. And I think the whether
it's you know, because the story is about most mass shooters. Oh,
this was someone with untreated mental illness quote unquote, and
then they know that's why they did this. But as
you said, if you look at the stories of many,
if not most, if not all of them, they were
(11:34):
already interfacing with the mental health system in some way.
And so whether whether they were on these drugs when they,
you know, committed these horrific acts, or maybe in some cases,
had stopped these drugs abruptly, which itself can cause withdrawal
symptoms that literally are suicidal or homicidal ideation. I mean,
I wouldn't be because they've made it so hard to
(11:58):
look at these shooters medical record. I have a friend
who's a professor who tried to foil them and couldn't
get them. You know, we can only ask these questions,
but I think I think it's worth asking them. And
the fact that these questions are getting shut down, I think,
you know, indicate something important. And just to quickly piggyback
on what you said about that, you know what you
(12:19):
saw in high school with the rise of stimulants, You're
hitting something so important, which is that you know, in
the case of stimulants and this a d D thing
and ADHD and school and performance you know, instead of
stepping back to say, like, why do we all force
ourselves into this one rigid way of learning in this
one rigid school system that some kids do well in
(12:41):
but some kids don't? You know, why, why are we
doing this? Do we have to do it this way?
I think it's a lot easier and more convenient to say, Oh,
this one individual kid here, something's wrong with him because
he can't sit in his desk for six hours straight
and not get sunlight and focus on you know, mundane tasks.
You know, I think I think pathologizing kids and making
(13:04):
them the problem instead of stepping back to problematize the
school system itself, you know, I think that is a
part of what's happened here with this predominance of the
psychiatric paradigm is instead of looking at the context of
our lives and understanding our behaviors and our struggles as
responses to the environment that we're in, to the food
(13:26):
we're putting in our body, to the breakdown of social
networks and neighborhoods and intergenerational families. I mean, the list
is endless, poverty, all all these possibilities. Instead of doing that,
we say, oh, the problems inside of your brain, and
here's the pill. And I know, you know, I think
I think we're finally reaching a point where enough people
are realizing does that really make sense?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
And it's crazy because you really are altering their brain chemistry.
But then there's not, like I said, there's no actual test.
I mean, if you have a broken arm, you know
the fix right that, and then the arm is no
longer broke and you move on with life. When you
have someone who has a broken heart or you know,
thinks things that are sad or depressed, there is no
(14:09):
obvious answer. And I talked a little before we got on.
When my daughter was eight, she was just anxious. They
had talked about germs in school, but I couldn't figure
out what had set her off if it was that,
but she was so concerned about germs. She was freaking
out if anybody would get near her. And so we
talked about it at her well child visit. She should
(14:30):
go to a therapist and talk to the therapist. And
again this is at a point where I'm like, I
want to be obedient.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
To my doctor because my doctor knows.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Then we went to the therapist and the therapist saw her
for probably about I mean, i'll give her credit. She
saw her for probably about four visits before saying she
has to be on two different medications and you have
to go to a psychiatrist. And I said, well, we're
not interested in that. And then the next day I
got a call from the pediatrician's office and she's like,
(15:01):
we received.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
This long letter. Your daughter has to be on.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
An antidepressant and an anti anxiety medication.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And I was like, well, I'm.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Not going to do that, and they're like, you know,
well it's been it's in the file.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Now you have to go. And I got to the
point where I was getting calls from them.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
I was getting calls from the psychiatrist's office, and I
was afraid I was going to get a call from
the state saying like this, you have to get your
kid on medication. And I finally just said, look, it's
not going to happen. I'm going to block the number
if you.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Keep calling me.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
And we went home and I said, okay, I'm going
to pour everything into figuring out how when something happens,
what we do. And there was like I started reading
about it, and certain kids have like soothing mechanisms and
for her, it's like if you can get to her
and I kind of rub her back and be like
we're okay. That's like to her, it brings down all
(15:50):
those emotions.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
She can calm down.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
And just last week was the end of school and
they all at the end of school, the teachers like
say these affirmations over the kids over and over again.
The kid the teachers were saying, she's such a light.
She's such a bright light when are at class. She's
just always cheerful. She is the kid that brings other
kids in. And I think, to this day, if I
had done that those years ago, would she be light?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Oh my gosh, tutor, I feel so emotional thinking about it,
because there's so many kids out there who have parents
who don't necessarily have the They don't know, they don't know,
they feel pressured into it, they're insecure, they're afraid, they're confused.
And the number of parents who have reached out to
me with kids who are now in their twenties, some
(16:38):
even in their thirties, who say, oh my gosh, what
did I do twenty years ago, ten years ago, five
years ago when I listened to what the school said
about getting my kid on adderall or I listened to
them telling me I needed to take my kid to
a psychiatrist. And now all these years later, they're young
(16:59):
adult children are oftentimes disabled, unable to work, completely dependent
on their families and all of course this is this
is all being translated into illness. Oh that they're just
very mentally ill. But when I think about my experience,
you know, through my twenties, as I got more and
more disabled in mind, body and spirit, and of course
(17:21):
every step of the way, it was two.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Meds, three meds, four meds, five meds.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It was the meds that were injuring me and harming
me in all of these ways that my parents and
I just didn't see because we were so unquestioning of
these top doctors, you know, because I came from a
family of associ economic means, I was seeing the best
of the best. So who would we be to have questioned?
And so I really feel for the bind that so
many parents are in, who don't have resources, who don't
(17:49):
have the time to educate themselves, who who feel, you know,
who don't feel you know, confident in their in their voice.
How do we support them? Because a lot of them,
you know, are are they mean well, and they love
their kids. They want to do it's best for their kids,
and they just don't have They're doing the best they
can with what they have, and so how do we
(18:09):
get them what they need?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well, and explain to me a little bit about what
that was like for you, because my experience with folks
who are not only the parents but the actual patient
themselves is like, there's this inability to admit that maybe
I've done something wrong and that there's and an inability
to see that there is a more complete and exciting
(18:32):
life without these medications dimming you. And like you said,
it really is you become disabled. It's like a fog
over what how you can accomplish things. I mean, I
have people that I know that are like, I just
can't get from here to there, and they don't see
that it's the medication. So how do you open their
eyes to this is the medication. There's no shame in it.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
You are allowed to let it go.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
And don't fear letting it go because you've even said
you work with people on this and they go, I'm
afraid of a relapse.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I might have to go back to the meds.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Oh, it's such an important question, and I wish there
was like one clear path of an answer. I mean,
I know, for me, what when I look back, you know, so,
as I said my twenties, as my med list grew
and I grew more and more disabled, I grew more
and more hopeless along the way, because eventually I was
told that I had, you know, so called treatment resistant
(19:27):
bipolar disorder, which basically meant like, oh, you are just
so defective that even our treatments can't help you.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
And what a horrible thing to think it was.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I mean, it was that story that led me to
eventually try to kill myself, because I was completely convinced
that I had exhausted every option that might give me
a chance at feeling okay, and what's left for me?
And so when I eventually did two years after my overdose,
was the year that I woke up, you could say,
(19:57):
And what actually jolted me, what started to jolt me awake,
What was like the first kind of thing that forced
me to step back and begin questioning, was was having
a few experiences with with psychiatric force, basically with the
power that mental health professionals have to strip you of
your civil liberties. So I was made to go into
(20:18):
a hospital when I didn't want to go in. I
actually did want to go. I just wanted to go
home to get my belongings. First, security guards were called.
There was a whole thing that was the first time
I was forced up against this realization that this system
I had been turning to for care was actually also
about control, about controlling me, and I just hadn't seen
(20:40):
it because I had never said no before. So I
had a couple of other experiences like that that just
got me questioning this faith I had had, and all
of these doctors and all these pills and these hospitals
and programs for so many years, fourteen years. And then
in that space of questioning, I began to wonder, you know,
who would I be off of these meds.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
That I've been on since I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
It was just this question at first, and it kept
nagging at me because I realized I didn't have any
sense of myself off meds, and I had never been
off meds as an adult, and so those those those
curious questions just kept eating at me. And then I
eventually did find a book that led me on this
(21:23):
journey that I'm still on today, and the book was about.
It was written by a medical journalists and it was
basically looking at, you know, why do we have such
poor long term outcomes in the United States compared with
you know, other parts of the world that aren't aren't developed,
that don't have all these pharmaceutical products. And what he
(21:45):
found was that if you actually look at the outcomes,
if you look at the long term data on psychiatric drugs,
they're making us sicker. You can make a strong case
for that. So I had that aha moment then when
I read this book and I was on five meds
and my whole life had fallen apart during the year
I was on them, and I realized, like, oh my gosh,
what if it's the treatment and so but you can't
(22:06):
force that awakening in someone. You can't make someone see
And so I think what it's really about is creating
opportunities for people to identify with this story and someone else.
I mean, it's why I wrote my book. I wanted
to write a book that I could put out into
the world to start a conversation and that might help
spark a sense of identification and other people who maybe
(22:30):
didn't haven't yet realized that my story might well be
their story too. So I think telling personal stories, putting
our stories out there, and then just creating opportunities for
people to step back and ask questions and be curious,
because you can't force an Aha moment in someone and
everyone's path to that is different. But I think the
(22:50):
storytelling aspect, I think is really big because that's what
also helped wake me up that book. I was mentioning
there were stories in it, and I saw myself in
the other people's story in this book, and that's I think.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Why I was able to say, Holy cow, what if
it's the true.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
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Speaker 1 (24:29):
This is a treatment.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It's the only time we are willing to go to
a doctor regularly and never be healed. That to me, So,
I was a psychology major in highsch or in college,
and as a psychology major at the university that I
was at, you could work at the there there was
like an inside the university. There was a little psychiatric clinic,
(24:51):
and so you could work there, and it was all
the psychology students, and then I think they had a
psychiatric portion as well.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But if you were a.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Student at the university in the psych or the psychology department,
then you were able to read everybody's every single patient
file unless they were a student or somebody that worked
at the university. So there was a massive amount of
community members that came in and they were patients there,
and I was pretty deep. I mean, this is probably
(25:21):
my junior or senior year, so at this point I'm
planning on going to get my master's degree and become
a therapist myself, and this is my first kind.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Of exposure to therapy.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So you get to I mean, you do all the
filing and everything, but you really get to sit down
and read the cases. And I remember sitting down with
one and I read day one and his file was
ten years long, and I went to the tenth year
and the stories were the exact same, And there was
(25:52):
this moment that struck me so hard where I said
to myself, how do you live with this being your
career if you can't help someone? Because there was no
change in this person, and I asked that question. They
were like, Oh, we're not here to solve their problems.
We're here to get them through week to week. And
(26:13):
I thought, what a terrible way of looking at this.
We're just here to keep them alive. They're miserable people.
We're just here to keep them going from one miserlled
week to the next. And that was unacceptable to me.
It's like, that is not what I thought this major
was about. This is not what I thought we were
here doing. I thought we were helping people. That was
what I wanted to do, was to help people, and
(26:34):
it seemed like they were keeping them trapped. And just
the conversations. If you think about the conversation, the conversation
is kind of like it's a gossip session. Okay, well,
how did that make you feel? Yeah, you had a
right to feel that way. And it's almost like even
the therapist and I'm not saying this in all cases,
because I do think there are times when therapy gets
(26:58):
you through a situation.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And that's the problem that we have.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
They are a therapists who say, Okay, you've had a
death in the family, you went through and you know
a lot had a marriage breakup or something, and there's
a let's go through the next few months of getting
you back on track, and then you want to see
the patient leave. The goal should be in my mind
to want to see the patient leave, and yet there
are there's a whole industry built around in my town.
(27:23):
The person has to have a meeting every week with
their psychologist, to once a month have a meeting with
their psychiatrists so that they can stay on all of
their meds. It's like a cash cow. You have to
have the gossip session once a week to get the meds,
and that means that you're constantly paying these people to
(27:44):
keep you in a bad place.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
For me, beginning therapy as a kid, what should have
been a period of my life when I was developing
meaningful friendships that I could you know, I could turn
to my friends in times of struggle, turned to the
for comfort, for mentorship, for guidance. I learned to turn
more and more to these paid professionals whom I was
(28:09):
seeing once a week and eventually twice a week. And
the more kind of accustomed I became to relying on
therapy as my source of support, the less even interested
really I was in friendships to begin with. And I
think what you were saying earlier too, about when you
(28:32):
were in your third year as a psych concentrator and
like what you were seeing that these years and years
and years of people not getting better. You know, that
gets to the heart of this brilliant business model really
that the mental health industry today is built upon, which
is this idea of chronicity. These are chronic, incurable conditions
(28:55):
that you'll have for the rest of your life, and
it's about managing them quote unquote man, I mean that
was the word that was used for me. This isn't
about This isn't about me, you know, really growing, changing, transforming, evolving.
This was about finding a med regimen that would help me,
you know, so called manage my symptoms and you know,
(29:16):
get by. And if you look at the history of
the mental health industry over the past seventy eighty years,
prior to the rise of psychiatric drugs in the nineteen fifties,
the baseline operating assumption was that these these challenges were episodic,
even you know, extreme altered states that you know today
(29:39):
are called like these chronic conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia.
Before the rise of the psychopharma pharmaceutical industry, people assumed
like you have hard.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Times in life.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Sometimes they last a few weeks, sometimes a few months,
maybe sometimes longer, but you moved through them, you move
beyond them. And I I think this medical model of
incurable mental illness requiring lifelong treatment has just slowly, over
the decades, led us to forget that these difficulties in
life do not have to be forever, and.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's normalized that we shouldn't actually have any difficulties. And that,
to me is it's a weird thing because you don't
have really medical malpractice when it comes to psychiatric care.
And yet there are true great therapists who say, you
went through something tough, let's get you through that and
let's get.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
You back into life as normal. And it is a.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Few meetings and then you're off. But I do believe
that there should be some accountability for people who keep
people in this cycle of you're right, that's really hard,
no wonder you're depressed, and that's why you carry this
label and other people don't, because you get these young
people to believe there's no way out.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Labeled this.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Now, this is who I am, yep, And I think
because as young people, you know, we're we are searching
for a sense of belonging. We're searching to understand ourselves
and how we fit in and where we fit in.
And one of the great tragedies I think of this, really,
you know, overly medicalized society, is that that identity of
(31:22):
being mentally ill quote unquote becomes it becomes the I mean,
speaking for myself, it became the thing that I was
proud of because if I wasn't ever going to be
able to be just a normal person. And of course
today like what is normal? What does that even mean?
But at the time that's what I thought, Then at
(31:43):
least let me get really good at being a psychiatric
patient and it being crazy and mentally ill. And the
more diagnoses, the more people will see how much I'm struggling.
The more meds I take, the more they symbolize how
how much suffering I'm in. They these this whole realm
of like medicalized pharmaceuticalized living came to become the singular
(32:06):
focus of my life, my sense of self, my relationships,
my purpose.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
My purpose was being a good patient.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
And I think there's so many young people who grow
up on meds in therapy, thinking of themselves as sick.
And this is not me judging any of them for this,
because I relate that was how I grew up too.
But I see now in retrospect that I was what
I was seeking, which was a sense which was feeling
(32:32):
seen and heard and understood in my struggles. I actually
was doing the very opposite by medicalizing myself and thinking
the solution was pills and professionals.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
What I really.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
For me now, the way I think we can most
validate a struggle in life is as a response. You're
having a response to something that's happening in your life,
and this response is a signal. It's a message. It's
telling you something about where you need to go from here.
And you just if you listen to it instead of
try to shut it down or medicate it or treat it,
(33:08):
you know, you open up all these possibilities for growth
and change.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
And I think it's it's important to kind of zoom
out on your life because I'm listening to you say this, well,
in the back of my head, I'm thinking, here is
someone who was a straight A student, a nationally ranked sportswoman,
a Harvard student. I mean this, You're saying, like, I
identified as being a good patient, but you had so
(33:32):
many things that you were amazing doing amazing things.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
How did what was that like? Because I think that
people go.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh, this isn't my kid, this isn't my story, because
my student's a good student. My student didn't have these issues.
But you fit all those categories too, So explain that.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
It might it might seem incongruous. But I actually think
that a big part of why I broke down as
a kid was because I I grew up in a
really intense town. You know, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
So this town with all these incredible opportunities and resources
and all of that, but it was a really high
(34:13):
pressured place where the just the unspoken, kind of operating
assumption of everyone was that if you ever, if you
want to feel worthy, you need to excel. And so
I think because I was getting good grades and you know,
a good student quote unquote, and a kind of conventional
way I could study and get good grades on tests
(34:35):
and regurgitate information, and because I was a good athlete
and all these things, I was just assuming that, you know,
I'm playing the game right, so maybe I'll eventually feel happy,
and so the fact that but what I was missing
really was like, why.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
What do I care about? What? What ignites me? What
brings me alive? What? What are my values?
Speaker 3 (35:01):
What are my I was so programmed, I was so
focused on this kind of programmed good grades, good sports,
good schools, that those deeper questions I didn't have the
chance to explore in myself. And so I was just
assuming I'll eventually feel happy because I'm doing it right.
And so, of course, when I broke down, because that's
not how it works, I believed all the more that
(35:22):
something must be fundamentally wrong with me because I have
it all together.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I've arrived at Harvard. You know, I did everything I
was meant to do. Why do I want to die?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
And so I was so terrified by that that I
think that desperation is what really drove me to then
buy in so deeply into the idea that something was
wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
And I think that is so I wanted to get
to that because I think that's key that it wasn't
as though you were in an abusive home where you
had had some terrible thing happen.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
This is life. This is life.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Every kid is experiencing life, and so often we say,
you shouldn't have to feel that pain and have to
feel upset about this, you shouldn't have to struggle with
this will make it easier. And every kid in class
has a different diagnosis. And I've seen this throughout my
daughter's lives.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Here, I have twins that are going to be in
seventh grade. I've got one that's going to be a
freshman in high school. I've got one that's going to
be a junior in high school. And they're all girls.
So I think even from that perspective, I've seen those
types of pressures of girls being mean to girls. And yes,
as a parent, you want to say, I don't want
you to have to deal with this, but I have
(36:31):
seen so many phases of life with these kids too.
That's the key is that there have been really hard years,
not really hard seasons. I mean, we're talking about an
entire year of high school that was really hard, you know,
and we got through it together, but there.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Were ups and downs.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And I think we're so quick to say we just
want to fix this, but I want to get to
you having this epiphany of like, oh my gosh, what
if it's the treatment.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Getting off of the treatment that's not easy. What was
that like?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Well, when I came off of five meds in twenty ten,
so I was in my late twenties, I had no
idea what I was doing, first of all, And I
had no idea that these these drugs that I had
been on for so many years had really changed my
brain and my body. They had that I was physically
(37:27):
dependent on them. No one told me this. I had
no idea.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I just want to stop you there, because I hear
so many times when people go, oh, it's not addictive,
so you that doesn't mean you're not dependent on it.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yes, people conflate these words addiction and dependence, and I
think sometimes sometimes this is done deliberately, because yes, you
know you're not craving your next fix of your antipsychotic,
but your brain may well be completely acclimated to your
daily dose of your antipsychotics such that if you don't
take it, it's gonna.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
You know, it's going to go haywire.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
And so when you hear someone's someone say oh these
are not addictive, that may actually be that is true,
but that doesn't mean that they aren't dependence forming which
has nothing to do with cravings and the kind of
the psychological elements of what we conventionally understand addiction to
be like, you know this alcohol is causing you harm,
(38:23):
but you keep drinking it anyways.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It's not like that. This is a different thing.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
This is about being a compliant patient, doing what you're
told by your doctor, and that then leading your body
to become totally dependent on these pills. So, because I
didn't know this, I was in this head space of
thinking that, you know, I've got to get off these
pills as fast as possible. If they've been harming me,
(38:47):
I've got to get off of them so I can heal.
I didn't realize that I had it backwards that actually,
for many, many people, the fastest way to get off
and stay off of these meds is to taper very
very very slowly because of this dependence issue. And by slow,
I don't mean over a few weeks or a few
months or even a year. Some people need to taper
(39:09):
over years to get off of these medications without causing
profoundly disruptive withdrawal symptoms that can literally take you out
of your life.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I mean, I have friends who.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Were brought off of you know, an antidepressant or an
antidepressant and benzodiazepine. You know, people who had have you know,
work related anxiety. This very kind of typical struggles that
they got put on these meds for they've been they
were brought off, you know, over a few weeks or
(39:41):
or a month or so, and were literally bedridden because
they had such horrible vertigo that they couldn't stand up
they would fall over, or the burning in their fingers
and their and their feet is unbearable. Or the brains
apps that a lot of people coming off anti the
depressants get where you literally feel like you are being
(40:02):
having electrical shocks going off in your brain.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I mean, that's crazy in and of itself. When you're
describing this, I'm like, this is what your body goes
through coming off of these drugs, and yet we want
to keep people on them, yep.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
And I think why people end up staying on them
is that the so there are those physical withdrawal symptoms
that are strange. You know, these brains apps, No one
would those are just such strange, strange things that are
so out of the ordinary. But a lot of withdrawal
symptoms mimic the diagnoses themselves, and so when you come off,
(40:36):
you know you've been on your prozac for fifteen years,
and you realize, like, I don't think I need to
take this anymore. And you come off and you feel
horribly anxious down in the dumps, you lose energy or
you know, maybe you can't sleep or you're restless, and
you realize, like, gosh, I really was depressed. I just
didn't realize it because I was on my meds, Like
I need to go back on my meds. I don't
want to feel this way. And I think that because
(40:58):
we don't have this understanding dependence and withdrawal, people stay
in this loop for years and years and years because
they hate how they feel when they stop their meds.
And so a lot of what my work is about
is not pushing any kind of agenda. I'm not anti med.
I'm about informed choice. We are not being informed about
the drugs before we start them. We are not being
(41:19):
informed about how to come off of them safely. And
I want everyone should have the right to this information
so that they can decide for themselves what their next
right step is. And I believe that right now, basically
none of us are making informed choices because we're not
being told any of this.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. What do you think about the
diagnosis process? Because I know, I mean, I think that
you had at one point major depression, eating disorder, substance
abuse disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar, all of these things.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
They had said, Oh, it's this, it's this, it's this.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Do you believe that they really understand what they're doing
when they diagnose?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Well, I think the diagnostic process. What I think people
really what I fail to understand, and I think a
lot of people fail to understand, is that the process,
the process of diagnosing with someone with a psychiatric condition
is not a scientific process that's rooted in in anything
kind of scientifically valid or reliable. It's it's a very
(42:27):
subjective process that that is largely about the opinion of
the person doing the diagnosing. And so in this in
that sense, the DSM, you know, psychiatry's bible that all
of these diagnoses live in. I don't really take it
seriously as as a valid a valid scientific text at all.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
I think it's more.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Of a kind of work of fiction, really, But that
isn't me saying that these experiences aren't real.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Sometimes people can think.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
That when I'm challenging the diagnostic paradigm, I'm challenging the
reality of the struggles that people have, and I am
not doing that for me. The fact that I had,
you know, six or seven different diagnoses along the way,
and that they would change, and you know, different doctors
had different opinions, and when you look at the history
(43:18):
of the DSM itself, these conditions are voted in and
voted out. That's how they That's if a diagnosis is
in the DSM, it's because a group of psychiatrists voted
on it, and that's why it's there. And so when
people realize that, then then you you know, some of
(43:40):
us start to wonder like, is this really the most
useful way to make sense of my difficulty here to
just reduce it to this label, or maybe there are
other ways to make sense of this this struggle. And
by making sense of it differently, you end up opening
up different options for you, because if it's not a
so called illness needing treatment, and then you know, it
(44:02):
can mean so many different things that then open up
maybe changing your diet.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Right there's relationships.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
There's so many different ways that you can have something
that appears like major depression, but it could be a
something that happened in your life. It could be a
temporary condition that you have to talk through. You could
have something that appears to be your standard eating disorder,
but it might be one person has that eating disorder
(44:29):
because they need control. The other person may have that
eating disorder because it's a social contagion, and their friend
has that and they're in a bad environment and you
need to get them out of that. I mean, that
is the concern is how do you get to the
root cause of a psychiatric condition.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
They're very hard, it's very hard to do that.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
It's very hard, and I think especially for people who've
been struggling for a long long time. Let's take the
kind of stereotypical example of the man on the sub
the homeless man on the subway who's talking to himself
and acting.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Really wacky and scary.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
You know, I think are most so many of us
just assume, oh, this person must have this serious illness
like schizophrenia, and he's off his.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Meds and that's why he's acting this way.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
But if you if you step back and think about it.
At one point, that man was a little boy, and
and things happened to that boy needs were not met.
Maybe things happened to that boy that never should happen
to a child. And when you when you think about
the kind of cumulative effect over years and years and
years of not having basic needs met, of having traumatic
(45:39):
things happening, of being maybe put on meds that cause
all these problems, and then you get stuck in this
cycle where you stop them abruptly and you go into withdrawal,
but everyone thinks it's you're having a relapse. And just
you think about all the layers of trauma and and
unmet needs and in all these kind of systems failing,
(46:00):
it makes sense then that eventually a person reaches this
extreme point where they're kind of seen as this other
being that's not like me. And I think it for me,
it's about, you know, stepping back and realizing that every
single person has a story behind why they're in the
struggles that they're in, and sometimes the story is obvious,
(46:22):
and sometimes it's not obvious, and sometimes it's long and complicated.
And so I'm not someone who's like, oh, it's all
simple let's just you know, if we stop diagnosing people,
there won't be problems. Life is really hard, messy, sometimes violent,
awful things happen. I'm not pretending there's some easy solution here,
(46:43):
but I think we need to all realize that every
struggling person has a story, and the current mental health
industry doesn't often make space for those stories to be
understood and.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Help people to cope through life on a regular basis.
And so I want to just end on what you're
doing now because you're kind of coaching folks who do
say I want to get rid of these medications from
my life, from my life, and I want to move
on and I want to feel healthy. And I think
I read something where someone said I felt like it
would happen right away, because it seemed like it happened
(47:17):
right away for Laura. But you just said it can
take years to get somebody off of one of these medications.
So if you can explain a little bit about how
you talk people through this, and then also I got
the impression that you also coach them through those moments
of you know, I'm having a panic attack, I must
be having a relapse.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
No, you can get through it. There are ways to
get through it, So tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
So for anyone who's on a medication, trying to come
off of it, or have tried in the past and
didn't go well, you know, I first there's this nonprofit
that I started, Intercompass Initiative, and so over there we
provide people with free information and resources for learning about
(48:04):
all so many of the things we talked about today
and more. Learn about how to read the drug label
for your medications you can better understand its risk profile
and all of that, how to learn about the history
of the DSM. You know, we have all that information
there because I think it starts there. It starts with
educating yourself with which is not easy. It takes time,
(48:25):
and it can be complicated. So we have everything organized
on our website that we think is you know, what
people need to know that they're not being told. And
we also over there have a self directed tapering manuals.
So we basically took all of the late person wisdom
in the withdrawal community, and by that I mean the
(48:48):
tens upon tens of thousands of people all around the
world who have been forced to figure out for themselves
how to taper off of these meds safely. Because the
medical system does not ignowledge this is a real issue.
There are no safe tapering protocols that have been officially
endorsed in the United States. So we lay people have
become the experts on this. So we have a free
(49:10):
manual at the website that walks through how people taper
off of these drugs. Write down to pictures of how
you you know, use a syringe to make a liquid mixture.
It's like very granular over there. And we have a
community over there as well of people helping each other
in a mutual aid capacity. I do offer you know,
coaching and consulting support to people who want one on
(49:33):
one support. I don't do a lot of it, I do,
but I know it's an important thing to offer people.
And that's separate from the nonprofit. And we also have
a group support program where people at all stages of
the journey off of these meds can kind of come
together and really like figure out how to feel and
(49:56):
be with themselves in the wake of all of this,
because that's the thing when you when you're psychiatrized. So
many of us are so afraid of our pain and
of being with ourselves, that when we decide to leave
it all behind, we have to learn how to do that,
how to just be and not try to fix it,
like you said, not try to shut it down. So,
(50:17):
but the way I see it, there should be freely
available information and resources and community for people.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
People shouldn't have to pay. You shouldn't have to pay me,
You shouldn't have to pay anyone.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
And that's why our nonprofit ICI exists because we believe
it's a right for all people to get this for free.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
What you just said, afraid of being with ourselves that
really strikes a chord because I do think that a
lot of people have felt like, oh, I'm too scary
without some sort of aid, and this is helping people
through that. You have a book too, Can you tell
us about the book quickly or Unshrunk?
Speaker 3 (50:55):
It's called Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, and
it's available at through my my website Lauradelano dot com
or all fine booksellers. And it's a memoir about all
of this, plus a lot of research and history woven in.
And my hope is that it just helps continue this
conversation and can serve as something hopeful for people that
there's another story for you, beyond what the mental health
(51:17):
industry tells you about yourself.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
I love it. Thank you so much, Laura Delano.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
It's been a joy talking to you, and I know
I kept you extra long, and I just I want
to say I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Thank you so much. Such an important topic.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Oh, Tutor, I'm so honored to be on your podcast,
and thanks for everything you do.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
Oh absolutely, and thank you all for joining the Tutor
Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, go to Tutor
dixonpodcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts and join us next time. You
can also watch the video on Rumble at Tutor Dixon.
Join us next time and have a blessed day.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Today, we have one of my most awkwardly favorite subjects
because I try to educate people as much as I
can about the psychiatric care industry and what these drugs
are doing to people who are being overdiagnosed, over prescribed.
And I feel like sometimes I'm just yelling into this
echo chamber and no one's really listening. And then last night,
(00:24):
I think it was last night or over the weekend,
I was on X and I saw this tweet from
this woman and I was like, yes, yes, this is
someone who can speak from true life experience and has
created an entire career over helping people who don't need
to be on these medications get off. So I have
Laura Delano with me today. I'm so excited about it.
(00:47):
I'm so excited about what you do.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Laura.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Toodar.
I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Your story is interesting because, like I said, you are
someone who was put on medications, and I guess when
we're talking about this, kind of explain what we're talking
about with psychiatric medications and what your journey was from
age fourteen to twenty seven on these medications.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So, yeah, when we talk about psychiatric meds, we're talking
about antidepressants, benzodiazepines, So you know, Prozac is an antidepressant,
Klonipin is a benzodiazepine, and then mood stabilizers like lithium lemictal,
anti psychotics like brispert al sarahquell, and then stimulants like
ritalin and adderall and sleep aids like Lunesta or ambient.
(01:31):
So those are the kind of broad drug classes, and
for me, I ended up taking all of them over
the years in varying combinations, and as a fourteen year old,
what got me into this, this whole long relationship with
these medications that I ended up having, was that I
was just a struggling girl who was angry and confused
(01:54):
about who she was, and I felt overwhelmed by despair,
and I was injuring myself and spinning out at home,
and my parents just didn't know what to do, and
they were scared and confused and they felt very alone
with the experience, and so they sent me to a therapist,
who eventually sent me to a psychiatrist who, in the
(02:14):
span of one session told me that I was bipolar
and because I was angry and having anger outbursts and
rage issues.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Those were symptoms of mania.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
And then the despair and the cutting and the you know,
the down feelings that I was having were symptoms of depression.
So like that, in the snap of a finger, I
was told I had this lifelong illness that required meds,
and I was put right out the gates onto on
a mood stabilizer and on an antidepressant that that list
grew over time.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, I've had a very similar experience with someone that
I love in my family who went and said, you know,
I've forgotten literally first appointment, I've forgotten a few things
I've had some where I get distract did easily when
I'm working, and then forgotten things at home and without test.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Without that's what blows my mind.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
There's no I mean, you can't do a blood test,
but there's no actual written exam.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
There's nothing.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It was a fifteen minute appointment in the doctor's office.
Immediately five medications, one of which was adderall, which is
someone who they said, oh, well, you're anxious, but you
also have ADHD, so we're going to put you on
an anti anxiety drug and adderall at the same time,
and it was just like, this clash of chemicals inside
(03:34):
of this person's body seemed shocking. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, And what happened to your family member is how
it is for literally every every single person who gets
a diagnosis in this country. It's based on completely subjective
observations made by the clinician. There are no tests of
any kind, no lab tests, brain scans. It's it's these
(04:03):
these these emotional difficulties, these behavioral struggles, These get translated
into this medical language you know, of symptom and condition,
and we just take for granted that that's what they are,
that there must be some pathology in me if a
doctor's telling me I have this, But when you step
back and you actually think it through, you're.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Like, wait a minute, this doesn't really make sense here.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yes, And that, I think is what you just said
is key, is that we always assume the doctor's right.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
If a doctor told me this, then this must be
the case.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
And honestly, this was how I felt up until I'm
a cancer survivor. And when I went to the first doctor,
they had this kakamamie idea of what they were going
to do, and I was like, man, that sounds intense,
like I think I'm going to go to a few
different people, and I had never really been that person,
which this also sounds crazy, but I'd never really had
a big medical experience before, so I had never been
(04:56):
that person to go get two and three opinions on something.
But that was that moment where I went man. Medicine
is different depending on who you talk to. Every different
person has a different impression of how to solve your problem.
But when it comes to something psychiatric, what I think
is so key and what I love about what you've
(05:16):
done in your book that is unshrunk a story of
psychiatric treatment resistance is that I don't think a lot
of people, including parents, understand, and I don't think it's
explained to us what the side effects of these medications are.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
You're totally right, and we're not only not told about
the side effects, but we're also not told about the
evidence base upon which these drugs are approved to even
begin with. So, for example, when I was put on
these meds as a fourteen year old and my parents
and I were told I would need them for the
rest of my life, no one said and just by
(05:53):
the way, these drugs have actually only been studied for
about six to eight weeks before we approve them. No
one ever said, just by the way, this combination we
have you on has never been studied for safety and effectiveness.
So it's both the evidence base itself that we're not
told about, and then, as you said, the long list
of adverse effects, which you know are in the drug labels.
(06:17):
They are spoken quickly at the end of drug ads.
It's not like no one knows that these drugs have
problematic side adverse effects, but we're I think we're so
desensitized to that because we hear all those drug.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Ads day in and day out, and the.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Long list of symptoms at the end, I think it
doesn't sync in in the way.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
That it should.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
And I think and also because so many of the
adverse effects mimic psychiatric conditions themselves or you know, other
health conditions.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
We just we have this.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
We're trained to not kind of think critically about how
the pharmaceuticals that we take are going to be altering
our bodies, and instead, when we have problems, we end
up getting new diagnoses that end up needing more medications.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So that's another one that I love.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
This is now this is causing this, so we're going
to add this, and that's kind of I think that's
how Ambient actually gets added to the protocol sometimes because
oh wait, this stimulant won't let you sleep.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Well, let's put this on and now you'll.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Sleep, and you'll sleep in this weird drug induced coma
that doesn't actually give you good sleep, and you might
make yourself a meal in the middle of the night
and crochet a an entire throw for your couch, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Like it was bizarre. Oh my gosh, tutor, when I
was on Ambient. So I was on Ambient for years,
you know.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Of course this drug is not approved for more than
two weeks. And I would, without fail, blackout after about
twenty three ish minutes, and I'd wake up in the
morning and I would have empty bowls, It's empty cereal
box bowls, spilled milk everywhere. I'd write weird things in
my journal. And then, as you said, too, that's scare up.
(07:56):
I ended up feeling so sedated during the day that
they have started on Provigil, which is an anti narcileptic drug.
So I was literally on an insomnia drug at night
and an anti narco elliptic drug during the day. At
the same time not to mention like two or three
other meds too.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
I mean it was wild and I never and then
who are you as a person?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, yeah, that's the question, And especially for those of
us who end up on these meds as kids when
we haven't even had a chance yet to forge a
sense of ourselves, you know. And adolescence, which was when
I got psychiatrized, as I like to put it, that
was I was just waking up to self, to my body,
to how I fit into the world around me. I
(08:35):
had all these questions and these struggles that I now
see were these meaningful, deep, profound questions. And because I
got diagnosed so young and I got put on these meds,
that process was interrupted, was disabled, really, and so I
had no sense of, no baseline sense of myself through
these critical years of my life, my teens, in my twenties,
(08:56):
which in turn made it hard to then extricate myself
from it because I didn't have an old me to
look back to. You know, sometimes people will start meds
later in life, and you know, they realize, like, hey,
this I don't really I'm not really the way I
used to be, Like I'm not the same mom I
was five years ago, or I'm not the same you know,
(09:16):
person at work. Maybe something's going off with these meds.
When you're a kid, you don't have anything to compare
yourself to, and so I think it's it's especially insidious
for young people.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And I think in our generation that's when it really well,
you're a little younger than me, So I think that
I didn't go through. It wasn't until I think maybe
I was in high school, that the younger generation was
coming in using Riddlin and that they there was like
this real push for Riddlin. I remember that being and
I don't remember people in my class being on medication
(09:48):
or talking about it, but it was almost like a
badge of honor for the younger.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Kids, like, well, I'm on Riddlin.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know, I have a special dispensation here because I'm
on this or I'm on that. And then that kind
of expanded, and I think it became incredibly normal for
us to go, oh, is this person struggling with coping
with something, Then there's got to be a med for that.
Where the quick fixed society and you're right, those ads
were very so so quick and so fast and so
(10:15):
constant that even though they said, if you're feeling the
thoughts of suicide or harming someone else, go to a doctor.
We just kind of forgot about that, and I wasn't
so the first and this may be a place you
don't want to go, and you can tell me to
stop if you don't want to. But the first school
shooting was right after I graduated from high school. I
was in college at the time. I was actually graduating
(10:35):
college at the time, and I interviewed a psychiatrist who
met with those with Dylan and the other kid now
his name escapes me, but met with them or read
their file. The one that was nineteen read his file,
and he was like, look, kids have not become less depressed,
and they've become more violent since we've been giving them
(10:57):
all these medications.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
He said.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I forced the FDA to say these ads had to
say you might be considering suicide or harming someone else.
He was like, I guarantee you if you look at
every school shooter, they have one of these medications in
their system.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Why don't we talk about that.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
It's such an important question. And I think the whether
it's you know, because the story is about most mass shooters. Oh,
this was someone with untreated mental illness quote unquote, and
then they know that's why they did this. But as
you said, if you look at the stories of many,
if not most, if not all of them, they were
(11:34):
already interfacing with the mental health system in some way.
And so whether whether they were on these drugs when they,
you know, committed these horrific acts, or maybe in some cases,
had stopped these drugs abruptly, which itself can cause withdrawal
symptoms that literally are suicidal or homicidal ideation. I mean,
I wouldn't be because they've made it so hard to
(11:58):
look at these shooters medical record. I have a friend
who's a professor who tried to foil them and couldn't
get them. You know, we can only ask these questions,
but I think I think it's worth asking them. And
the fact that these questions are getting shut down, I think,
you know, indicate something important. And just to quickly piggyback
on what you said about that, you know what you
(12:19):
saw in high school with the rise of stimulants, You're
hitting something so important, which is that you know, in
the case of stimulants and this a d D thing
and ADHD and school and performance you know, instead of
stepping back to say, like, why do we all force
ourselves into this one rigid way of learning in this
one rigid school system that some kids do well in
(12:41):
but some kids don't? You know, why, why are we
doing this? Do we have to do it this way?
I think it's a lot easier and more convenient to say, Oh,
this one individual kid here, something's wrong with him because
he can't sit in his desk for six hours straight
and not get sunlight and focus on you know, mundane tasks.
You know, I think I think pathologizing kids and making
(13:04):
them the problem instead of stepping back to problematize the
school system itself, you know, I think that is a
part of what's happened here with this predominance of the
psychiatric paradigm is instead of looking at the context of
our lives and understanding our behaviors and our struggles as
responses to the environment that we're in, to the food
(13:26):
we're putting in our body, to the breakdown of social
networks and neighborhoods and intergenerational families. I mean, the list
is endless, poverty, all all these possibilities. Instead of doing that,
we say, oh, the problems inside of your brain, and
here's the pill. And I know, you know, I think
I think we're finally reaching a point where enough people
are realizing does that really make sense?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
And it's crazy because you really are altering their brain chemistry.
But then there's not, like I said, there's no actual test.
I mean, if you have a broken arm, you know
the fix right that, and then the arm is no
longer broke and you move on with life. When you
have someone who has a broken heart or you know,
thinks things that are sad or depressed, there is no
(14:09):
obvious answer. And I talked a little before we got on.
When my daughter was eight, she was just anxious. They
had talked about germs in school, but I couldn't figure
out what had set her off if it was that,
but she was so concerned about germs. She was freaking
out if anybody would get near her. And so we
talked about it at her well child visit. She should
(14:30):
go to a therapist and talk to the therapist. And
again this is at a point where I'm like, I
want to be obedient.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
To my doctor because my doctor knows.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Then we went to the therapist and the therapist saw her
for probably about I mean, i'll give her credit. She
saw her for probably about four visits before saying she
has to be on two different medications and you have
to go to a psychiatrist. And I said, well, we're
not interested in that. And then the next day I
got a call from the pediatrician's office and she's like,
(15:01):
we received.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
This long letter. Your daughter has to be on.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
An antidepressant and an anti anxiety medication.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And I was like, well, I'm.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Not going to do that, and they're like, you know,
well it's been it's in the file.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Now you have to go. And I got to the
point where I was getting calls from them.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
I was getting calls from the psychiatrist's office, and I
was afraid I was going to get a call from
the state saying like this, you have to get your
kid on medication. And I finally just said, look, it's
not going to happen. I'm going to block the number
if you.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Keep calling me.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
And we went home and I said, okay, I'm going
to pour everything into figuring out how when something happens,
what we do. And there was like I started reading
about it, and certain kids have like soothing mechanisms and
for her, it's like if you can get to her
and I kind of rub her back and be like
we're okay. That's like to her, it brings down all
(15:50):
those emotions.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
She can calm down.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
And just last week was the end of school and
they all at the end of school, the teachers like
say these affirmations over the kids over and over again.
The kid the teachers were saying, she's such a light.
She's such a bright light when are at class. She's
just always cheerful. She is the kid that brings other
kids in. And I think, to this day, if I
had done that those years ago, would she be light?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Oh my gosh, tutor, I feel so emotional thinking about it,
because there's so many kids out there who have parents
who don't necessarily have the They don't know, they don't know,
they feel pressured into it, they're insecure, they're afraid, they're confused.
And the number of parents who have reached out to
me with kids who are now in their twenties, some
(16:38):
even in their thirties, who say, oh my gosh, what
did I do twenty years ago, ten years ago, five
years ago when I listened to what the school said
about getting my kid on adderall or I listened to
them telling me I needed to take my kid to
a psychiatrist. And now all these years later, they're young
(16:59):
adult children are oftentimes disabled, unable to work, completely dependent
on their families and all of course this is this
is all being translated into illness. Oh that they're just
very mentally ill. But when I think about my experience,
you know, through my twenties, as I got more and
more disabled in mind, body and spirit, and of course
(17:21):
every step of the way, it was two.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Meds, three meds, four meds, five meds.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It was the meds that were injuring me and harming
me in all of these ways that my parents and
I just didn't see because we were so unquestioning of
these top doctors, you know, because I came from a
family of associ economic means, I was seeing the best
of the best. So who would we be to have questioned?
And so I really feel for the bind that so
many parents are in, who don't have resources, who don't
(17:49):
have the time to educate themselves, who who feel, you know,
who don't feel you know, confident in their in their voice.
How do we support them? Because a lot of them,
you know, are are they mean well, and they love
their kids. They want to do it's best for their kids,
and they just don't have They're doing the best they
can with what they have, and so how do we
(18:09):
get them what they need?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well, and explain to me a little bit about what
that was like for you, because my experience with folks
who are not only the parents but the actual patient
themselves is like, there's this inability to admit that maybe
I've done something wrong and that there's and an inability
to see that there is a more complete and exciting
(18:32):
life without these medications dimming you. And like you said,
it really is you become disabled. It's like a fog
over what how you can accomplish things. I mean, I
have people that I know that are like, I just
can't get from here to there, and they don't see
that it's the medication. So how do you open their
eyes to this is the medication. There's no shame in it.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
You are allowed to let it go.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
And don't fear letting it go because you've even said
you work with people on this and they go, I'm
afraid of a relapse.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I might have to go back to the meds.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Oh, it's such an important question, and I wish there
was like one clear path of an answer. I mean,
I know, for me, what when I look back, you know, so,
as I said my twenties, as my med list grew
and I grew more and more disabled, I grew more
and more hopeless along the way, because eventually I was
told that I had, you know, so called treatment resistant
(19:27):
bipolar disorder, which basically meant like, oh, you are just
so defective that even our treatments can't help you.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
And what a horrible thing to think it was.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I mean, it was that story that led me to
eventually try to kill myself, because I was completely convinced
that I had exhausted every option that might give me
a chance at feeling okay, and what's left for me?
And so when I eventually did two years after my overdose,
was the year that I woke up, you could say,
(19:57):
And what actually jolted me, what started to jolt me awake,
What was like the first kind of thing that forced
me to step back and begin questioning, was was having
a few experiences with with psychiatric force, basically with the
power that mental health professionals have to strip you of
your civil liberties. So I was made to go into
(20:18):
a hospital when I didn't want to go in. I
actually did want to go. I just wanted to go
home to get my belongings. First, security guards were called.
There was a whole thing that was the first time
I was forced up against this realization that this system
I had been turning to for care was actually also
about control, about controlling me, and I just hadn't seen
(20:40):
it because I had never said no before. So I
had a couple of other experiences like that that just
got me questioning this faith I had had, and all
of these doctors and all these pills and these hospitals
and programs for so many years, fourteen years. And then
in that space of questioning, I began to wonder, you know,
who would I be off of these meds.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
That I've been on since I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
It was just this question at first, and it kept
nagging at me because I realized I didn't have any
sense of myself off meds, and I had never been
off meds as an adult, and so those those those
curious questions just kept eating at me. And then I
eventually did find a book that led me on this
(21:23):
journey that I'm still on today, and the book was about.
It was written by a medical journalists and it was
basically looking at, you know, why do we have such
poor long term outcomes in the United States compared with
you know, other parts of the world that aren't aren't developed,
that don't have all these pharmaceutical products. And what he
(21:45):
found was that if you actually look at the outcomes,
if you look at the long term data on psychiatric drugs,
they're making us sicker. You can make a strong case
for that. So I had that aha moment then when
I read this book and I was on five meds
and my whole life had fallen apart during the year
I was on them, and I realized, like, oh my gosh,
what if it's the treatment and so but you can't
(22:06):
force that awakening in someone. You can't make someone see
And so I think what it's really about is creating
opportunities for people to identify with this story and someone else.
I mean, it's why I wrote my book. I wanted
to write a book that I could put out into
the world to start a conversation and that might help
spark a sense of identification and other people who maybe
(22:30):
didn't haven't yet realized that my story might well be
their story too. So I think telling personal stories, putting
our stories out there, and then just creating opportunities for
people to step back and ask questions and be curious,
because you can't force an Aha moment in someone and
everyone's path to that is different. But I think the
(22:50):
storytelling aspect, I think is really big because that's what
also helped wake me up that book. I was mentioning
there were stories in it, and I saw myself in
the other people's story in this book, and that's I think.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Why I was able to say, Holy cow, what if
it's the true.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
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Speaker 1 (24:29):
This is a treatment.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It's the only time we are willing to go to
a doctor regularly and never be healed. That to me, So,
I was a psychology major in highsch or in college,
and as a psychology major at the university that I
was at, you could work at the there there was
like an inside the university. There was a little psychiatric clinic,
(24:51):
and so you could work there, and it was all
the psychology students, and then I think they had a
psychiatric portion as well.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But if you were a.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Student at the university in the psych or the psychology department,
then you were able to read everybody's every single patient
file unless they were a student or somebody that worked
at the university. So there was a massive amount of
community members that came in and they were patients there,
and I was pretty deep. I mean, this is probably
(25:21):
my junior or senior year, so at this point I'm
planning on going to get my master's degree and become
a therapist myself, and this is my first kind.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Of exposure to therapy.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So you get to I mean, you do all the
filing and everything, but you really get to sit down
and read the cases. And I remember sitting down with
one and I read day one and his file was
ten years long, and I went to the tenth year
and the stories were the exact same, And there was
(25:52):
this moment that struck me so hard where I said
to myself, how do you live with this being your
career if you can't help someone? Because there was no
change in this person, and I asked that question. They
were like, Oh, we're not here to solve their problems.
We're here to get them through week to week. And
(26:13):
I thought, what a terrible way of looking at this.
We're just here to keep them alive. They're miserable people.
We're just here to keep them going from one miserlled
week to the next. And that was unacceptable to me.
It's like, that is not what I thought this major
was about. This is not what I thought we were
here doing. I thought we were helping people. That was
what I wanted to do, was to help people, and
(26:34):
it seemed like they were keeping them trapped. And just
the conversations. If you think about the conversation, the conversation
is kind of like it's a gossip session. Okay, well,
how did that make you feel? Yeah, you had a
right to feel that way. And it's almost like even
the therapist and I'm not saying this in all cases,
because I do think there are times when therapy gets
(26:58):
you through a situation.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And that's the problem that we have.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
They are a therapists who say, Okay, you've had a
death in the family, you went through and you know
a lot had a marriage breakup or something, and there's
a let's go through the next few months of getting
you back on track, and then you want to see
the patient leave. The goal should be in my mind
to want to see the patient leave, and yet there
are there's a whole industry built around in my town.
(27:23):
The person has to have a meeting every week with
their psychologist, to once a month have a meeting with
their psychiatrists so that they can stay on all of
their meds. It's like a cash cow. You have to
have the gossip session once a week to get the meds,
and that means that you're constantly paying these people to
(27:44):
keep you in a bad place.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
For me, beginning therapy as a kid, what should have
been a period of my life when I was developing
meaningful friendships that I could you know, I could turn
to my friends in times of struggle, turned to the
for comfort, for mentorship, for guidance. I learned to turn
more and more to these paid professionals whom I was
(28:09):
seeing once a week and eventually twice a week. And
the more kind of accustomed I became to relying on
therapy as my source of support, the less even interested
really I was in friendships to begin with. And I
think what you were saying earlier too, about when you
(28:32):
were in your third year as a psych concentrator and
like what you were seeing that these years and years
and years of people not getting better. You know, that
gets to the heart of this brilliant business model really
that the mental health industry today is built upon, which
is this idea of chronicity. These are chronic, incurable conditions
(28:55):
that you'll have for the rest of your life, and
it's about managing them quote unquote man, I mean that
was the word that was used for me. This isn't
about This isn't about me, you know, really growing, changing, transforming, evolving.
This was about finding a med regimen that would help me,
you know, so called manage my symptoms and you know,
(29:16):
get by. And if you look at the history of
the mental health industry over the past seventy eighty years,
prior to the rise of psychiatric drugs in the nineteen fifties,
the baseline operating assumption was that these these challenges were episodic,
even you know, extreme altered states that you know today
(29:39):
are called like these chronic conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia.
Before the rise of the psychopharma pharmaceutical industry, people assumed
like you have hard.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Times in life.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Sometimes they last a few weeks, sometimes a few months,
maybe sometimes longer, but you moved through them, you move
beyond them. And I I think this medical model of
incurable mental illness requiring lifelong treatment has just slowly, over
the decades, led us to forget that these difficulties in
life do not have to be forever, and.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's normalized that we shouldn't actually have any difficulties. And that,
to me is it's a weird thing because you don't
have really medical malpractice when it comes to psychiatric care.
And yet there are true great therapists who say, you
went through something tough, let's get you through that and
let's get.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
You back into life as normal. And it is a.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Few meetings and then you're off. But I do believe
that there should be some accountability for people who keep
people in this cycle of you're right, that's really hard,
no wonder you're depressed, and that's why you carry this
label and other people don't, because you get these young
people to believe there's no way out.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Labeled this.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Now, this is who I am, yep, And I think
because as young people, you know, we're we are searching
for a sense of belonging. We're searching to understand ourselves
and how we fit in and where we fit in.
And one of the great tragedies I think of this, really,
you know, overly medicalized society, is that that identity of
(31:22):
being mentally ill quote unquote becomes it becomes the I mean,
speaking for myself, it became the thing that I was
proud of because if I wasn't ever going to be
able to be just a normal person. And of course
today like what is normal? What does that even mean?
But at the time that's what I thought, Then at
(31:43):
least let me get really good at being a psychiatric
patient and it being crazy and mentally ill. And the
more diagnoses, the more people will see how much I'm struggling.
The more meds I take, the more they symbolize how
how much suffering I'm in. They these this whole realm
of like medicalized pharmaceuticalized living came to become the singular
(32:06):
focus of my life, my sense of self, my relationships,
my purpose.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
My purpose was being a good patient.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
And I think there's so many young people who grow
up on meds in therapy, thinking of themselves as sick.
And this is not me judging any of them for this,
because I relate that was how I grew up too.
But I see now in retrospect that I was what
I was seeking, which was a sense which was feeling
(32:32):
seen and heard and understood in my struggles. I actually
was doing the very opposite by medicalizing myself and thinking
the solution was pills and professionals.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
What I really.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
For me now, the way I think we can most
validate a struggle in life is as a response. You're
having a response to something that's happening in your life,
and this response is a signal. It's a message. It's
telling you something about where you need to go from here.
And you just if you listen to it instead of
try to shut it down or medicate it or treat it,
(33:08):
you know, you open up all these possibilities for growth
and change.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
And I think it's it's important to kind of zoom
out on your life because I'm listening to you say this, well,
in the back of my head, I'm thinking, here is
someone who was a straight A student, a nationally ranked sportswoman,
a Harvard student. I mean this, You're saying, like, I
identified as being a good patient, but you had so
(33:32):
many things that you were amazing doing amazing things.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
How did what was that like? Because I think that
people go.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh, this isn't my kid, this isn't my story, because
my student's a good student. My student didn't have these issues.
But you fit all those categories too, So explain that.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
It might it might seem incongruous. But I actually think
that a big part of why I broke down as
a kid was because I I grew up in a
really intense town. You know, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
So this town with all these incredible opportunities and resources
and all of that, but it was a really high
(34:13):
pressured place where the just the unspoken, kind of operating
assumption of everyone was that if you ever, if you
want to feel worthy, you need to excel. And so
I think because I was getting good grades and you know,
a good student quote unquote, and a kind of conventional
way I could study and get good grades on tests
(34:35):
and regurgitate information, and because I was a good athlete
and all these things, I was just assuming that, you know,
I'm playing the game right, so maybe I'll eventually feel happy,
and so the fact that but what I was missing
really was like, why.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
What do I care about? What? What ignites me? What
brings me alive? What? What are my values?
Speaker 3 (35:01):
What are my I was so programmed, I was so
focused on this kind of programmed good grades, good sports,
good schools, that those deeper questions I didn't have the
chance to explore in myself. And so I was just
assuming I'll eventually feel happy because I'm doing it right.
And so, of course, when I broke down, because that's
not how it works, I believed all the more that
(35:22):
something must be fundamentally wrong with me because I have
it all together.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I've arrived at Harvard. You know, I did everything I
was meant to do. Why do I want to die?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
And so I was so terrified by that that I
think that desperation is what really drove me to then
buy in so deeply into the idea that something was
wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
And I think that is so I wanted to get
to that because I think that's key that it wasn't
as though you were in an abusive home where you
had had some terrible thing happen.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
This is life. This is life.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Every kid is experiencing life, and so often we say,
you shouldn't have to feel that pain and have to
feel upset about this, you shouldn't have to struggle with
this will make it easier. And every kid in class
has a different diagnosis. And I've seen this throughout my
daughter's lives.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Here, I have twins that are going to be in
seventh grade. I've got one that's going to be a
freshman in high school. I've got one that's going to
be a junior in high school. And they're all girls.
So I think even from that perspective, I've seen those
types of pressures of girls being mean to girls. And yes,
as a parent, you want to say, I don't want
you to have to deal with this, but I have
(36:31):
seen so many phases of life with these kids too.
That's the key is that there have been really hard years,
not really hard seasons. I mean, we're talking about an
entire year of high school that was really hard, you know,
and we got through it together, but there.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Were ups and downs.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And I think we're so quick to say we just
want to fix this, but I want to get to
you having this epiphany of like, oh my gosh, what
if it's the treatment.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Getting off of the treatment that's not easy. What was
that like?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Well, when I came off of five meds in twenty ten,
so I was in my late twenties, I had no
idea what I was doing, first of all, And I
had no idea that these these drugs that I had
been on for so many years had really changed my
brain and my body. They had that I was physically
(37:27):
dependent on them. No one told me this. I had
no idea.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I just want to stop you there, because I hear
so many times when people go, oh, it's not addictive,
so you that doesn't mean you're not dependent on it.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yes, people conflate these words addiction and dependence, and I
think sometimes sometimes this is done deliberately, because yes, you
know you're not craving your next fix of your antipsychotic,
but your brain may well be completely acclimated to your
daily dose of your antipsychotics such that if you don't
take it, it's gonna.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
You know, it's going to go haywire.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
And so when you hear someone's someone say oh these
are not addictive, that may actually be that is true,
but that doesn't mean that they aren't dependence forming which
has nothing to do with cravings and the kind of
the psychological elements of what we conventionally understand addiction to
be like, you know this alcohol is causing you harm,
(38:23):
but you keep drinking it anyways.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It's not like that. This is a different thing.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
This is about being a compliant patient, doing what you're
told by your doctor, and that then leading your body
to become totally dependent on these pills. So, because I
didn't know this, I was in this head space of
thinking that, you know, I've got to get off these
pills as fast as possible. If they've been harming me,
(38:47):
I've got to get off of them so I can heal.
I didn't realize that I had it backwards that actually,
for many, many people, the fastest way to get off
and stay off of these meds is to taper very
very very slowly because of this dependence issue. And by slow,
I don't mean over a few weeks or a few
months or even a year. Some people need to taper
(39:09):
over years to get off of these medications without causing
profoundly disruptive withdrawal symptoms that can literally take you out
of your life.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I mean, I have friends who.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Were brought off of you know, an antidepressant or an
antidepressant and benzodiazepine. You know, people who had have you know,
work related anxiety. This very kind of typical struggles that
they got put on these meds for they've been they
were brought off, you know, over a few weeks or
(39:41):
or a month or so, and were literally bedridden because
they had such horrible vertigo that they couldn't stand up
they would fall over, or the burning in their fingers
and their and their feet is unbearable. Or the brains
apps that a lot of people coming off anti the
depressants get where you literally feel like you are being
(40:02):
having electrical shocks going off in your brain.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I mean, that's crazy in and of itself. When you're
describing this, I'm like, this is what your body goes
through coming off of these drugs, and yet we want
to keep people on them, yep.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
And I think why people end up staying on them
is that the so there are those physical withdrawal symptoms
that are strange. You know, these brains apps, No one
would those are just such strange, strange things that are
so out of the ordinary. But a lot of withdrawal
symptoms mimic the diagnoses themselves, and so when you come off,
(40:36):
you know you've been on your prozac for fifteen years,
and you realize, like, I don't think I need to
take this anymore. And you come off and you feel
horribly anxious down in the dumps, you lose energy or
you know, maybe you can't sleep or you're restless, and
you realize, like, gosh, I really was depressed. I just
didn't realize it because I was on my meds, Like
I need to go back on my meds. I don't
want to feel this way. And I think that because
(40:58):
we don't have this understanding dependence and withdrawal, people stay
in this loop for years and years and years because
they hate how they feel when they stop their meds.
And so a lot of what my work is about
is not pushing any kind of agenda. I'm not anti med.
I'm about informed choice. We are not being informed about
the drugs before we start them. We are not being
(41:19):
informed about how to come off of them safely. And
I want everyone should have the right to this information
so that they can decide for themselves what their next
right step is. And I believe that right now, basically
none of us are making informed choices because we're not
being told any of this.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. What do you think about the
diagnosis process? Because I know, I mean, I think that
you had at one point major depression, eating disorder, substance
abuse disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar, all of these things.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
They had said, Oh, it's this, it's this, it's this.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Do you believe that they really understand what they're doing
when they diagnose?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Well, I think the diagnostic process. What I think people
really what I fail to understand, and I think a
lot of people fail to understand, is that the process,
the process of diagnosing with someone with a psychiatric condition
is not a scientific process that's rooted in in anything
kind of scientifically valid or reliable. It's it's a very
(42:27):
subjective process that that is largely about the opinion of
the person doing the diagnosing. And so in this in
that sense, the DSM, you know, psychiatry's bible that all
of these diagnoses live in. I don't really take it
seriously as as a valid a valid scientific text at all.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
I think it's more.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Of a kind of work of fiction, really, But that
isn't me saying that these experiences aren't real.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Sometimes people can think.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
That when I'm challenging the diagnostic paradigm, I'm challenging the
reality of the struggles that people have, and I am
not doing that for me. The fact that I had,
you know, six or seven different diagnoses along the way,
and that they would change, and you know, different doctors
had different opinions, and when you look at the history
(43:18):
of the DSM itself, these conditions are voted in and
voted out. That's how they That's if a diagnosis is
in the DSM, it's because a group of psychiatrists voted
on it, and that's why it's there. And so when
people realize that, then then you you know, some of
(43:40):
us start to wonder like, is this really the most
useful way to make sense of my difficulty here to
just reduce it to this label, or maybe there are
other ways to make sense of this this struggle. And
by making sense of it differently, you end up opening
up different options for you, because if it's not a
so called illness needing treatment, and then you know, it
(44:02):
can mean so many different things that then open up
maybe changing your diet.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Right there's relationships.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
There's so many different ways that you can have something
that appears like major depression, but it could be a
something that happened in your life. It could be a
temporary condition that you have to talk through. You could
have something that appears to be your standard eating disorder,
but it might be one person has that eating disorder
(44:29):
because they need control. The other person may have that
eating disorder because it's a social contagion, and their friend
has that and they're in a bad environment and you
need to get them out of that. I mean, that
is the concern is how do you get to the
root cause of a psychiatric condition.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
They're very hard, it's very hard to do that.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
It's very hard, and I think especially for people who've
been struggling for a long long time. Let's take the
kind of stereotypical example of the man on the sub
the homeless man on the subway who's talking to himself
and acting.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Really wacky and scary.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
You know, I think are most so many of us
just assume, oh, this person must have this serious illness
like schizophrenia, and he's off his.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Meds and that's why he's acting this way.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
But if you if you step back and think about it.
At one point, that man was a little boy, and
and things happened to that boy needs were not met.
Maybe things happened to that boy that never should happen
to a child. And when you when you think about
the kind of cumulative effect over years and years and
years of not having basic needs met, of having traumatic
(45:39):
things happening, of being maybe put on meds that cause
all these problems, and then you get stuck in this
cycle where you stop them abruptly and you go into withdrawal,
but everyone thinks it's you're having a relapse. And just
you think about all the layers of trauma and and
unmet needs and in all these kind of systems failing,
(46:00):
it makes sense then that eventually a person reaches this
extreme point where they're kind of seen as this other
being that's not like me. And I think it for me,
it's about, you know, stepping back and realizing that every
single person has a story behind why they're in the
struggles that they're in, and sometimes the story is obvious,
(46:22):
and sometimes it's not obvious, and sometimes it's long and complicated.
And so I'm not someone who's like, oh, it's all
simple let's just you know, if we stop diagnosing people,
there won't be problems. Life is really hard, messy, sometimes violent,
awful things happen. I'm not pretending there's some easy solution here,
(46:43):
but I think we need to all realize that every
struggling person has a story, and the current mental health
industry doesn't often make space for those stories to be
understood and.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Help people to cope through life on a regular basis.
And so I want to just end on what you're
doing now because you're kind of coaching folks who do
say I want to get rid of these medications from
my life, from my life, and I want to move
on and I want to feel healthy. And I think
I read something where someone said I felt like it
would happen right away, because it seemed like it happened
(47:17):
right away for Laura. But you just said it can
take years to get somebody off of one of these medications.
So if you can explain a little bit about how
you talk people through this, and then also I got
the impression that you also coach them through those moments
of you know, I'm having a panic attack, I must
be having a relapse.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
No, you can get through it. There are ways to
get through it, So tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
So for anyone who's on a medication, trying to come
off of it, or have tried in the past and
didn't go well, you know, I first there's this nonprofit
that I started, Intercompass Initiative, and so over there we
provide people with free information and resources for learning about
(48:04):
all so many of the things we talked about today
and more. Learn about how to read the drug label
for your medications you can better understand its risk profile
and all of that, how to learn about the history
of the DSM. You know, we have all that information
there because I think it starts there. It starts with
educating yourself with which is not easy. It takes time,
(48:25):
and it can be complicated. So we have everything organized
on our website that we think is you know, what
people need to know that they're not being told. And
we also over there have a self directed tapering manuals.
So we basically took all of the late person wisdom
in the withdrawal community, and by that I mean the
(48:48):
tens upon tens of thousands of people all around the
world who have been forced to figure out for themselves
how to taper off of these meds safely. Because the
medical system does not ignowledge this is a real issue.
There are no safe tapering protocols that have been officially
endorsed in the United States. So we lay people have
become the experts on this. So we have a free
(49:10):
manual at the website that walks through how people taper
off of these drugs. Write down to pictures of how
you you know, use a syringe to make a liquid mixture.
It's like very granular over there. And we have a
community over there as well of people helping each other
in a mutual aid capacity. I do offer you know,
coaching and consulting support to people who want one on
(49:33):
one support. I don't do a lot of it, I do,
but I know it's an important thing to offer people.
And that's separate from the nonprofit. And we also have
a group support program where people at all stages of
the journey off of these meds can kind of come
together and really like figure out how to feel and
(49:56):
be with themselves in the wake of all of this,
because that's the thing when you when you're psychiatrized. So
many of us are so afraid of our pain and
of being with ourselves, that when we decide to leave
it all behind, we have to learn how to do that,
how to just be and not try to fix it,
like you said, not try to shut it down. So,
(50:17):
but the way I see it, there should be freely
available information and resources and community for people.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
People shouldn't have to pay. You shouldn't have to pay me,
You shouldn't have to pay anyone.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
And that's why our nonprofit ICI exists because we believe
it's a right for all people to get this for free.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
What you just said, afraid of being with ourselves that
really strikes a chord because I do think that a
lot of people have felt like, oh, I'm too scary
without some sort of aid, and this is helping people
through that. You have a book too, Can you tell
us about the book quickly or Unshrunk?
Speaker 3 (50:55):
It's called Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, and
it's available at through my my website Lauradelano dot com
or all fine booksellers. And it's a memoir about all
of this, plus a lot of research and history woven in.
And my hope is that it just helps continue this
conversation and can serve as something hopeful for people that
there's another story for you, beyond what the mental health
(51:17):
industry tells you about yourself.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
I love it. Thank you so much, Laura Delano.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
It's been a joy talking to you, and I know
I kept you extra long, and I just I want
to say I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Thank you so much. Such an important topic.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Oh, Tutor, I'm so honored to be on your podcast,
and thanks for everything you do.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
Oh absolutely, and thank you all for joining the Tutor
Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, go to Tutor
dixonpodcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts and join us next time. You
can also watch the video on Rumble at Tutor Dixon.
Join us next time and have a blessed day.
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