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This is the full version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Laura Delano. The interview was originally released on Epoch TV on May 12, 2025.
“This system I had been turning to for help through all of these years, through the most formative years of life, that I had been assuming existed to take care of me … was actually a system of control. And I just hadn’t seen it for what it was, because I had never said no to it before,” says Laura Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.”
For 14 years, Delano was a “professional mental patient,” as she puts it, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was a teenager.
Now she wonders whether the dominant, medicalized approach to mental illness is actually making us as a society sicker.
“Sixty-five million American adults and 6 million American children are currently on psychiatric drugs, and there are zero off ramps for getting them off these drugs safely within the mental health industry. Zero,” she says. “This is not about being ‘pro’ or ‘anti.’ This is about using straightforward, honest language to talk about what these drugs are, to talk about our limits of knowledge around what these drugs are and how they actually affect us, and then to let people make their own decisions from there based on their own life circumstances.”
In this episode, Laura Delano discusses the dangers of relying solely on medical treatments to treat mental health issues and of rapidly withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.
CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 – Introduction: The System of Control
0:00:16 – Laura Delano’s 14-Year Journey as a Mental Health Patient
0:01:05 – Challenging the Mental Health Narrative
0:02:20 – Defining the Mental Health Industry
0:03:09 – The Trend of Self-Diagnosis and Pathologizing Human Experience
0:04:42 – Consumer Culture and Medical Prescription
0:06:11 – The Impact of Direct-to-Consumer Drug Advertising
0:07:26 – Laura’s Personal Story: From Diagnosis to Resistance
0:09:36 – The Moment of Realizing Systemic Control
0:13:15 – The Complexity of Suicide Prevention and Patient Agency
0:18:49 – The Decision to Leave the Mental Health System
0:24:21 – Questioning the Concept of Incurable Mental Illness
0:28:15 – The Challenging Process of Coming Off Psychiatric Medications
0:39:19 – Addressing Criticisms of Her Approach
0:43:09 – Critical Information About Psychiatric Medications
0:46:09 – Concerns About Reducing Mental Health Services
0:49:29 – The Potential Role of Psychiatric Drugs
0:53:07 – The Inner Compass Initiative: Mission and Vision
0:56:15 – Closing Thoughts and Reflection
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