Laura Delano: The Dark Truth About Antidepressants, SSRIs, and the Psychiatrists Lying for Profit

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Speaker 2 If you're being told, you know, you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, here's some Prozac. It's going to help adjust the chemicals.
That's a lie.

Speaker 1 If something's an imbalance, what's balance? Is there any science behind that at all?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 It has never been proven. Most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances.

Speaker 1 66 million Americans total on these terms.

Speaker 2 According to the CDC, in 2022, so those numbers could well be higher. That's craziness.
There's this condition called PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. Oh, come on.
There's a whole movement.

Speaker 2 They're incredibly well organized on X doing really important public awareness work around how many people either never regain sexual function when they come off or what some people haven't regained it for years and and so they're just dead yep okay really

Speaker 1 and no one's gone to jail for this

Speaker 1 So, I read this piece in the New York Times about you that's like actually kind of hostile.

Speaker 1 And the story seems to be that you were on psych meds for a lot of your young life and then you got off them. And that's bad.

Speaker 1 That's bad. You might lead people to do the same.
You might lead them astray off

Speaker 1 psychiatric medication, out of therapy, and into like independent, happy life.

Speaker 1 Why would anyone be mad at you for getting off psych drugs?

Speaker 2 It's a good question.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think,

Speaker 2 I think,

Speaker 2 really,

Speaker 2 there's just so much fear and

Speaker 2 greed and

Speaker 2 disconnection from,

Speaker 2 you know, emotional pain that

Speaker 2 people hear a story of someone who's decided to

Speaker 2 go of dependence on professionals and pills and institutions, and they just can't fathom

Speaker 2 trying it for themselves because they've built their whole lives around this idea of being sick and needing treatment and needing medical expertise and institutional authorities to guide them.

Speaker 2 So, to hear a story of someone who said, I'm not going to do that anymore is to basically call into question their entire existence, their entire identity, their entire sense of self and purpose in the world.

Speaker 2 And it makes me feel sad. I feel sad about it because I'm just sharing my story.
I'm not telling anyone what to do. I'm just talking about what I did.

Speaker 2 And yet somehow a lot of people out there think I'm insulting them or attacking them.

Speaker 2 It baffles me.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's in, and I understand everything that you have, that you've said. I mean, the...

Speaker 1 And I think you've got a lot of detail on this, but the country is pretty much addicted to these drugs.

Speaker 1 Like a huge percentage of the population takes them, can't get off them, unclear if they're benefiting from them.

Speaker 1 So I understand that you're poking at something that people rarely mention in public and that goes deep.

Speaker 1 On the other hand, I thought the goal was health and independence and joy and connection between people and productivity and creativity.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't even seem like that those are considered virtuous goals by the New York Times, which does kind of give me the creeps a little bit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 Well, it is.

Speaker 1 It's dark.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if you looked at the comments on that New York Times article or if you heard about the kerfuffle, you know, that that article caused the readership of the New York Times, but they had to shut the comments down after 1300 just poured right in within a day of the article being out because people were just so outraged at how

Speaker 2 basically what a fascist I am for

Speaker 2 entertaining the idea that

Speaker 2 you can take your body and your well-being and your identity back from

Speaker 2 a very powerful industry that profits off of us being afraid of our suffering.

Speaker 2 And I'm literally a fascist now. I've been called

Speaker 1 you live quietly with your family in New England, not wanting to bother anybody or tell anyone what to do, but you're for nature and peace and independence, and that makes you a fascist.

Speaker 2 Basically.

Speaker 1 So amazing. Okay.
I just want to

Speaker 1 set the stage for your story.

Speaker 1 So you're from Connecticut.

Speaker 1 You come from an attack family. We had dinner last night.
I heard all of this. It's an amazing story.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 you wound up on psychiatric medications and it began this whole odyssey. Can you just tell us what happened to you?

Speaker 2 Sure. So I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is, you know, you picture the most stereotypical kind of upper

Speaker 2 middle-class affluent New England town, and it's Greenwich. And I was the kind of kid who was good at school.

Speaker 2 So I happened to know how to get A's on tests and memorize and regurgitate information well and

Speaker 2 follow the instructions of adult authority figures. So I was good at school.
I was a good athlete. you know, on paper, I had it all together, you could say.

Speaker 2 But when I was 13, I ended up having this profound experience one night in front of the bathroom mirror as I was brushing my teeth.

Speaker 2 And I had been elected president of the middle school at my all-girls private school. And the next day I was going to lead an assembly with the headmistress.

Speaker 2 And I started looking deeper and deeper into my eyes as I was thinking about all that I had on my plate. And I ended up having this profound

Speaker 2 out-of-body experience where I lost touch with

Speaker 2 space and time and everything went black around me. And I was just staring at this girl in the mirror until suddenly a stranger was looking back at me and I was like, who is she? Who is she?

Speaker 2 What is this girl doing looking at me? I just was totally out of reality. And when I came to the only conclusion I could draw

Speaker 2 about what this meant was that I didn't have a real self. I was just this programmed robot who'd been raised to perform well and

Speaker 2 have it all together. But who was I really? What did I really care about? What did I

Speaker 2 want to do with my life? I didn't know the answer to that. And that terrified me.
And so I ended up trying to repress what had happened and pretend it hadn't happened.

Speaker 2 I didn't tell anyone about this out-of-body experience I'd had. And I just continued on performing well.
But at home, eventually I began to just

Speaker 2 I couldn't hold it all in anymore. So I began to act out and scream and curse.
And I started to get physical and I'd push my mother. I'd terrify my sisters.

Speaker 2 I started slicing up my arms, I started thinking about death because, you know, what was the point to this game that I had no agency in?

Speaker 2 And my poor parents were just shocked and stunned at, you know, what had happened to their eldest daughter seemingly overnight. She was this, you know, maniac, basically.

Speaker 2 And so they did what so many loving American parents are taught to do when their child is struggling. They took me to a professional because they internalized this story that they didn't have

Speaker 2 they didn't have what they needed to to help me they needed to pay some someone who'd studied about kids like me to help so they sent me to a therapist your parents are um i identify with the parent in this

Speaker 1 you know they they love you they think everything's going great you're killing it in school you're staying within the boundaries and then like they don't have any idea what to do basically yep but they're motivated by love it Is that very?

Speaker 2 Very much so.

Speaker 2 They

Speaker 2 did what they thought would be the most helpful for me.

Speaker 1 They're the opposite of negligent, I guess that's what I want to say. Like they're engaged.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 they did the best they could with the information that they had at their disposal, which was...

Speaker 2 You know, really all they saw as a resource was the mental health system.

Speaker 2 There weren't any visible

Speaker 2 support groups for parents of struggling teens. No one was talking about, my gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too?

Speaker 2 No one talked about this then.

Speaker 2 And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health professional. And so, and this woman was, this therapist was a very kind woman.
She had the best of intentions.

Speaker 2 But when I was sent to see her each week, to me at the time, I experienced it as this profound violation of

Speaker 2 my very being. I interpreted this as a sign that everyone around me thought I was defective, I was the problem.

Speaker 2 And I knew in my heart that the anger I felt and the despair I felt were actually really meaningful responses to the environment that I was growing up in, this like really high-pressured, intense environment where, you know, it's just in the air itself that if you want to feel good about yourself, you have to excel.

Speaker 2 And I knew that that was the problem, not me. But of course, I was 13.
I didn't have the language to articulate this. I didn't have the sense of self yet to stand up for myself.
So

Speaker 2 I ended up, you know, doing what I, being sent to therapy each week. I felt humiliated.
I felt ashamed.

Speaker 2 My poor parents didn't mean to, you know, cause that in me, but I just, I experienced therapy as basically a statement that I wasn't good enough as I was. And so it wasn't a long.

Speaker 2 it wasn't that long before the therapist ended up recommending to my parents that they send me to a psychiatrist because I was, you know, pretty extreme.

Speaker 2 My, my difficulties were, you know, not, it wasn't enough to just see a therapist. And so my parents took me to a psychiatrist.
My mom took me to my first appointment.

Speaker 2 And in that first session, I was 14 by this time.

Speaker 2 In that first session, after sitting down with this woman, this stranger who I'd never met before, I think she'd been given some information about me by my parents and that therapist, but I'd never met her.

Speaker 2 I poured out all my pain to her. And at the end of that session, she said, have you heard of something called bipolar disorder?

Speaker 2 And I was like, what? And she said, well, this anger that you feel, this irritability, these rages you're getting into, these are symptoms of something we call mania.

Speaker 2 And the despair and the injury you're doing to yourself, these are symptoms of depression.

Speaker 2 And this is a condition that you'll have for the rest of your life, but don't worry, they're medications that will help you manage this.

Speaker 1 14, she told you you'd be stuck with this for life?

Speaker 2 For life.

Speaker 2 For life.

Speaker 2 That's how it always is.

Speaker 2 Anytime you're given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, you know, the baseline operating assumption is that this thing we call mental illness is an incurable condition that you treat and you manage. But

Speaker 2 that forms the premise of the entire business model of the psychiatric industry is that these are incurable conditions that require treatment indefinitely.

Speaker 2 And there, there I was hearing this message as a 14-year-old girl. I'm like, excuse my language.
I'm like, who the fuck does this woman think she is telling me this?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 But that defiance that I felt, you know,

Speaker 2 I had no one.

Speaker 2 I knew I couldn't resist that if I resisted, that would be used against me. So I just

Speaker 2 went along with it.

Speaker 1 Resisted? would be, it's like you've been taken in by the Bulgarian border police in 1975. Resistance is futile.

Speaker 2 Well, it totally is. Well, and interestingly, just to like pan out for a moment to this whole broader mental health industry,

Speaker 2 you know, at scale, that is when you, many people who resist their diagnosis or who tell their doctors, I don't think I'm sick.

Speaker 2 That's actually is used literally to reinforce just how sick you are.

Speaker 2 You lack insight, quote unquote, into your condition.

Speaker 1 So, Soviet.

Speaker 1 So, like, listening to the patient is that's been taken out of the process?

Speaker 2 It has. Well, in the sense that, of course, the psychiatrist is listening for signs of symptoms.

Speaker 2 You know, okay, I'm listening past what they're saying so I can determine if this person is entering a hypomanic episode or her depression is worsening, but they're not listening to the patient.

Speaker 2 I'll speak for myself. My all very well-meaning therapists and doctors over the years were not actually

Speaker 2 listening to me from a premise of me having having

Speaker 2 knowing myself better than them,

Speaker 2 of me having wisdom, of me have, you know, they lacked a respect

Speaker 2 for my own ability to

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 2 define for myself what my reality meant.

Speaker 1 It sounds like they went into

Speaker 1 the sessions knowing what you were sick with, and everything that you said was confirmation of what they already knew.

Speaker 2 Exactly. It's all filtered through this clinical lens of translating

Speaker 2 your

Speaker 2 deep human experiences into this clinicalized language of symptom, illness, disease. And so they're just, they're trained to do that.

Speaker 2 And what ended up happening to me when I eventually bought into all of this by the time I was 18 is I learned how to do that to myself.

Speaker 2 And I just came to translate every single thought, emotion, behavior, decision through this medicalized lens of me having this sickness that was incurable and that these were all symptoms of it, basically.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you're 14. Can you imagine telling a 14-year-old you have a lifelong illness from which you will never recover that will define you going forward? At 14, you're telling somebody that.

Speaker 1 On the basis of what evidence? Like, where did you catch this illness? Like in the ladies' room in an airport? Like where did, did they explain where you got this illness?

Speaker 2 It's a very good question, Tucker. And it's a question that we should be asking all the time

Speaker 2 about literally every single psychiatric diagnosis that is ever given to any human being, because the entire model is built on subjectivity.

Speaker 2 It's built on the subjective observations of the diagnosing clinician, which of course means it will be infused by their own personality, like whether they had a bad night's sleep, they just had a fight with their spouse an hour earlier and they're grumpy.

Speaker 2 You know, it's going to infuse how they see their patients. There are no objective biological tests.

Speaker 2 There are no brain scans,

Speaker 2 lab tests that you can do to say, oh, this is proof that you have this

Speaker 2 chemical imbalance in your brain or this faulty biomarker.

Speaker 2 There's no objective measurable pathology of any kind in any of these conditions.

Speaker 2 Literally, all of them, including the so-called serious ones like bipolar and schizophrenia, it is completely based on observation.

Speaker 1 But is there any explanation for, so if, so they're telling you they're looking forward in to the next 70 years of your life and saying it's going to be with you forever, kind of incumbent on them to explain where you got this thing, its nature, like what exactly are they talking about?

Speaker 1 Did anybody ever explain any any of that?

Speaker 2 No, and in large part, because I never asked. I mean, of course, I didn't ask as a kid.

Speaker 2 I was just so flummoxed by the whole and disoriented by this whole experience that it didn't even occur to me to be like, Can you prove that I have an incurable brain disease?

Speaker 2 But honestly, talking about.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, Lord, to say you have terminal cancer. We can keep you alive for decades, but it's terminal.
I mean, that's like so nuts to say that to a child on the base of no evidence.

Speaker 2 But the entire paradigm is that. For

Speaker 2 every single person who has ever been given a psychiatric diagnosis in the history of psychiatric diagnosis, it's always that. It's always just the opinion of the clinician based on his or her

Speaker 2 personal orientation. It's the entire thing.
And I did not realize this because it never occurred to me to step back and ask these questions.

Speaker 2 And I think most, maybe I shouldn't, I shouldn't presume most, but many people don't either.

Speaker 2 Because the, the, you know, when I ended up eventually buying into all of this a few years after that first psychiatrist, as an 18-year-old, you know, I'd, I'd continued through high school playing the performance game, knowing it was bullshit, but not knowing how to get out of it.

Speaker 2 So I ended up getting into Harvard and trying to tell myself, you know, maybe I'm wrong and I will actually

Speaker 2 feel okay in my skin once once I get to Harvard and I'll just be able to say to myself, like, you were crazy thinking this performance thing is bullshit. Harvard is amazing and now you're happy.

Speaker 2 So of course I didn't feel that way when I got there. And I was,

Speaker 2 I instantly spun out. I started, you know, getting drunk and doing Coke and ecstasy and just running away from the reality that I still had no idea who I was.

Speaker 2 I still didn't feel like I had an authentic self. I still felt trapped in this performance game.
So now what I, what do I do? Because I'd been hoping Harvard would save me and it hasn't.

Speaker 2 And that pain.

Speaker 1 Well, you just won like the number one merit badge in the world, too. You get into, plus you're playing at the highest level in sports.
Yep.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I was playing on the squash team.
I had on paper, I'd made it. I'd arrived, you know, the, the, the pinnacle of what you strive for as a young person within the kind of elite education industry.

Speaker 2 Like I won the jackpot. And yet I wanted to kill myself basically every day and saw no point to any of it.

Speaker 2 And so as I spun out with each, you know, through the fall, week after week after week, and I really lost, lost my, any footing I might have had. I just, I just lost it all.

Speaker 2 And I was, I was just a mess and getting myself into all kinds of dangerous, impulsive, you know, really dark situations.

Speaker 2 I eventually, by wintertime, was just so desperate for relief from this pain that that little voice of that psychiatrist all those years earlier is saying, Oh, you have this illness called bipolar disorder.

Speaker 2 I was like, Maybe she's right. Like, why do I feel this way? Why can't I get my shit together? Why am I such a mess? Maybe I really am sick.

Speaker 2 And so, it was at that point that I willingly, voluntarily went back to psychiatry.

Speaker 2 I found a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, which, of course, you know, it's considered considered the kind of the gold, the golden psychiatric institution, one of the oldest in the country.

Speaker 2 This, this,

Speaker 1 most famous. Most famous.

Speaker 2 Yep. Sylvia Plath and Sexton.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Ray Charles. Robert Lowell.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. They all wrote poems and fiction about their experiences there.
And so here I was now

Speaker 2 so privileged and blessed to be entering this hallowed psychiatric ground. I was just so excited.

Speaker 2 Did it work for Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell?

Speaker 2 I mean, we know what you mean, but like.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people say that,

Speaker 2 you know, from what I recall, and someone should, you know, confirm my facts, but from what I remember

Speaker 2 years ago reading about Sylvia,

Speaker 2 I guess she eventually ended up getting Electroshock, which, by the way, is still alive and well. 100,000 people a year get Electroshock in the U.S.

Speaker 2 McLean Hospital on its website a couple of years ago was like bragging about how great its ECT center is.

Speaker 2 I think Sylvia, you know, what ECT did to her brain and her creativity, I've heard that that

Speaker 2 played a part in why she eventually just couldn't be alive anymore because of the adverse effects of psychiatric treatment. So I knew none of this then.
I was just desperate for relief.

Speaker 2 And I think that desperation is a really important piece of this broader conversation because as human beings, we can only withstand so much suffering before we need help. We need relief.

Speaker 2 And that desperation drives you to just accept whatever promise is offered to you because you just, you're too tired of trying anymore yourself. Just someone take over here.
Someone fix me.

Speaker 2 Someone take this pain away. And that's the place that I got to.
that freshman year.

Speaker 2 And I think because of that, it impaired any critical thinking capacities that I might have otherwise had to ask those questions of like, how do you know I have an incurable brain disease?

Speaker 2 Or can you give me, can you tell a little bit more, you know, about the evidence base for this drug you're putting me on? None of those questions occurred to me because I didn't care.

Speaker 2 I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted the pain to stop.

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Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 but at the same time, you're going to class at Harvard, you're playing on the squash team, like you're continuing to achieve.

Speaker 2 Kind of. I mean, I skipped a lot of classes freshman year.
I was sick a lot, and so I missed a lot of practices. That first year, I definitely fell off the

Speaker 2 upper echelons of performance that

Speaker 2 I'd been used to leading up to then, which I think also was part of why I was just so desperate.

Speaker 1 When did they start putting you on drugs at McLean?

Speaker 2 Right in that first appointment with my new doctor. And I was put,

Speaker 2 well, I had actually been put on psych drugs a week or two prior to that meeting my new psychiatrist at McLean because I had come out as a debutante in a couple of debutante balls on around Christmas time, which the good wasp girl that I was, like, wasn't an option

Speaker 2 to not do. And I had actually on winter vacation, you know, in this literal wedding dress, this fancy white wedding dress.

Speaker 2 There I was up on stage, like coked out of my mind, completely trashed, because I had to be to survive doing such things.

Speaker 1 Basically, sorry, excuse me.

Speaker 2 And, you know, in my long white gloves, and I'm up on stage, and I'm like,

Speaker 2 I am literally a robot performing. I, I just, that was my breaking point on

Speaker 2 Christmas vacation where I just was like, I either need to kill myself right now or get help. And so

Speaker 2 that was, I went to my parents. I said, please help me.

Speaker 2 I hadn't asked for this kind of help from them in years because of how betrayed I had felt by them sending me to the therapist years earlier, but now I was at a breaking point. And so that was,

Speaker 2 I was put on a couple of meds on vacation. And then when I went back to school and started seeing the psychiatrist at McLean, he continued me on those and he began to add new ones.

Speaker 2 And that began what ended up being a decade of just the polypharmacy highway, you could say. And I became basically a professional psychiatric patient.

Speaker 1 So what did they put you on?

Speaker 2 So I, I was from the beginning, I was always on an antidepressant of some kind, a mood stabilizer.

Speaker 2 And then with the passage of time, antipsychotics were added in, benzos were added in. I was on Ambien for a long time too,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 it was the kind of typical bipolar regimen, as they call it, where it's literally a handful of different prescriptions. And the way it was explained to me, you know, it was, it almost felt like

Speaker 2 I had this impression that my psychiatrist was very skilled and sophisticated. Oh, this for a little, you know, a little bit of this for that issue, a little bit of this for that issue.

Speaker 2 I, I, the more meds I was on,

Speaker 2 the more cared for I felt. And the more, and, and it felt like the, the more serious, you know, my, my doctor was taking me.
And it just steadily, beginning that freshman year at Harvard

Speaker 2 on, you know, I, I just, my,

Speaker 2 the more treatment I got and the more compliant I was and the more deferential I was to psychiatric authority, the more my life fell apart.

Speaker 1 During the, so you said you got meds in your

Speaker 1 first appointment.

Speaker 1 Did anyone ever say to you,

Speaker 1 you know, you, you obviously feel deeply unsettled and unhappy, at times suicidal?

Speaker 1 Maybe you're not living the right way. Maybe you shouldn't be at Harvard.
Maybe you shouldn't be on the varsity squash team.

Speaker 1 Maybe you should be, I don't know, tending to horses on a farm or painting or working in a bank or, I don't know, doing something else. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Like, it does seem just intuitive that if someone has pain, it's worth thinking about the cause of the pain. If I put my hand on a stove and it hurts, I don't take meds for that.

Speaker 1 I'm like, take my hand off the freaking stove. Did anyone ever address it in that way?

Speaker 2 Well, they can't really, because this is the bind of this medical model that the mental health industry is built on.

Speaker 2 So, so you're told you have a mental illness, quote unquote, and that it's in your brain, that there's some kind of usually you're, it's the chemical imbalance story, which by the way.

Speaker 1 I just want to ask you to stop. Chemical imbalance.
So this is a phrase that I first heard maybe 30 years ago when I

Speaker 1 the first person I knew started taking an SSRI, Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurzel.

Speaker 1 It was this whole like Time magazine promoted idea that depression, mental illness of all kinds was caused by a quote, chemical imbalance in the brain.

Speaker 1 And the question I always had is, well, okay, if something's an imbalance, what's balance? Is there a baseline?

Speaker 1 is there a way to measure various chemicals in your brain do we know what the right levels of those chemicals is I mean I don't under like is there any science behind that at all no

Speaker 1 it's a chemical imbalance in your brain okay where should so like if I'm low on oil I throw the dipstick at the top of the engine. I'm like, oh shit, it's two, you know, two inches down.

Speaker 1 I got to pour another cord in.

Speaker 1 Is there anything like that

Speaker 1 in a psychiatric assessment?

Speaker 2 No, okay. Nothing.
And

Speaker 2 you are one of the lucky few who somehow miraculously saw right through it because most people to this day, despite the fact that the chemical imbalance theory has long been debunked, and there was an umbrella review published in molecular psychiatry two years ago that just kind of put the final nail in the coffin on it.

Speaker 2 It has been,

Speaker 2 it has never been proven, and that's been known all along.

Speaker 2 And yet, if you survey American and surveys that have been done of Americans, most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances to this day.

Speaker 2 So, so

Speaker 2 that's like utterly fake. Utterly fake.

Speaker 1 Because we can't define balance, therefore we can't define imbalance.

Speaker 1 Correct, exactly.

Speaker 2 And even if, you know,

Speaker 2 this medicalized framework that we use to think about ourselves, you know, which has such a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human now, I mean, suffering, anxiety,

Speaker 2 madness of all kinds. I mean, most people view that as illness, quote unquote.
Like that medical framework is so ubiquitous.

Speaker 2 And what it what it does, to return to your question about like, did anyone ever ask me about the circumstances of my life? Like, you, you, you can't because

Speaker 2 you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry and you're just, oh, it's too bad. You, you had the bad, you know, genetic card and you have this chemical imbalance, or

Speaker 2 your struggle is a response to your life. It can't be both.
You can't have this unfortunate disease and also be having a meaningful response to your circumstances. It's one or the other.
And so

Speaker 2 the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient, and I think the experiences of so many of the more than 60 million adults who are on these drugs right now and more than 6 million children is that.

Speaker 1 Wait, there's 60 million American adults and 6 million, 66 million Americans total on these drugs.

Speaker 2 According to the CDC in 2022, so those numbers could well be higher by now.

Speaker 1 That's craziness.

Speaker 2 And we are told that

Speaker 2 we're having a mental health crisis because so many rates of suicide are through the roof, anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling.

Speaker 2 We're told, you know, this is this terrible crisis. And most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment.
But no, if you look at the numbers, you're like,

Speaker 2 basically everyone is

Speaker 2 almost, you know, this huge percentage of our population more than ever before is getting mental health treatment. So the problem isn't not enough mental health treatment.

Speaker 2 The problem perhaps is, is the mental health treatment.

Speaker 1 So I'm just, I can't, I'm fixated on this. And to continue the metaphor, want to beat it to death, if you come in with a burnt hand and I don't ask you how you burned it, I'm not really treating it.

Speaker 1 I'm just giving like a palliative. So I give you painkiller because you've got a burn on your hand.
But if I never say, how'd you burn your hand? Well, I put it on the stove. I do it every morning.

Speaker 1 So I think a clinician who cared about the patient would say, how about don't put your hand on the stove? Like there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 in therapy, I would, of course, talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but it was all

Speaker 2 the baseline operating assumption was that I was just, I had this brain disease that I was at the mercy of, that the only thing I could do to manage, you know, to manage it was take pills.

Speaker 2 And so any conversations that I had with therapists about my life to me, and I think to a lot of them, just felt kind of secondary, like, oh, you know, you're having, you have a lot of stress, or you're in this dysfunctional relationship, or this kind of

Speaker 2 hard thing happened to you. We would talk about those things, but

Speaker 2 not

Speaker 2 because we thought that was

Speaker 2 working through those would be what helped me resolve my challenges. It was the meds that were going to do that.
That was, you know, what I was, what I learned to believe.

Speaker 2 And I, and I think that's the insidious,

Speaker 2 that's the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm is that it basically teaches you to let go of any sense of responsibility or agency over your life because you're just at the mercy of faulty brain chemistry.

Speaker 2 And so, like, what's the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life? Because I'm still going to have this brain disease.

Speaker 1 So, like, why does it really a disease that they can't define whose origin they don't even ask about?

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 a brain disease that's like in no scientific sense a disease. Literally.

Speaker 1 Is it contagious?

Speaker 1 Wow, that's wow, that's even crazier than I, speaking of crazy, that's even crazier than I realized. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, okay, so can we just go, if you don't mind, please, yeah, since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs, can you just go through and order what those drugs are generally and what the effects on a person are?

Speaker 2 So the different drug classes are antidepressants, of course. So you have the, you know, Prozac, Effexor, Symbolta, Selexa, Lexapro,

Speaker 2 the mood stabilizers, which many, many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy, but they've over you know, over the decades, when they were studying them, they noticed that the,

Speaker 2 you know, the animals became kind of apathetic when they were testing them for these other conditions. They're like, oh, maybe we can use this on on psychiatric patients.

Speaker 2 So, so most mood stabilizers are are actually anticonvulsants so those would be you know lamictyl depacote lithium is classed as a mood stabilizer it's literally a neurotoxin that you know it was banned in in the united states and until um

Speaker 2 the late the early 70s it didn't get approved until the early 70s for psychiatric uses and had been banned prior um so that's the other you know that's considered the so-called gold standard mood stabilizer and i could talk a lot about lithium.

Speaker 2 I have a whole chapter on it in my book because of all the drugs that I've lithium salts, it used to be called, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they probably, I think

Speaker 2 that's one of the ways it's been described.

Speaker 1 It's an old, old drug.

Speaker 2 It's been around for a long time. And it started to be used for psychiatric purposes first in Australia and I can't in the first half of the 20th century.
That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's been around a long time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And if you actually,

Speaker 2 I go,

Speaker 2 I do a deep dive in the chapter on it in my book because

Speaker 2 the story to this very day that most people are given about lithium is that it is the most, you know, it's been around the longest.

Speaker 2 It has this really reliable evidence base because of how long it's been in use for. It's a gold standard.

Speaker 2 If you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, I mean, they are the most shoddy,

Speaker 2 unscientific, completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine.

Speaker 2 You're just shocked when you, and this is the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market.

Speaker 2 If you actually look at the drug label on the FDA website, so don't take my word for it, go to the FDA website, look up any psychiatric drug, go to the clinical studies section to see

Speaker 2 what

Speaker 2 trials this the approval was based on. Usually it's maybe two studies, and of course they can do as many studies as they want, and they just throw out the ones that they don't like the outcomes of.

Speaker 2 Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts to determine safety and efficacy?

Speaker 1 I don't know, 10 years?

Speaker 2 Six to eight weeks.

Speaker 2 Wow. Some of them last a week.
Some of them last a day.

Speaker 2 Maybe two studies.

Speaker 1 That's so these are not longitudinal, as we say.

Speaker 2 There is zero evidence base for long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs. Zero.

Speaker 2 And there is also zero evidence base for polypharmacy. These drugs have never been studied in combination with each other.
And yet, most of us go on to take multiple of them for years.

Speaker 1 Nor is

Speaker 1 the mechanism of their effectiveness understood, right? So you said, for example, mood stabilizers were used on animals,

Speaker 1 you know, to stop convulsions. And they noticed that the animals became compliant.
But that doesn't mean that they know how that drug acts on the brain, correct?

Speaker 2 Yeah, usually you'll see a line like that in the drug, like the mechanism of action is not yet understood or something.

Speaker 2 And it's, it's, it's, I mean, it is such a

Speaker 2 it, it's, we are all guinea pigs in a massive experiment here. And this unfortunately is the case outside of the psychiatric drug context too.

Speaker 2 And, and,

Speaker 2 you know, when you think about the hubris and the um,

Speaker 2 you know, we know so little about the human brain already as it is. It's, it's so mysterious to us how it works.
And to think that, you know,

Speaker 2 we're just, we're going to put in this psychoactive, this synthetic psychoactive chemical. We're going to put it into your body.

Speaker 2 It's going to course through your blood, through your bloodstream, potentially for the rest of your life,

Speaker 2 to be so disregarding of what the long-term consequences of that might be especially when you're putting a kid on this it's it's

Speaker 2 you know it it's

Speaker 2 it's it's one of the most horrible um

Speaker 2 crises of our time i think it's it because to return to your question you know that besides the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers there are the antipsychotics you know, Risperdol, Seraquels, Iprexa, Giadon.

Speaker 2 There are, of course, the anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazepines, clonopin, valium, adavan.

Speaker 2 And there are the stimulants, the so-called ADHD drugs, like Ritalin, Adderall.

Speaker 2 And then the sleep aids, like Ambien and Lunesta. So those are the

Speaker 2 all the, that's the family, the psychiatric drug family.

Speaker 1 Can we go? Okay, so can we start at the beginning, if you don't mind? So the antidepressants. So that would include SSRIs, correct? Okay.
So you were put on that immediately.

Speaker 1 What is the effect of that on you?

Speaker 2 Well, it's such a tricky,

Speaker 2 it's such a complicated question to answer because

Speaker 2 in hindsight, I can see all the effects. But at the time when I was on them, I didn't notice the effects.
I didn't, it was so, it was subtle. It was, in some cases, gradual.

Speaker 2 So when I look back now

Speaker 2 at how my life,

Speaker 2 the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down, I can see that they,

Speaker 2 you know, they altered my body physically. So, and not just antidepressant.
I mean, I couldn't answer what antidepressants specifically did.

Speaker 2 So for me, what the drugs did generally, whichever ones did what, I couldn't say, but

Speaker 2 they interfered with my basic bodily functions. So I pretty quickly began to have digestive issues.

Speaker 2 You know, you don't get told that it's like 90 to 95 percent of your serotonin receptors are in your gut.

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Speaker 1 The point of these drugs is to regulate or affect or disrupt, but change your serotonin levels.

Speaker 2 That's the crude way that we are, that we understand them so far. So they obviously act, so an SSRI is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

Speaker 2 So it's it's named as a serotonergic drug so that it, you know, it primarily acts on the serotonin system. It acts on many other systems too, because it's all interconnected.

Speaker 2 The human body cannot be compartmentalized. But the serotonin system,

Speaker 2 besides being, you know, largely responsible for your, how your gut functions, it also, you know, muscle function.

Speaker 2 Um, I mean, they're like basic primal, if I'm remembering correctly, I think it's the serotonin system that regulates like temperature,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 uh, vomiting reflex. Like, it's really primal.

Speaker 2 It's not just about happy chemicals.

Speaker 2 And so, when you're taking an SSRI or an SNRI, any of these serotonergic drugs, you're not just,

Speaker 2 it's not just acting on the brain, it's acting on the whole body.

Speaker 2 And so, a lot of people, myself included, will get diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome or, you know, they'll have other kinds of digestive issues while they're on these drugs.

Speaker 2 You know, sometimes it starts quickly, sometimes it takes a while, but it doesn't occur to you to, because we're not, we're not wired, we're not, we're not programmed to question

Speaker 2 medical treatments generally, at least I wasn't. And so as my physical issues accumulated, I just assumed I was just, you know, I'm, because I'm so mentally ill, I'm not taking good care of myself.

Speaker 2 I'm eating shitty food. You know, I was your fault.
Exactly. Exactly.
And besides digestive issues,

Speaker 2 the antipsychotics and mood stabilizers cause serious weight gain. My weight fluctuated 70 pounds during my mental patient career.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's just,

Speaker 2 I literally looked like a different person. I should have brought an old picture of me.
I mean, you wouldn't have recognized me during my peak psych patient era.

Speaker 2 They caused, you know, I had chronic aches and pains and my, my, you know, I had skin issues and my nails would flake off, my hair would fall out.

Speaker 2 All those, all these subtle changes that happened that just grew over time.

Speaker 2 I never linked it to the drugs.

Speaker 2 And then, in terms of their effects on me, you know,

Speaker 2 emotionally and mentally, a lot of people talk about antidepressants, especially as

Speaker 2 having a numbing effect.

Speaker 2 And which, by the way, can be helpful. I mean, it's important to make clear here, my orientation to this is not anti-psych drug.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, we've been altering ourselves as as human beings since the dawn of time with psychoactive substances.

Speaker 2 You know, who am I to tell someone, you know, you're, you shouldn't take a psych drug? For me, it's about the stories that we're told about what they are and what they do.

Speaker 2 And if you're being told, you know, you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, that's why you feel down in the dumps. Here's some Prozac.

Speaker 2 It's going to help adjust the chemicals, which will help you feel happier. Like, that's a lie.
And you agreeing to take the pill is not a choice.

Speaker 2 You are not making, you are, you have been coerced into taking this drug through basically propaganda. But if you're told, you know, Tucker, we really don't know that much about what these drugs do,

Speaker 2 they're approved on the basis of very short-term trials.

Speaker 2 Long-term outcomes are quite poor if you actually look at the data that does exist.

Speaker 2 Your serotonin system, you know, controls a lot of really important functions. You know, if you walk them through, if you are walked through all of that, and then you still decide, you know what,

Speaker 2 I kind of want to numb myself out right now. Like, I can't, I don't have support system.
I'm too stressed. I have too much on my plate.
Like, I am aware of the risks.

Speaker 2 I still want to take this and, and, you know, I know it's not fixing a pathology in me. Then I'm like, all for it.

Speaker 1 Like, good for you. That's informed consent is what you're describing.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And that is not, if you are being told this is an antidepressant medication, you're not making an informed choice because that is marketing language.

Speaker 2 This is not a drug that's acting against depression, like targeting, oh, let's get in there. And there's where the depression lives.
And now we're going to target it. That's bullshit.

Speaker 2 So the language itself makes or breaks whether you can make a true choice. And so until we change how we talk about these drugs, I don't think anyone is making a truly informed choice.

Speaker 1 So my sense of SSRIs is that in some people they offer relief,

Speaker 1 which is not always good. I felt that way about vodka, you know, and it turns out it was causing a lot of problems that I thought it was solving.

Speaker 1 I think anyone who drank too much has a similar experience, but drugs are similar. But it does offer, at least in the short term, like, oh, I feel less crazy.
Like, I'm calmer now. Does it?

Speaker 2 I think it can,

Speaker 2 especially short-term use. I mean, for example, if you are someone who hates to fly in airplanes and you get panicky, like you take a Vanax,

Speaker 2 that's going to help you a lot, or might help you a lot and so when used

Speaker 2 in acute situations or for a short term of a short period of time I do think they can feel really helpful to many people the

Speaker 1 I think a lot of this is is is around the long-term use of them which they were never designed for well so but that's um I mean that's the that's the marker for addiction Anything that, and that's why smoking is cigarette smoking is so compelling, crack smoking is so compelling, because anything you pull into your lungs immediately goes to your bloodstream.

Speaker 1 It has an immediate effect. And every study shows the faster the effect, the more profound the relief, the more addictive it is.
And that's one of the reasons benzos are so terrifying.

Speaker 1 But I guess my question is: like, does it

Speaker 1 you get the feeling that people on some of the antidepressants, the SSRIs, like seem kind of like dead inside. Did you feel that?

Speaker 2 I totally did, but I attributed it to how sick I was. Oh.
I felt dead. I felt disconnected.
I felt,

Speaker 2 I felt, I felt like I was trapped in this kind of

Speaker 2 sludgy

Speaker 2 morass of,

Speaker 2 that was separating me from

Speaker 2 the world around me.

Speaker 2 I just,

Speaker 2 and I really, truly believed that that was me and my own faulty biology. And so

Speaker 2 it's so insidious. Like, you, I think it's, it's

Speaker 2 a psychiatrist named Peter Bregan

Speaker 2 calls it medication spellbinding, which I think is a really compelling phrase because the very parts of you that are required to step back and think critically about what's happening to you are impaired by the drugs.

Speaker 2 And so you're in this, for me, like decade and a half, almost like intoxication state.

Speaker 2 And then you're getting all these messages from all these well-meaning therapists and psychiatrists saying, oh, you're not feeling helped. Oh, you're feeling worse.
Well, your sickness is progressing.

Speaker 2 Like, let's try this new drug or let's up your dose or let's switch you to that. It's never like, let's all just pause for a moment here and sit back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is

Speaker 2 wrong.

Speaker 2 And you don't need any of this. No one is doing that, of course.

Speaker 2 And so as I went deeper into psychiatric patienthood and those physical issues worsened, my cognitive function worsened, you know, memory problems. Oh my gosh, when you were,

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know which drugs were the biggest culprits, probably the benzos and the antipsychotics, but my capacity to remember things, to read, to absorb information, and actually comprehend information,

Speaker 2 I just dissipated over the years, and which was

Speaker 2 really hard for me as someone who had, you know, so much of my sense of self, however fake it felt, was rooted in my intellect. And so here I was just feeling like this mushy,

Speaker 2 just totally

Speaker 2 incapacitated mind that couldn't engage with the world anymore and let alone like feel creative and curious. And I was just, I was just like a zombie basically.

Speaker 1 It was killing your life force, it sounds like.

Speaker 2 It totally was. And

Speaker 2 that idea of a life force, like to me, this whole thing

Speaker 2 at the heart of this crisis that we are in, because it is a crisis. It's just not a mental health crisis.
It's a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis is what I call it.

Speaker 2 The word iatrogenic means treatment induced or doctor induced harm.

Speaker 2 I believe that this huge, these huge numbers of people who, who are in so much pain, a huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more more suffering.

Speaker 2 And it does.

Speaker 1 And more violence.

Speaker 2 More violence, more disconnect, more polarization. When you're under the influence of these drugs for years and years and years, like you said, you do.

Speaker 2 I won't speak for everyone. I'll speak for myself and the thousands of fellows whom I have known over all these years.

Speaker 2 You lose touch with your human spirit, with you know, your sense of aliveness in the world, your ability to feel connected to

Speaker 2 the sunlight on your cheek, to the, you know, the sweet child on the sidewalk, to God, to

Speaker 2 serenity. You lose the ability to feel connected to any of that, and you're thinking the whole time it's you,

Speaker 2 and you're just getting sicker. And

Speaker 2 when you scale that out and think about the consequences on our society of that, with so many, especially young people on these drugs without even realizing that this is happening to them because of this medication spellbinding phenomenon.

Speaker 2 I mean, to me, it's like no wonder our country is more polarized than it's ever been. It's obviously much more complicated.

Speaker 2 I'm not trying to say it's all psych drugs, but I think it's a big piece here of why we're all so disconnected.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, the main takeaway just listening to this is that it changes something essential about people. This is not on the margins.
This is like the deepest thing in you you changes.

Speaker 1 So the measure, if you think the measure of happiness is your relationships, which I think is fair,

Speaker 1 how, how were your relationships?

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh. I mean, I chuckle because I'm like, first of all, I'm like, well, what relationships really? But then, of course, I did have, I had boyfriends.
I had, you know,

Speaker 2 people I would socialize with, but it was all by the time I

Speaker 2 graduated,

Speaker 2 which, you know, I had to take a year off at Harvard because I was so suicidal. I had my first admission to a psych ward while I was at Harvard.

Speaker 2 The fact that I made it through to this day, I don't really remember anything I learned there.

Speaker 2 I just was so foggy from it all. But by the time I left, I had no friends.

Speaker 2 I had a tendency to be in, I was a serial monogamist, you could say, just relationship with a guy, and then we'd break up, and then I'd get right into another relationship with a guy.

Speaker 2 And it was just, I dated guys who were as lost as I was. So suffice to say, it didn't look pretty.

Speaker 2 That was my, when I would sometimes, you know, muster the energy to

Speaker 2 go out and socialize. Like, I'd have to do drugs and get trash because that was the only way that I felt alive.
And of course, it was synthetic.

Speaker 2 So, and my family, you know, they were, my family hung in there with me through the whole

Speaker 2 the whole

Speaker 2 that whole thing that whole thing um but of course they didn't have access to the real me

Speaker 2 and because i was under the influence of all of these drugs and so they were there for me but i wasn't connected to them emotionally i would rely on them and i would come home and and

Speaker 2 They would take care of me and provide for me as I, you know, bumbled along through my 20s like a total mess. Like I could barely hold them.

Speaker 1 They sound like really kind people.

Speaker 2 They,

Speaker 2 the patience and the persistence that they

Speaker 2 all had, and you know, my younger sisters and my parents, you know, it was not easy for them.

Speaker 2 And it was not always pretty in our family system. You know, we, our whole family evolved around me as the designated problem, you know, me as a designated patient.

Speaker 2 So, so understandably, that created all kinds of challenges, but they never gave up on me. And I would just, I'd come home whenever I

Speaker 2 couldn't function anymore. And, but I didn't feel,

Speaker 2 I didn't feel connected to them, to myself, to anything. And again, I believed it was me.

Speaker 1 That's like hell. You're describing hell.

Speaker 1 Disassociated from everybody, everything, and from God. Do you think it's possible to have a relationship with God while on psych meds?

Speaker 2 It wasn't for me. I mean,

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say that in a sweeping generalization. But it wasn't for you.
It wasn't for me, for sure. For sure.
And I think the other piece of this that

Speaker 2 is so important, especially because of how many of us are psychiatrized as kids, is that I had no

Speaker 2 sexuality. I had no

Speaker 2 kind of like erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer, as a friend, as an appreciator of beauty. I had none of that.

Speaker 2 And I, of course, didn't realize what I was missing because I'd been psychiatrized basically at the onset of puberty.

Speaker 2 And when you don't have access to that facet of who you are,

Speaker 2 it makes for a very lonely,

Speaker 2 alienating existence. And, you know, I'm so glad that when I got myself out of this mess years later, I regained my sexuality

Speaker 2 because a lot of people, like there's a whole movement now of, it's called the,

Speaker 2 there's this condition called PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. Oh, come on.

Speaker 2 There's a whole movement. They're incredibly well organized on X doing really important public awareness work around how many people

Speaker 2 either never regain sexual function when they come off, or some people lose it. Some people had it on, and then when they come off the antidepressant, they lose it.

Speaker 2 Some people haven't regained it for years, and so they're just dead.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 1 Okay, really?

Speaker 1 And no one's gone to jail for this?

Speaker 2 No, because this is the

Speaker 2 It's the lack of accountability. And of course, this is the whole pharmaceutical industry, not just psychiatry.

Speaker 2 It's designed in such a way that no one, the most that they're held accountable is, you know, the occasional $3 billion fine for criminal activity.

Speaker 1 So I guess we could say, but at least the suicide rate's going down and people are happier.

Speaker 2 I mean, you would think, but

Speaker 2 as of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes. I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves.

Speaker 1 So, like, that's kind of the bottom line.

Speaker 1 I don't need to have a medical degree to say that if the number of people, the absolute number and the percentage of people taking these drugs rises and the suicide rate rises,

Speaker 1 you know, we can argue about cause and effect, but they're not working.

Speaker 1 I mean, can't, I mean, in what sense are they working if more people are killing themselves?

Speaker 2 And what's wild, Tucker?

Speaker 1 Am I missing something? I don't want to be a Philistine here. I want to be like sensitive to the science.

Speaker 2 You're seeing it clear as day. Okay.

Speaker 2 And what's wild is that in these drug labels for many, many years in the adverse effects section, you will see antidepressants have been documented to increase rates or increase suicidal and homicidal ideation, even in some of the drug labels.

Speaker 2 So this isn't like we're just realizing that these drugs can actually make people worse. It's been in the drug labels the whole time.

Speaker 1 Well, I know from first-hand experience, so I knew nothing about this. I don't take any of that crap.
I've always hated shrinks my whole life.

Speaker 1 Never been.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 no one I know who's been to one has gotten better. So that's why I don't like them.
But anyway,

Speaker 1 these mass shootings and the calls for gun control and to take my shotguns away and all this stuff got me involved in like, what is causing all these shootings?

Speaker 1 Because there are a lot of shootings, right?

Speaker 1 And in every case you look at, the person's

Speaker 1 just full of psychiatric meds. And so I brought this up a couple of times in public and whoa,

Speaker 1 you get attacked for even raising the question like is there a connection between SSRIs and mass shootings like why is that a crazy question even the question and people can't what is that

Speaker 2 it's it's it's you would think that

Speaker 2 people would of course want to have that question asked and answered and if they had

Speaker 2 if they had true faith in their products they would be like let's look at it let's be transparent about this let's let's have open access to the data let's do whatever we need to do to show you all that our products don't

Speaker 2 cause violence. But of course, it's the opposite.
There's, it's, you know, and I, I know, I know

Speaker 2 a friend of mine who's who's a professor

Speaker 2 at one point tried to FOIA the medical records of various mass shooters and and couldn't get access.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't allow to know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, and, you know, it's, I don't, I, I can't remember when

Speaker 2 Columbine, was it like 98 or 90?

Speaker 1 It was 97, I think.

Speaker 2 I think.

Speaker 2 And as you said, the 90s were, so Prozoc came to market in the late 80s. The 90s were declared the decade of the brain by our U.S.
government. And the 90s began

Speaker 2 basically the ubiquitization of psychiatric drugs, the normalization of them, the kind of infusion of them into every facet of our lives. And

Speaker 2 this, of course, was fueled by industry funding. So all the kind of anti-stigma mental health awareness campaigns that you now, you know, Mental Health Awareness Month, we're in May.

Speaker 2 Actually, Tucker, we're in May. May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

Speaker 2 These are all industry-funded efforts to basically

Speaker 2 infuse the cultural discourse around emotional pain with this message that with this actually very just, righteous message that you should never feel alone with your suffering.

Speaker 2 You should feel like you can talk about your troubles.

Speaker 2 That is a really important message.

Speaker 2 But that has been exploited by

Speaker 2 powerful corporations to basically now mean there's no shame in getting mental health treatment. And so they've taken this important message and perverted it to basically

Speaker 2 link anyone who is calling into question psychiatric drugs with someone who doesn't care about suffering. I mean, it's amazing the number of times that

Speaker 2 share my story, and I'm literally just talking about my story. I'm not saying anything about anyone else.
You know, the story of how I eventually left this all behind,

Speaker 2 people hear that as me denying the reality of suffering. I mean, you're, you're, you know, this woman doesn't think people are struggling out there.
I'm like, where did I ever say that?

Speaker 2 It's actually the opposite. I think there's, I am, first of all, I struggle a lot in my life.
You know, I'm by no means a happy, put together, mentally healthy person all the time.

Speaker 2 But how are you conflating me questioning the psychiatric drug paradigm with me questioning the reality of people suffering?

Speaker 2 If you think about it, it's just

Speaker 2 these industries have been so effective in conflating care with treatment.

Speaker 2 So if you question treatment, people assume you're questioning the need that people have for help. It's like, there are other ways to get help, people.

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Speaker 1 Does anyone doubt, I mean, just being honest, that if you get rid of all drugs, legal and illegal, licit and illicit, that the mental health crisis would

Speaker 1 basically disappear.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm sure it's, you know, it's, it's.

Speaker 1 If people stayed sober,

Speaker 1 I haven't had any serious mental health problems since I got sober 23 years ago. I can just speak for myself.
Like, that's just what I know. And I know a lot of people in that exact position.

Speaker 1 Once you just

Speaker 1 stop addling yourself with crap,

Speaker 1 you return to equilibrium. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I think, I think you, the way I would think about it for myself, at least, is that when I

Speaker 2 let go of this medicalized way of understanding myself, you know, translating all my struggles into symptoms to take to a doctor, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And when I came off the drugs, and when I also then began to educate myself about like the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize the body in all these problematic ways.

Speaker 2 And so I just kind of reconceptualized how I think about well-being and the things I put in my body or don't put in my body.

Speaker 2 To your point, I definitely have found my way to

Speaker 2 a kind of equilibrium that equips me to face life's challenges, which are inevitable. I mean, it's, I think it's a part of the human condition to suffer, to struggle, to

Speaker 2 have dark nights of the soul.

Speaker 2 And I think historically, these were episodic experiences that

Speaker 2 would, you know, some something hard happened in your life,

Speaker 2 or even something not visible, but you just are in a tough chapter. You

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 2 just find your way through it. Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes a year, but you move through it.

Speaker 2 I think that used to be prior to the rise of this medicalized mental health industry, that used to be the baseline operating assumption.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 since the rise of psychiatric drugs and since the rise of the chemical imbalance story and this incurable brain disease story, we've just forgotten that the struggles that emerge in life are

Speaker 2 responses to life and not permanent.

Speaker 2 If you orient yourself to them in that way and actually

Speaker 2 and actually believe and tell yourself, like, this is a hard chapter that I'm in, but it's a chapter. It's not my whole story.

Speaker 2 And that's what I was taught by psychiatry is that my whole story, the rest of the story of my life, is that I'm just so-called mentally ill, needing treatment, and that's all I have.

Speaker 1 They do that with alcohol, too.

Speaker 1 I can speak from personal experience. Well, you're not, I will always be an alcoholic.
No, I'm not an alcoholic. I drank too much, alcoholic, I guess, but I don't drink anymore.

Speaker 1 So, like, it's not the center of my life anymore.

Speaker 2 That's so, I have, I don't know. I mean, I think that's a fair.

Speaker 1 Look, I'm not judging anybody. I love AAA.
I don't go, but I love it.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be judgmental, but like telling people they're weak and pathetic and will always be dependent on you, it's like it's a red flag for me.

Speaker 2 I'm so, I'm so with you.

Speaker 2 I, I, in my book, I, I talk about the chapter in my life when I quit drinking, which I did eventually do because drinking one to two bottles of wine a night before you take your five med regimen, including like horse tranquilizer doses of clonopin is not a recipe for, for functioning.

Speaker 2 And so I did eventually decide to quit drinking and was really active in the 12-step world for a few years. And I hold a a soft spot for it in my heart.

Speaker 2 But I came to the same conclusion for myself: you know, I had spent the most formative years of my life

Speaker 2 letting psychiatry define who I was.

Speaker 2 And then I moved into the 12-step world and I took on a new label, alcoholic, and I began to defer my authority to, you know, a higher power. And I do believe in God, and I do, I am connected to to

Speaker 2 this kind of like broader oneness of of of life around me, but I eventually realized that I have to stop turning it over. I have to stop seeking outside

Speaker 2 guidance authority expertise answers and I need to start looking within myself and actually

Speaker 2 take responsibility for my life and my decisions and my relationships.

Speaker 2 And I

Speaker 2 realized like I have to stop labeling myself as anything, really, and kind of buying into any ideology of any kind that tells me I have a problem it has the solution for.

Speaker 2 Now I'm like, you know,

Speaker 2 I in even in the wellness alternative health world,

Speaker 2 there are a lot of problems that you get sold into thinking you have

Speaker 2 that their products can help you

Speaker 2 help you solve. And I'm at the point where I'm like,

Speaker 2 I don't want to look out there anymore for answers to

Speaker 2 anything internal to me. That's just me.

Speaker 1 So, what was the experience of therapy like? So, you're on all these drugs. How many drugs were you on?

Speaker 2 At the peak five.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 concurrently, you're sitting through therapy a lot.

Speaker 1 How often?

Speaker 2 Twice a week, usually.

Speaker 1 For how long?

Speaker 2 An hour each time.

Speaker 1 No, but for oh for how many years

Speaker 2 um the whole the i mean

Speaker 2 the whole time i was from 18 to 27

Speaker 2 consistently in therapy sometimes i would it's enroll in you know programs too if i was

Speaker 2 i was i was i ended up hospitalizing going to the hospital four times during those years

Speaker 2 And then afterwards, you know, when you're discharged from a psych ward, you're enrolled in some kind of like step-down program, you know, an intensive intensive outpatient program for, you know, where every day from nine to five for like a few weeks, you go to the psych hospital and then you go home.

Speaker 2 And then you downgrade to, you know, a lesser intensive program where you go to a few groups a week. So in my 20s, I was, I was always in individual therapy and then very often in group programs.

Speaker 1 Man, that's a lot of therapy. Obviously, I guess I can skip to the end, to the punchline.
It didn't work because you were in the hospital four times. So it's like not working.

Speaker 1 But what that's nine years of therapy, you know, consistently, full-time almost. Like, what was that like? What do you talk about?

Speaker 2 Well, that's, that's the,

Speaker 2 I'm, I, I won't speak for all therapists or the therapy industry as a whole.

Speaker 2 You know, some of my good friends are therapists and they, they work with people in very different ways than how I was in therapy.

Speaker 2 So, but in my experience, and I do think in the experience of a lot of people,

Speaker 2 because our society has

Speaker 2 lost so many,

Speaker 2 because there's so few spaces where you can turn to other human beings, to neighbors, to friends, to colleagues, to talk about how hard it is to be alive sometimes.

Speaker 2 Therapy becomes like the one place you have to feel seen and heard and understood.

Speaker 2 And so, what happened for me is that because

Speaker 2 I had no other place to where I felt like I could be open,

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 2 kind of developed this like dependence, you could say, on my weekly therapy sessions.

Speaker 2 And this, you know, I just, I kind of

Speaker 2 came to see my therapists as really like my substitute friends, sometimes my substitute mother.

Speaker 2 Some, you know, they, they kind of replaced what would have been authentic relationships had I not grown up in therapy.

Speaker 2 And so, of course, if this is the only place you have to go to talk about your problems, you need to have a lot of problems to talk about because otherwise you don't have to be aware of that.

Speaker 1 That's just fascinating what you just said. So

Speaker 1 you're basically paying people to be in a relationship with you, but because you were doing that. And you were steered there.

Speaker 1 I mean, this wasn't like a choice that you initially made, obviously, but because you did that, you actually neglected your real relationships. Is that what exactly?

Speaker 2 And what's so

Speaker 2 really nefarious about the whole thing is that you don't only neglect what could have been authentic relationships, you actually, for me at least, I actually came to dismiss the idea of like just a friendship.

Speaker 2 Like they don't understand mental illness. Like I need doctors.
You know,

Speaker 2 how could a friend help me? Like, I have a brain disease. You know, it, it, it, that's so darn.
It's like really,

Speaker 2 I don't know if that happened.

Speaker 2 I don't know what percentage of psych patients that happens to, but it happened to me and I saw it and, you know, the culture of the psych ward, the culture of these, all these programs that I was in.

Speaker 2 We were the only people we hung out with, fellow patients.

Speaker 2 Like we had a whole, you know, you go to lunch together in the hospital cafeteria and like you're at your little patient table in the corner and you're looking at all the psychologists and social workers and doctors walking around with their badges and you're kind of over in the corner like, we're the crazy, like fucked up patients over here.

Speaker 2 Like, we're not like them. I mean, there's this whole twisted, almost like romanticized

Speaker 2 culture of psych patienthood where heroin addicts are like this too. It's, it's so,

Speaker 2 gosh, I feel grief about it because we truly were like the real world out there. They wouldn't get us.
Like, we're so messed up. Like, we can never, like, we don't belong there.
Like, we belong here

Speaker 2 on the hospital grounds. It's like,

Speaker 2 I used used to feel really proud of like how crazy I was. I believe that.
It's so,

Speaker 2 I mean, I chuckle about it now, but I, you know, it's, of course, I grieve too, that that was my pride, my source of pride was what a good

Speaker 2 successful psych patient I was.

Speaker 1 It's so deep and so sick. You see it with homeless drug addicts.
There's a kind of pride, like there's a, there's a tribe. We support each other.

Speaker 1 We're, you know, we're sharing our misery, but there's a kind of feeling like we're in the elite.

Speaker 1 We're junkies. And

Speaker 1 it's the same kind of death worship. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, and like we, it, it, that word tribal, I mean, it does, because it exploits this like deep primal instinct that we have as tribal beings. It exploits that.

Speaker 2 Whereas, you know, once in our pre-modern, pre-industrialized age, your tribe would have been your village, your local community.

Speaker 2 And of course, people in that community, individuals would have had crises and struggles, but you all banded together and you had multi-generations of families.

Speaker 2 So, you know, grandparents had important roles,

Speaker 2 grandchildren. And the home, the home was a place where the man and the woman had a kind of symbiosis and

Speaker 2 mutual

Speaker 2 interdependence. And I'm not trying to romanticize.

Speaker 1 I literally have a family like that. So that's real.
I mean, I live like that. And I think, not bragging, but I mean, that's just, that's the way you're supposed to live.
Yeah. And

Speaker 2 I think our modern world does make it really hard. I think, you know,

Speaker 2 this isn't for me about individuals or,

Speaker 2 you know, particular families being, you know, weak or lazy or bad. I think just we're in this toxic stew of

Speaker 2 a culture in which we're you know, from

Speaker 2 the food we're so many of us put into our bodies bodies to the screens that we're in front of all day to the just gross

Speaker 2 kind of consumerist messaging that's just buffeting us all day. It makes it really hard to stay in touch with yourself enough to actually have the capacity to grow a, you know,

Speaker 2 develop your own tribe, whether it's your family or your neighborhood. Like, I think it's really important to say, like, this is not about individuals like fucking up.

Speaker 2 this is about our social order having evolved in such a way that it makes it feel like impossible to have the family that you have to for so many people and economics play a role too i think for sure for sure um so a big role so no i couldn't agree with you more so i keep stepping on your story sorry no not at all so you're because it's an amazing story but the question of like what do you talk about in therapy for nine years i'm sorry i didn't let you answer you know i talked about whatever poor guy i I was in a dysfunctional relationship with.

Speaker 2 I talked about my family and our conflicts. I talked about, you know, how I, whatever job I was trying to hold down, which I never could, you know, how hard it was.
And

Speaker 2 I talked about how suicidal I was. I was just, suicide was like a constant companion of mine through my 20s until I did eventually.

Speaker 2 Actually, it's an important

Speaker 2 part of my story to bring up. Like

Speaker 2 the therapy, the meds, you know, by the time I was 25,

Speaker 2 all I had was my relationship to the mental health professionals in my life, to the people being paid to be there for me and the pills that I would pick up at the pharmacy every month.

Speaker 2 That was all I had.

Speaker 2 And I

Speaker 2 life had deteriorated to such a degree that I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't work.
I had no friends.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was told, like, the message that I received was, you know,

Speaker 2 unfortunately, your bipolar disorder has progressed to such a degree that you're now treatment resistant.

Speaker 1 Come on, come on.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1 So you spend millions of dollars on these people, take all of their drugs, you get worse, and they're like, unfortunately, Lori, you're treatment resistant.

Speaker 2 literally literally and and so you know this this this phrase treatment resistance like the craziest story so crazy but it's a brilliant it's a brilliant business model because of course you know

Speaker 2 if you feel if you feel better after starting a psych drug the credit goes to the drug of course see it's helped you if you don't feel better or if you feel worse

Speaker 2 Yes, it's never the drug. It's you and just how

Speaker 2 extra defective you are. And what has now happened, and Tucker, you're not going to believe this.
It's like, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 This is just so. No,

Speaker 2 it's totally bonkers. And

Speaker 2 what I would predict, and because I'm seeing from my book,

Speaker 2 I did a lot of, I wove in a lot of research into my book and I,

Speaker 2 way more than I originally intended. And my editor kept wanting more, which is great.
And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at

Speaker 2 the current landscape of psychiatry and like, where is it heading? Because obviously, these drug-based paradigm is failing. So, like, what's next for them?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, the drug companies are not making, are not focusing

Speaker 2 relatively much at all on psych drugs anymore. They've kind of moved on.
They've recognized this isn't where the big bucks are.

Speaker 2 And so, I was just curious. I was like, so where is it heading? And

Speaker 2 what this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this treatment resistance concept. It's building a new

Speaker 2 chapter of medical devices, literally inserting electrodes into the brain that are wired to, it's called deep brain stimulation, where you, you, if you have treatment-resistant depression because your meds haven't helped you, don't worry, Tucker.

Speaker 2 Now you just go in for a simple procedure.

Speaker 2 We're just going to open up your chest cavity, insert a heart, a pacemaker-like device there, then run some wires up into your brain, and then your doctor can press a remote control button to send electrical stimulation, which we believe is going to help target the particular areas of your brain that are involved.

Speaker 1 Is this you making this up, or is this real?

Speaker 2 This is literal, literally happening.

Speaker 1 Um, besides deep brain stimulation, there's do you think there's anybody who would allow a doctor to implant something in his brain?

Speaker 2 Oh, it's it's happening, it's and it deep dbs is not wides under widespread.

Speaker 1 Widespread remote control. So you're giving somebody else the power to control your, physically control your brain.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 With electricity.

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Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was, I have read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who've had these

Speaker 2 procedures. And then afterwards, like the battery dies, and then, and you can't get the

Speaker 2 device out because it's like too complicated to remove it. So there's just like a dead,

Speaker 2 you know, matchbox size thing that's like protruding from your chest under your skin.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 DBS, it is probably the least common one right now.

Speaker 2 The big push right now is for what's called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation,

Speaker 2 which is also for treatment-resistant depression. So, you know, there's a wide array of options for people.
Don't despair.

Speaker 2 And you basically sit under this device that shoots like very powerful magnetic, you know,

Speaker 2 currents, whatever you call energy through your skull. And it's being marketed as a non-drug, you know,

Speaker 2 safe alternative because it's just magnets.

Speaker 2 And don't forget ECT, Electroshock, which is alive and well. And that's long been a treatment-resistant depression treatment.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I had a relative who did it and then committed suicide. So yeah, it's been around for a long time.
Yep.

Speaker 1 And I just want to restate what you said so eloquently, which is people subject themselves to these horrors because they are in such pain, because they are so desperate.

Speaker 1 They will accept any

Speaker 1 treatment because they're panicked and they're dying. So I get it.

Speaker 2 And they see no other option.

Speaker 1 100%. I'm not judging anybody who submits to shock treatments or deep brain, like whatever the hell that was.

Speaker 1 But this is just,

Speaker 1 but does anybody ever say, you know, you really need to go outside more often, get a dog, make a date to sleep with your spouse every other day, get on your knees and pray to God.

Speaker 1 Let's just start there. Like, maybe take your shoes off on the lawn occasionally.

Speaker 1 Does anybody? Because that would be my program just saying,

Speaker 1 and I think that works.

Speaker 1 Did anybody ever say that to you?

Speaker 2 No, and if, like, if you had met me 16 years ago and said that to me, I would have been like, fuck you, Tucker.

Speaker 2 How dare you insult me? Do you not understand how seriously sick I am? You're telling me to get some sunlight.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of people feel that way. It's like, it's invalidate.
It feels invalid.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to really go after you. I just had this insight because you're too articulate.

Speaker 1 Your story is too

Speaker 1 great because you actually recovered from these tortures and

Speaker 1 you're a real threat.

Speaker 1 I just want to say that. I just want to be on the record saying that.
So just a fact. Like that New York Times story that I thought kind of slammed you in a subtle way.
That's just the beginning.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Did you, there was a Washington Post book review of my book that was wild.
I mean, she was so,

Speaker 2 I feel for her. I, I feel for all the people who are just outraged by my story because I know that at the heart, they're afraid.
I know it's fear.

Speaker 2 And so I don't mean this in a,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 I mean it from a heartfelt place. She was so, so set off by my story and her review,

Speaker 2 I mean, she, she was just, I can't remember the exact phrases, but just wild how vitriolic it was. It was, it was an attack on my character, really.

Speaker 2 It wasn't even really about my book, this book review. And,

Speaker 2 you know, I was ready. I've been ready.

Speaker 2 I take it as a sign that I'm doing something right, that, that these large corporate media outlets are really pissed that you got better

Speaker 2 they hate that and to be clear and i because because people when i i do feel better but by better i don't mean i'm like happy and and put together like people often assume that i'm so-called mentally healthy now like i

Speaker 2 you can ask my husband like do not catch me on a day where i have you know i'm sleep deprived and have been in front of my screen too much and I'm about to get my period and I feel really stressed.

Speaker 1 Like I yelling children in the background.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I mean, I

Speaker 2 definitely, I've been off of these drugs for 15 years now, but I can tell my central nervous system is still quite sensitized to stress. So

Speaker 2 and I've always been a big feeler from, you know, I was a little girl.

Speaker 2 Like I have this vivid memory of one day I was outside in the sun in the summer and I saw saw this worm, this dead, dried-out worm, like shiny because it had been dehydrated by the sun.

Speaker 2 And I just remember crouching down and looking at it and holding it and just crying, this life that had been taken. And I buried it in my garden, my mother's garden.
And I just couldn't handle facing

Speaker 2 the death of this little bee. I mean, I've always been that kind of intense feeling person.
And so I'm often angry. I'm often very angsty.
I can get panicky.

Speaker 2 I feel a lot of grief about a lot of things. Like I could feel myself right now.
Like I could start crying just thinking about all the kids right now who are getting sent to their first psychiatrist.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 if I sat down right now in front of a psychiatrist, they'd be like, oh, gosh, Laura, you're a little emotionally lay pile.

Speaker 2 Maybe, you know,

Speaker 2 we might want to consider some, you know, Symbolta or whatever. Like they wouldn't be able to compute.
Like crying is actually a sign of being alive and being in touch with life.

Speaker 2 It's not a sign of pathology.

Speaker 2 And so I often find myself in this interesting position where I'm like defending how crazy I still am a lot of the time because people are like, you are so happy now and everything's great.

Speaker 2 I'm like, I am a dark, twisted, fucked up person, like basically on a daily basis. But you know what? I'm not.
afraid of it anymore. Like that's the big difference.

Speaker 2 Psychiatry and the mental health industry taught me to be terrified of my pain and my mind. And that's been the most liberating.

Speaker 1 But what's interesting is how terrified they are of healing. I mean, there's this amazing scene in the New Testament.

Speaker 1 It's in Luke or John, where Jesus heals a man who's been blind for his whole life, since birth. And he's like, Jesus, heal me.
And Jesus goes, okay.

Speaker 1 And he puts mud on his eyes and washes it off in a pool and he's, he can see.

Speaker 1 I mean, amazing. I talk about healing.
And the religious authorities, the Pharisees, show up immediately and they're like, who did this? Wow. And they start interrogating him.

Speaker 1 Then they interrogate his parents and their only interest is not, they were infuriated by the fact he was healed, infuriated. And they're trying to find Jesus to kill him.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, that's like the most burnt, screwed up thing I've ever read in my life, but it doesn't seem so different from the response that you're getting.

Speaker 1 It's like, I don't know, Laura Delano maybe has emotional days, but like.

Speaker 1 happily married kids, like functional, like enjoying life, loving life, loving people. That's like such a massive win.
You know what I mean? But they're like mad about it. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no.

Speaker 2 And I think when you realize that the objective to living is not happiness, it's meaning and purpose and finding your calling in the world and the way that you are meant to be of service to the world.

Speaker 2 I mean, when you

Speaker 2 find access,

Speaker 2 when you find your way to those

Speaker 2 states, then

Speaker 2 you don't care about being happy all the time anymore. You don't care about the next quick fix because that's just like you just, you know, like, that's not the point to being here.

Speaker 2 And I think that message is such a threat, not just to the mental health industry, but to so many,

Speaker 2 some, so much of consumerism more broadly. If, if, you know, once you realize, A, the answers and, and, and, you know, expertise

Speaker 2 that I'm seeking don't lie out there in all these so-called experts or products or pills or services. It's, it's, if, if I look inwards and I just trust that if I do the next right thing,

Speaker 2 I find ways to get out of self. I mean, that's like my go-to.

Speaker 2 When I'm getting a little too occupied with myself, which a long career as a therapy patient primes you to be, I'm like, okay, what's the fastest way I can forget myself?

Speaker 2 Usually it's like playing with my stepson or my son,

Speaker 2 or it's, you know, reaching back out to someone who's called me and in in a struggle in you know a tough spot when you realize like you can do that anytime you want like get out of yourself then you're like why would i go pay

Speaker 2 pay all these professionals to like

Speaker 2 listen to me ramble on about myself every week for five years.

Speaker 1 That was the thing that I was really struck by almost five-hour dinner last night. And I asked you all about your life and your story and your family and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And so we talked about your life, but a lot, but you did not talk about yourself in a way

Speaker 1 at all. It was like, and that was really striking to me because I do think the hallmark of a therapy

Speaker 1 person

Speaker 1 is narcissism. I'm sorry to say that.
I think they're really hurting people, including people I love who go to therapy, whatever. But

Speaker 1 so I don't want to be mean at all, but I do think that narcissism is death and I feel like it encourages it. Do you think that?

Speaker 2 I think a lot of, I mean, there are some modalities that I've never tried myself that are, like, for example, one is called somatic experiencing therapy. I think,

Speaker 2 um, to my understanding, it's actually about getting you out of your mind and into your body. So when you talk about, I'm anxious, they're like, what does that feel like in your body?

Speaker 1 It's like yoga, kind of.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so I think there are some modalities that aren't.

Speaker 1 I'm sure there are many great kinds of therapy, but the traditional, like, let's talk about your mother kind of thing.

Speaker 2 I totally agree with you. It teaches you to navel gaze.
It teaches you that whatever like fleeting emotion or thought is in your head is like so important.

Speaker 2 Most important thing in the world. Nothing else matters, but your own upset.
And if you think about it, if you scale outwards and imagine that at scale, it's like, what do you get?

Speaker 2 You get the social order that we have right now where everyone is driven. Not I'm being a little sensational here, but where so many people are driven by their outrage, driven by their fear.

Speaker 2 And I, my, you know, unscientific theory that I just base on my own experience and what I've seen in so many people is like, I can't help but wonder how much of that is

Speaker 2 because a lot of these people grew up therapeuticized and taught to prioritize and privilege how they feel all the time and then like decide what should happen next based on that. Like,

Speaker 2 I am outraged, like, you hurt my feelings. Like, now let's cancel you.
Or, you know,

Speaker 2 I think the therapeutic element here is

Speaker 2 potentially a significant thing.

Speaker 1 Well, it's the same. It's the same people.
You know, 100% of the people who've ever yelled at me in public are from the demographic that you're describing.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to be more precise because I don't want to make race or class part of it, but it's very noticeable.

Speaker 1 You know, it's people in expensive therapy programs who are mad at their husbands and like talking a lot about themselves. Those are the ones who scream at me.
I've just noticed that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised.
Yeah. And it's so when you,

Speaker 2 to me, the, one of the great tragedies of this is that

Speaker 2 when you, you know,

Speaker 2 the, because there are so few visible spaces in our culture right now where you can get help that isn't a paid service. Right, exactly.
You know, people just,

Speaker 2 they just don't even realize that's an option in the first place.

Speaker 2 They're so, we've been so disempowered by all these helping industries that have billions and billions of dollars to make off of us thinking we need them that people don't even realize the power and capacity they have to be with someone in great distress.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, because of the work that I do and the work that my husband does, like we are often like our home, for example, we have a spare bedroom.

Speaker 2 And the way we live our lives is like, we have a spare bedroom. Like if you are in a crisis,

Speaker 2 you're feeling lost and you know, like, we know you and we trust you. Like, come, come stay and eat dinner with us and,

Speaker 2 you know, hang out with our

Speaker 2 yelling children and just

Speaker 2 be with us in our lives. And,

Speaker 1 you know, you're making me emotional.

Speaker 2 That's like such a. And, you know, of course, we are in a position where we have a house with an extra room.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm mindful that so much of my story, and I try to talk about this all the time, like class economic factors are a huge,

Speaker 2 are

Speaker 2 a huge factor here.

Speaker 2 So I acknowledge that not everyone can do this if they wanted to, but just as an example, there's someone we know in our neighborhood who just all anonymize the descriptors just to protect them.

Speaker 2 They're young, they got psychiatrized. as a teen, bad things had happened to them.

Speaker 2 They ended up, instead of those bad things being addressed, they ended up getting sent to a psychiatrist and diagnosed and medicated. Now they're in their early 20s and they really

Speaker 2 haven't yet figured out how to be an adult in the world because they're just emerging from the psychiatric nightmare, so to speak. So this person called me up a couple months ago

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I have to stop saying that. She was on her way.
She was on her way to the hospital. She's like, I am.

Speaker 1 I love your commitment to good grammar. I just love that.
That is one benefit of the high school and college you went to. It's like, it pains you.
I couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 I couldn't do a plural pronoun for a single.

Speaker 2 I'm like, it's still anonymous.

Speaker 1 I love that. Thank you.
I hate the word they, not just because of the trans thing, but just.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I couldn't do it. And I think

Speaker 2 it's still anonymous enough. There are a lot of women in my neighborhood.
51% of the population. And she was like, I'm on my way to the hospital.
I think I'm going to die.

Speaker 2 I think I'm having a heart attack. And so I instantly was like, I think she's having a panic attack.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was like, well, I was like, so what, what is it that you're wanting by going to the ER? And she's like, I don't know. I don't know.
And then she started thinking it through.

Speaker 2 And she's like, and I know what's going to happen. They're just going to admit me.
And I was like, and then, yeah, and then you'll be inpatient.

Speaker 2 And then, and I just walked her through just to help her remember like how this goes.

Speaker 2 Like, you don't just go into the ER and then someone makes you a cup of tea and comforts you and then sends you on your way.

Speaker 2 You're like boarding sometimes for days on a psych ward with a security guard watching you, and then you're carted off to some psych ward, and who knows how long you'll be there.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, it just disrupts like potentially months of your life.

Speaker 2 So, so I was like, why don't you just, we're about to have dinner, Cooper's almost done cooking, just come over and have dinner with us.

Speaker 2 And she came over, and she's just like the loveliest young woman who I see, I get so emotional, I see so much of me in her, and she's like super lost right now.

Speaker 2 She's just trying to emerge from from this

Speaker 2 dark, dark experience of being a psych patient.

Speaker 2 And so she comes into our house, and the first thing she says is like, do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself?

Speaker 1 I'm like, girl,

Speaker 2 the fuck does she're like, I'm like, me, of course, we have. Of course I have.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't think about that anymore, but literally every day for like a decade, I was like, should I kill myself today?

Speaker 2 And so what I think, and I could feel in her instantly like a shift. And her poor parent was out in the driveway, had been driving her, and he was like a deer in headlights.
I was like,

Speaker 2 we're good. You go on.
Like, we're good. I'll touch base with you later.
And what she felt in me was that I wasn't afraid. And instantly, I could feel her be like, oh.

Speaker 2 And I was like, come on, let's go eat. And we just sat down at the table.
Our yelling children are like, you know,

Speaker 2 being wild men.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we didn't over-dramatize what she was in. We just had a regular dinner together.
And I could just feel her energetically like

Speaker 2 settling in, opening up. And she ended up staying with us for a week, sleeping in our room.
Like we hadn't planned on it.

Speaker 2 And just in that period of time, like all we did was offer her a space where she could be, fully be herself in all of her darkness. We weren't afraid of it.
We listened.

Speaker 2 We didn't make a huge deal out of it. We just like kind of brought her into our life and went on walks and we talked about stuff.
And she didn't need to talk a lot about stuff.

Speaker 2 There was stuff to work through.

Speaker 2 But it was that simple.

Speaker 2 And when I, you know, I recognize this might sound a bit romantic, you know, just and how, and how unfeasible this kind of thing is for so many people.

Speaker 1 Human connection, love.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, it's very possible.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm with you. It's possible.
It's possible, but again, like our social order is set up in such a way where it feels impossible for so many people.

Speaker 1 Well, then commit the revolutionary act of loving someone one-on-one, non-judgmentally, bring them into your home, have dinner with them,

Speaker 1 make them sit there while your kids cry. Like, that is the answer to everything, actually.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it costs no money. Yep.

Speaker 2 It pays the

Speaker 2 college tuition of no children. It's like just built on empathy.
It's support built on empathy, not profit.

Speaker 2 And that's, I think, part of why a lot of people are pissed at me right now is that the nonprofit that I started, Inner Compass Initiative, that my husband Cooper now runs,

Speaker 2 our mission is to help people make more informed choices about all of this stuff. So, like, everything that you weren't told by your doctor, we have it available for free on our website.

Speaker 2 We teach you how to read a drug label.

Speaker 2 We walk you through like how these drugs are researched and brought to to market, the history of the DSM, you know, psychiatry's so-called Bible of disorders, how unscientific it is.

Speaker 2 Like it's literally based on voting. You vote disorders in and out based on, you know,

Speaker 2 the opinions of these, the committee members, most, many of whom have drug company money. So we, we provide all of that for free, but really the most.

Speaker 2 radical, which of course is like not radical thing we do is we help people help each other. So like mutual aid in the, in the most pure sense of the word, like AA, like that, that

Speaker 2 support that you offer and receive from fellow humans who've been where you've been. And it's, it's driven not by the desire to make money, but because of love and

Speaker 2 service.

Speaker 2 And to me, that's the biggest threat. to the mental health industry is when enough people realize

Speaker 2 I have the power and the people, you know, in my neighborhood, of course, many people don't even know their neighbors, and that's a problem.

Speaker 2 When you band together and you realize, like, we can help each other through Dark Nights of the Soul,

Speaker 2 like, think about how much,

Speaker 2 how, how many services and prescriptions and

Speaker 2 facilities will be no longer needed.

Speaker 2 And yeah, the fact that that's a radical concept and a dangerous one. You're not a doctor.
I mean, the number of times we're like, you should be sued. You're practicing medical advice.

Speaker 2 I'm like, how is

Speaker 2 speaking about my own experiences

Speaker 2 practicing unsolicited medical advice or whatever it is they say? It's just, it's wild how dehumanized

Speaker 2 we've all

Speaker 2 been

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 these industries that

Speaker 2 convince us we don't have the power to be with our pain, to be with each other in pain.

Speaker 1 So I was really moved by that, I will say, like emotionally moved by that. And I,

Speaker 1 a couple wise people in my life have convinced me of something in the last year or so, which is stop being shocked by evil that you see in the world. That's the status quo.
It's always been that way.

Speaker 1 If every time you see something horrible, hear your story about how kids are being put on life-destroying drugs. And I'm like, I can't believe that.
It's like, no.

Speaker 1 That's the way it is. What we should be shocked by are acts of love and altruism and self-sacrifice.
And that's unnatural. That's like supernatural.
That's what we should be thrilled by.

Speaker 1 So I believe that. I've come to believe that.
And I was just, I was absolutely thrilled and moved by the love that you showed to the, your neighbor who's having a panic attack.

Speaker 1 It's like, if everybody did that once a week, like we would. we'd be like living in the kingdom of God.
I mean, that's like, anyway, that's my view.

Speaker 1 So, but I just want to, you've been very nice about psychiatrists and you gave them the benefit of the doubt that these are people of goodwill.

Speaker 1 And I love to hear you do that and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. However,

Speaker 1 maybe I think you're being a little generous. Like, how can

Speaker 1 they keep doing something that's not working?

Speaker 1 And why is it that I'm sure they're a great psychiatrist, but I've known a number of psychiatrists and they're the craziest people I've ever met in my life with the most screwed up personal lives.

Speaker 1 Like they have no standing to give other people life advice. Like, what?

Speaker 1 So, I don't know. Am I being too mean?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think you're asking an important question. And I think,

Speaker 2 you know, to the question of why, why do screwed up people become psychiatrists? I think, you know, speaking for myself as a screwed up person, you know, you're on a quest to understand yourself.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 because the only visible place where, not the only, but the primary visible place in our culture where you go to do that is psychiatry or psychology when you yourself are screwed up and then you think about what you want to do with your life whether you're conscious of this or not i do think maybe that's why you're pulled to this field i get it okay and you know it's not a bad reason and it's not it's not a justification or an excuse for them but i i do think

Speaker 2 a lot of people come to this profession from a place of true

Speaker 2 originally at least like true curiosity and and openness and desire to help. Exactly.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 I had problems. I want to help other people.

Speaker 1 I think that's, well, you clearly feel that way in your own life. So that's a good thing.

Speaker 1 I guess what I'm saying is you want wise people, compassionate, empathetic people who really are putting others at the center of their lives. That's the profile of the healer.

Speaker 1 And I, there are some exceptions. Anna Lemke at Stanford is a wonderful person, psychiatrist.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she is right there on the cover.

Speaker 2 Oh, really? There, on the bottom.

Speaker 1 She is a huge exception to everything I'm saying. But

Speaker 1 in general, you don't feel a lot of wisdom coming off these people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 what I think is part of why

Speaker 2 that ends up happening is that the

Speaker 2 indoctrination that young medical students, because I think this, this goes beyond just psychiatry to much of

Speaker 2 allopathic medicine, where doctor, young doctors, or young medical school students are

Speaker 2 in year one, for example, I think to my understanding, at the beginning, at least pre-COVID, maybe things have changed with COVID, but at the beginning of your first year, you're given your cadaver.

Speaker 2 And I can't remember who,

Speaker 2 where I read this, but I read it many years ago from

Speaker 2 someone who was writing critically about

Speaker 2 the medical enterprise and basically saying that it's very deliberate. You enter into medical school because you want to help, you want to help heal.

Speaker 2 And then the first thing that you are thrown into is basically this experience of having this object in front of you who once was your fellow brother or sister and is now just an object that you're going to cut apart.

Speaker 2 I think that's a,

Speaker 2 it's really like a degradation ritual that

Speaker 2 you are put through so that you can separate yourself from this fellow human and it becomes a specimen. It becomes an object in it.

Speaker 2 And so I think this phenomenon happens across medicine where,

Speaker 2 you know, you have an issue with your thyroid or whatever body part part of you, and you sit in front of a specialist who is trained to just see you as,

Speaker 2 you know, that they are trained to not emote. They are trained.

Speaker 2 You are actually, as a doctor, not meant to feel too much because how could you sustainably do this for decades if you're just emoting all the time and opening yourself up and being vulnerable like you're meant to be closed off who came up with that idea i don't know i mean i don't know enough you weep over your children you laugh with your children like you're so emotionally engaged with your children at all times if you're a good parent and that's the way to parent them that's the way to heal them i don't i don't get it yeah i mean i don't think you could survive i don't because i don't think it it's

Speaker 2 feasible to cross so let's go back to psychiatry you know if you're as a psychiatrist psychiatrist, let's say you work for 40 years, so you cross paths with thousands and thousands of people, you don't have the bandwidth to fully emote and be open and be vulnerable.

Speaker 2 You have to survive that. I mean, my view is that,

Speaker 2 and knowing many mental health professionals, like you either,

Speaker 2 if you stay in touch,

Speaker 2 like you can't stay in touch with your heart and your humanity and last for decades in this. You either have to numb out and disobey and disconnect and

Speaker 2 come to view your patients as these other, like you have to other them and just see them as lists of symptoms to write scripts for, like, or you quit or have a breakdown.

Speaker 2 Or like, it's, I have to imagine that it is not

Speaker 2 possible to be fully in touch with your own humanity for decades, immersed in the suffering and struggle of like thousands of people. So I kind of, I, I almost like,

Speaker 2 I feel for the spot that I do too.

Speaker 1 I just, but there's an irreconcilable problem at the core of it, which is you can't heal people without loving them, period.

Speaker 1 You can't actually make the best decision for somebody else unless you love that person.

Speaker 1 So, um, and in the absence of love, you wind up with a system like the one you're describing where we're destroying people.

Speaker 1 And like, there's a lot of evidence that we're destroying people and we're continuing to do it. So like, what does that tell you? They don't love those people.

Speaker 2 You're raising, I mean, this is the fundamental, like, kind of philosophical, spiritual dilemma of the modern mental health industry: is that when, yeah, when you commodify care and you turn it into a service, you can't love because

Speaker 2 you can't, they're incongruous with each other. And so, if what you're saying is true, which I

Speaker 2 believe, you know,

Speaker 2 what does that mean for the legitimacy of the kind of foundations of this massive like mega-billion-dollar industry that, you know, because it's so many, it's obviously drug companies, the hospital industry, managed care, it's psychiatry, psychology, social work, it's medical device companies, it's you know, just all the industries that supply hospitals with food.

Speaker 2 And I mean, when you think about how much money is made off of commodifying the care of suffering people and medicalizing that suffering, um,

Speaker 2 you know, it's we're in quite a dilemma here. And this isn't me saying like, blow up the mental health industry.
Like, it's obviously, it exists. It's not going away tomorrow.

Speaker 2 But I do think, like, my view is

Speaker 2 what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is helping people

Speaker 2 who, in their heart, feel that this isn't right for them. Like, if you feel helped by your meds, you love your psychiatrist,

Speaker 2 all the power to you. Like, that's, I'm, I'm truly happy for you.
But if something in you is like, is this my answer? Like, is this really helping me?

Speaker 2 is there something different something more like if something in you

Speaker 2 is calling you to that question like those are the people who

Speaker 2 who i want to who i want to reach who i want to connect with and i think slowly over time the more of us

Speaker 2 um the more of us asking these questions and forging different paths like slowly over time the demand for this industry will lessen and i mean this is probably going to be multi-generation

Speaker 2 evolution here. It's not going to change overnight.
But when enough people, with each passing decade,

Speaker 2 actually meet their neighbors, like go literally knock on the doors of their neighbors with a pot of soup, saying, Hi, we've lived next to each other for five years.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm just, let's just finally meet each other, you know, like when enough people do that and then band together for potluck dinners, for crisis networks. Like, imagine one of my fantasies is that

Speaker 2 the three streets. So, we live on

Speaker 2 a grid and the street next to us on either side.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, I've thought often about making a flyer, putting it in the mailbox of every single person and being like, let's all get together and meet.

Speaker 2 Let's all share our stories with each other, figure out who has what tools that we can exchange and borrow, figure out who has extra bedrooms.

Speaker 2 in case, you know, if your kid is in a crisis and you need a break, come on over here, you know, to really really get that grassroots about it.

Speaker 2 Like, this might sound crazy to you, but I'm like, imagine if every town and every city across the country, like enough people realized how much power they have.

Speaker 1 Live normal lives like people have always lived. Like how we used to, pre, pre-industrial revolution, right?

Speaker 1 So I think most people, I'm definitely in the category, would trade life expectancy for that. It's like, oh, it's been, modernity has been such a huge win.
Antibiotics, I'm not against antibiotics.

Speaker 1 I'm against, you know, I'm for long life expectancy, but but like

Speaker 1 you also have to acknowledge what was lost.

Speaker 2 Well, and our life expectancy is dropping.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm aware.

Speaker 1 I'm highly. How do you know that?

Speaker 1 Okay, so I've got two more big questions for you.

Speaker 1 The first is, how did you go from being like damaged to the point of attempting suicide repeatedly, like the most damaged you can be and still be alive, to being someone with, I can say, having interviewed thousands of people, a person of unusual wisdom, truly unusual wisdom.

Speaker 1 How did that happen? Like, what was the moment where

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 1 set upon the path of liberation?

Speaker 2 Well, I think, I think, so my

Speaker 2 turning point

Speaker 2 when I realized like this

Speaker 2 industry doesn't have my answers

Speaker 2 happened when I was 27.

Speaker 2 It was 2010.

Speaker 2 Um, I was, I,

Speaker 2 you know, just months of just unfolding dysfunction and craziness. And, um,

Speaker 2 and I found myself in a substance abuse day program because I had decided to quit drinking,

Speaker 2 specifically because I had been convinced that maybe the reason why all these meds weren't helping me was because I was getting shit-faced every night. And if I

Speaker 1 the booze is getting in the way of the pills,

Speaker 2 yeah, yeah. I mean, they were making rather than,

Speaker 2 i mean which was true yes this is true the booze was complicating things but of course the booze was also what was keeping me alive like ironically getting drunk was the one thing that kept me from killing myself for literally years because at least i didn't care how messed up my life was so so i had been very resistant to quitting drinking for that reason and then you know on my what ended up being my second to last hospitalization, just for whatever reason,

Speaker 2 I heard this message from a mental health worker about maybe try not drinking.

Speaker 2 And I think because I was still holding on to hope that maybe the meds would one day help me, I was like, okay, okay, because maybe he's right.

Speaker 2 If I stop drinking my super treatment resistant bipolar disorder, like maybe now it will be treated.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 I was in this substance abuse. day program.
I was living with my aunt and uncle who had generously offered up their home to me.

Speaker 2 And the psychopharmacologist on my like, you know, five-person treatment team

Speaker 2 kind of caught wind that I was like having a hard time and maybe becoming suicidal, which, which I was.

Speaker 2 And he, he was like, you know what, Laura, why don't you

Speaker 2 take a break? Like, why don't you go over to the short-term unit and just, you know.

Speaker 2 So you can feel safe. And I was like, you're right.
I wanted to go. I loved,

Speaker 2 I was so afraid of myself that i loved going onto psych wards because it was the only place where i felt safe for myself so i it was i was like into it i loved it so i was like great idea i just want to go home first let me get my belongings

Speaker 2 it's not fun going on to a locked ward without anything like any of your comforting possessions and he's like oh i can't let you do that i was like what do you mean he's like well you're suicidal right now so i have to take you directly there i can't let you leave.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I just told you I want to go. Like, I'm coming back.
I really mean it. And I meant that.
I was. He's like, I'm sorry.
And I, something in me,

Speaker 2 it kind of like really outraged, it ignited in me. And I was like, this isn't fair.
Like, I'm coming back. And I started to raise my voice and I started to get more angry.

Speaker 2 He ended up calling security.

Speaker 2 And a couple of security guards came on by and they escorted me over to this unit and they gave me the so-called choice of going voluntarily or involuntarily.

Speaker 1 Well, this progressed quickly, didn't it?

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh, in a matter of, you know, 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 And never in my wildest dreams had I ever considered that I might once be faced with this kind of situation because I had been this good little mental patient for so many years, doing everything my doctor said, always saying yes, taking my meds as prescribed,

Speaker 2 like so diligent and good at what I was doing as a patient. And now here I was non-compliant.
And

Speaker 2 that recognition that my psychiatrist had the power to strip me of my civil liberties and incarcerate me

Speaker 2 on a unit, stripping me of my right to fresh air and freedom,

Speaker 2 dislodged this like deep, deep faith that I had always had. Not all, I mean, not at the very beginning, but from age 18 on that I had had in this system.

Speaker 2 And I had two more experiences like that where I was, you know, made to take a drug that I didn't want to take.

Speaker 2 And then after I had been discharged from that,

Speaker 2 what would be my last hospitalization?

Speaker 2 I slept through a therapy appointment because I was so tranquilized by that drug. And my therapist called the cops to do a wellness check on me.

Speaker 2 which I talk about in the book.

Speaker 2 Those three experiences with

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 basically the power that psychiatry has to force you to do things you don't want to do

Speaker 2 made me step back and just start questioning all of it. And it was in that questioning space that, and the fact that I had quit drinking, I hadn't yet found AA.

Speaker 2 So I was like really fucking miserable because I just like just stopped. I removed the one thing that I had for relief without doing any work on myself.
So I was really, really miserable.

Speaker 2 But in that space,

Speaker 2 opened up this new

Speaker 2 curiosity, like

Speaker 2 who would I be off of these meds? I've been on these meds since I was a kid. Like, I've never known myself as an adult off meds.
Like, what would my baseline look like?

Speaker 2 What would my personality be like? How would I think? What would I care about?

Speaker 2 What would my body look like? Like, I just suddenly started wondering these things. And because I was questioning the power, the psychiatric power, basically,

Speaker 2 I just

Speaker 2 like I just opened up to

Speaker 2 the possibility that not all was as it seemed. And then it was in that space that I found a book by a medical journalist named Robert Whitaker.
The book is called Anatomy of an Epidemic.

Speaker 2 And in a nutshell, he

Speaker 2 was curious about the fact that

Speaker 2 outcome, long-term outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much better

Speaker 2 in the so-called third world, in countries where we don't have, where they don't have these sophisticated medicines. And he was like intrigued by that.
Like, why are outcomes better

Speaker 2 in poor countries that don't have a lot of drugs? Because he had been under the assumption that these drugs are these great, amazing things. And so he

Speaker 2 did this deep dive investigation and basically

Speaker 2 posits this very compelling,

Speaker 2 makes this very compelling case that if you look at long-term data on psych drugs, on the whole, they are making us sicker, more disabled. And

Speaker 2 there I was on five psych drugs,

Speaker 2 previous 10 years of my life that I'd been this compliant patient, like progressively falling apart every month, month after month after month.

Speaker 2 I was physically sick, all these chronic health issues, no friends, couldn't work, suicidal all the time, totally financially dependent dependent on my family, like a fucking mess.

Speaker 2 And in that beautiful, terrifying moment of like starting this book, I realized like, holy shit, what if it's not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it's the treatment?

Speaker 1 It's coming from inside the house.

Speaker 1 That's like really,

Speaker 1 wow.

Speaker 2 And that was like the beginning of

Speaker 2 that set me on this path that I've been on ever since, where I just knew I had to find out who I would be off of these drugs. Like I had to find out.
And in the beginning, when I was still,

Speaker 2 like I said,

Speaker 2 I still believed I had bipolar disorder. I still believed in the chemical imbalance theory.
Like I wasn't even questioning any of that stuff yet, but I was just like, I want to find out what my.

Speaker 2 untreated bipolar state is like at least let me see maybe I could manage it you know without meds or you know so I started there

Speaker 2 but I quickly began to educate myself about the DSM, you know, this, this textbook that

Speaker 2 the entire psychiatric enterprise is built around. You know, oh, you have four out of seven of these symptoms, it means you have this.
Oh, you have three out of five of them, it means you have that.

Speaker 2 And of course, our insurance system is built around it for billing codes. It's what the whole entire psychiatric research enterprise has been built around.
Like

Speaker 2 it, this textbook that I had just assumed for all these years was this like rigorously researched, like scientific text.

Speaker 2 I quickly realized is like completely subjective, completely unscientific. And even the NIMH,

Speaker 2 you know, itself and like all of these kind of key opinion leaders in psychiatry admit this. This is not controversial to say.
I learned that very quickly.

Speaker 2 And that was just the first like onion layer of self-education that I basically just kept

Speaker 2 going deeper into. And I realized like every single fucking thing that I believed about myself, like through the most formative years of my life, about my suffering, about my mind, about

Speaker 2 everything

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 like a marketing trick.

Speaker 2 Like everything I thought I knew. And it was terrifying to face this.
Like my whole world fell apart. I had no idea who, who I was because all that I had been for so long was so-called mentally ill.

Speaker 2 And so, but I just was so determined to like figure it out.

Speaker 2 And thank God I had been born into a family who could provide for me and like literally put a roof over my head while I did because I, when I then came off of these drugs way too fast.

Speaker 2 And I want to make sure we like talk about this because

Speaker 2 I had no idea that all these drugs I'd been on for all of these years had completely changed my central nervous system and that my brain was physically dependent on them. You had no idea?

Speaker 1 No idea. So, the physicians who prescribed them never told you that.

Speaker 2 Never told me. Never told me.

Speaker 1 That's what I think.

Speaker 2 Well, what's wild, Tucker, is that it is not even, you know, in

Speaker 2 certain drug labels, acknowledge dependence, like benzodiazepines.

Speaker 2 Those drug labels will acknowledge dependence.

Speaker 1 You can die getting off them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can have seizures if you stop them abruptly.

Speaker 2 But a lot of drug labels say nothing about this. And

Speaker 2 the establishment

Speaker 2 authorities often do not acknowledge this, at least not for like all of the psych drugs. Benzos, maybe they do, but antidepressants, mood stabilizers,

Speaker 2 obviously the sleep aids, which are very similar chemically to benzos,

Speaker 2 stimulants, all of them are psychoactive chemicals that... you know, when you take them regularly for years, like are you are going to become dependent on them? And so, because I didn't know that,

Speaker 2 I didn't know that I needed to taper off really slowly. And by slow,

Speaker 2 I don't mean like a few weeks or a few months. Like, people who've been on these drugs for any length of time, especially like a decade or longer, often need years of tapering.
Years.

Speaker 2 I'm not even kidding you, Tucker, because the withdrawal symptoms can be so debilitating if they try going faster.

Speaker 2 And I feel like I've said the word insidious like 30 times in this interview, but so much of it is insidious.

Speaker 2 The insidious thing is that because our public does not understand how dependence-forming these drugs are, and because doctors don't realize it and are certainly not telling their patients this, when people come off their psych meds too quickly and they feel like shit, intense anxiety, insomnia, despair, panic, you know, paranoia, whatever ends up happening, they're told, oh, you're having a relapse of your illness.

Speaker 2 Like, see, this is why you need to stay on your meds. So it keeps people in this vicious cycle for literally decades because when they try to stop, they feel horrible.

Speaker 2 And then they use that as a reason to go back on.

Speaker 1 He's off his meds.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 He's off his meds.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And to return to the mass shooter thing for a minute, like, you know, this is just total speculation on my part.
But

Speaker 2 obviously, like, the narrative is often like, oh, these were mentally ill people who were untreated. That's why they committed these

Speaker 2 violence.

Speaker 2 I can't help but wonder. I mean, I think in the case of James Holmes, I know in his journals, I can't remember if I complained about being on psych meds and how they weird they made him feel.

Speaker 2 So it's like, did he stop them cold turkey? Because he was like, I don't like how I feel. I mean, I'm just speculating.
I'm just, I'm truly asking that question from a place of curiosity.

Speaker 2 But people assume if you're off your meds, like that's your illness, whatever you're doing is because you're mentally ill. It's never like, oh, because you're in acute withdrawal.

Speaker 2 And I think my hope is that, especially now with the growing awareness just more broadly in our society about the ways we've been betrayed by medical authorities, you know, I think more and more people,

Speaker 2 you know, the 66 million people on these drugs, more of them are going to realize they might want to pursue a different path for themselves.

Speaker 2 And my fear is that they won't know about dependence and how important it is to taper slowly. They'll come off too fast.

Speaker 2 And it will be like talk about a crisis. I mean, I have friends who, who came off like antidepressants, for example, basically in a couple of weeks because that's what they were told to do.

Speaker 2 They were bedridden. Like one friend I'm thinking of in particular, she had been on an antidepressant and a benzo, always taken as prescribed for work-related anxiety.

Speaker 2 She went to a detox facility because she wanted to come off of them. They ripped her off in two weeks.

Speaker 2 And she was bedridden for like two years because every time she stood up, she would have vertigo and she'd like fall over. She couldn't stand, let alone walk to her car, let alone drive.

Speaker 2 for like two years. She had to move in with her.
She was like 40 years old. She had to move in with her parents.
That's just one of like

Speaker 2 hundreds of thousands. Maybe that's like at least 100,000 stories online of people who

Speaker 2 didn't have this information from their doctors, came off too fast, often at their doctor's instruction because the doctors have no idea.

Speaker 2 You are taught how to put people on these drugs, not how to get them off.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 people often only figure this out after the fact when they're already destabilized in withdrawal, not knowing what the hell is happening to them, freaking out. And then they start Googling.

Speaker 2 And then they find this online community of like,

Speaker 2 at this point, like thousands of Facebook groups and online forums. They find our nonprofit, Inner Compass Initiative.
They start to learn about what they just did.

Speaker 2 And they're like, oh my God, I had no idea.

Speaker 2 Sometimes people recover from withdrawal within weeks or months. Sometimes it takes years.

Speaker 2 It took years for me, really. And because I had a family, again, who could provide for me, like I made it through.

Speaker 2 But I often think about how many people don't have the resources that I had access to. I'm like, I wouldn't have survived

Speaker 2 this if I didn't have a family who could literally provide for me because I could not function.

Speaker 2 And 66 million people are on this stuff. Like, it's this is a real crisis.
That's this is the real crisis here that we need to be talking about.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a

Speaker 1 horrifying story

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 how long did it take you to recover

Speaker 2 the first year I would say was like every day was hell like showering was a success like if I took a shower I'm like I had a really good day

Speaker 2 um I was living with my I ended up living with my aunt and uncle for almost a year they opened their home to me as I went on this journey.

Speaker 2 And, you know, everyone was scared because everyone in my family believed I had this serious brain disease and like someone with diabetes needs insulin.

Speaker 2 You know, I needed like that whole thing, like she could die. Like, you know,

Speaker 2 but my, God bless my aunt and uncle, they just let me be a mess.

Speaker 1 You have a very nice family. Just nice.
They sound like nice people.

Speaker 2 I'm, I'm really,

Speaker 2 really lucky. I mean,

Speaker 2 so many people

Speaker 2 who want, who would want the same things that I wanted, you know, with getting off these drugs, like do not have

Speaker 2 anything like a supportive family. I'm so lucky.

Speaker 2 I really would not be here.

Speaker 2 I would literally be dead. And so I lived with them for basically a year.
And I was super active in AA at that time because I had quit drinking.

Speaker 2 And thank God for AA. I mean, I went to a meeting every morning and every night.

Speaker 2 And I didn't even realize at the time that like most of my struggles were because I was in cold turkey withdrawal because I came off five drugs in six months, which is like cold turkey.

Speaker 2 Like I didn't know, I thought that was, I had,

Speaker 2 that would have shocked me if you've told me that was cold turkey. I'm like, what do you mean? It took half a year.

Speaker 2 And so I would just go to AA meetings because I was like so messed up. I was so paranoid and insecure.
And like I couldn't talk.

Speaker 2 I felt like I couldn't articulate myself. And I just had, I was such a mess.

Speaker 2 But I had a meeting every morning and every night, and like I didn't even realize it was withdrawal for a while, it didn't matter.

Speaker 2 Like, just being able to talk to other people about the most vulnerable, painful parts of my daily reality. Like, what a gift.
Thank I'm so grateful for AA.

Speaker 2 I would say around a year off, I started to feel less shitty.

Speaker 2 Like, I kind of like between years one and three,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 like progressively felt better, you know, physically, especially cognitively,

Speaker 2 emotionally. And by year three,

Speaker 2 I was, I, I, when I look back, I'm like, that was the year when I kind of like came alive again. And I would actually have these like,

Speaker 2 these are my fingers.

Speaker 2 I'm real. Like, I'm here.
Oh my God, that's the sun. That's the sun.
It feels warm on my cheek. Like, literally that level of like, I exist.
Like, it was like so profound. And I had, and

Speaker 2 I hadn't realized that I hadn't been exit. Like, I didn't know what I had been missing.
You know what I mean? It's like,

Speaker 2 because my whole adult life, I'd been under the influence of these drugs. So it took me a long time.
And what I will say is that very early on,

Speaker 2 I found my purpose though.

Speaker 2 So like, even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal, I started blogging about my experiences basically right after I, right at the end of finishing coming off the drugs, because I had reached out that author, that journalist who wrote that, Robert Whitaker, who wrote that book that had sparked my aha moment.

Speaker 2 I had reached out to him and had asked if I could write for his website.

Speaker 2 Because I was like, you know, I grew up psychiatriz. I have no idea who I am.
Can I write about what this whole thing has been like?

Speaker 2 And he said, sure. So I started blogging very early about what I was going through and began hearing from people

Speaker 2 like all over the world. This was 2010.
So this was like not a commonly talked about

Speaker 2 thing online. Like most people then were like, I love my meds.
I've embraced my diagnoses. And like here I was being like, I'm an ex-mental patient.
Like, what the fuck just happened back there?

Speaker 2 And so I just realized so early on, and God, I'm so grateful, like, what I went through actually has value.

Speaker 2 And, and if I take, it's not, it wasn't wasted time, wasn't fruitless suffering, meaningless suffering, like this meant something, this means something.

Speaker 2 And if I,

Speaker 2 if I put myself out there in the world, and the more open I am about it, like, the, the, the more,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 the more of a chance I'll have at like actually helping others. And so I, even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal for a while, like, I,

Speaker 2 I was a lot, I was living. I was, I was like connecting.
Um,

Speaker 2 and it was like, what a gift. I mean, at this point now, it's like thousands and thousands of people have either emailed me or have like, I've met them at conferences or,

Speaker 2 you know, to me, the, if,

Speaker 2 you know, like the one takeaway from my book, from my story that I want like every struggling person to leave with, if I could leave them with one thing, is like, your suffering means something.

Speaker 2 Like, it is so much more than just faulty brain pathology, which is bullshit, first of all, like not even true, but

Speaker 2 it's not wasted time. All is not lost.
Like, what you've been through might actually be the medicine that another person

Speaker 2 needs. And

Speaker 2 like, I just, I'm so grateful for all of it. I wouldn't change a minute of any of it because I'm just, this is my purpose.
Like, this is what I'm makes me cry.

Speaker 2 Like, this is what I'm here to do is just literally just talk about how hard it is to be alive. And, and, um,

Speaker 2 and, and just, you know, the power of store, the stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be human. Cause like, that's really all I've done.
I've just changed the story.

Speaker 2 I let go of this bullshit, medicalized, pharmaceuticalized story that I grew up believing in.

Speaker 2 And, um,

Speaker 2 and I'm like,

Speaker 2 kind of,

Speaker 2 I've found my way to an actually like human one. Like, life is hard.
Pain isn't something to run away from.

Speaker 2 The best way to find your way to peace of mind is to get out of yourself.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 and like

Speaker 2 mutual aid and and like the fellowship of

Speaker 2 other human beings is

Speaker 2 so simple and oftentimes like so powerful, like to help you kind of find your way through.

Speaker 1 Other people are the greatest gift. Let me ask you one final question.
So I think any person listening to this would conclude, you know, this is what it means to recover. This is victory.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, once was lost, now and found. I mean, this is like the greatest story arc.

Speaker 1 How many of your professional psychiatric caregivers have called you to say congratulations? I'm so glad you're well.

Speaker 2 None of them.

Speaker 1 Okay. So that, we're going to end on that, Laura Delano, because that just kind of tells the whole story right there.

Speaker 1 Because it's not like you're in hiding and any, you know, you have an unusual name. Anyone who treated you is probably aware of how you are now.

Speaker 1 And anyone who's not thrilled by that is like serving darkness. That's my view.
But I'm thrilled by it. So

Speaker 1 thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me, Tucker.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh. The best.

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