Speaker A
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. If something's an imbalance, what's balance? Is there any science behind that at all? No.
Laura Delano discusses how Big Pharma fueled the mental health crisis and shares her personal journey off psychiatric meds.
Key Takeaways
- The chemical imbalance theory of mental illness lacks scientific proof and is widely misused.
- Psychiatric medications are heavily prescribed but may cause long-term harm like PSSD.
- Personal recovery can involve stepping away from medication and professional dependency.
- There is significant stigma and resistance against questioning mainstream psychiatric treatments.
- True mental health should prioritize holistic well-being, independence, and human connection.
Summary
- Laura Delano challenges the chemical imbalance theory behind mental illness, calling it unproven and misleading.
- She highlights the widespread use of psychiatric medications in the US, with 66 million Americans on them as of 2022.
- Delano brings attention to PSSD (post SSRI sexual dysfunction), a serious side effect often ignored by the medical industry.
- She shares her personal story of growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, excelling academically but struggling internally.
- At 13, she experienced a dissociative out-of-body moment that led to emotional turmoil and self-harm behaviors.
- Her parents sought professional mental health help, reflecting common reliance on psychiatric treatment for struggling youth.
- Delano critiques the mental health system’s focus on medication and professional dependency over true healing and independence.
- She describes backlash from media and public for advocating for getting off psychiatric drugs and reclaiming personal agency.
- The conversation touches on societal fear, greed, and disconnection from emotional pain as barriers to alternative recovery paths.
- Delano emphasizes the need for health, independence, joy, connection, productivity, and creativity as true goals.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
It has never been proven. Most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances. 66 million Americans total on these according to the CDC in 2022. So, those numbers could well be higher. That's
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craziness. There's this condition called PSSD, post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Oh come on. There's a whole movement 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
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off or some people haven't regained it for years and so they're just dead.
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Yep. Okay. Really? And no one's gone to jail for this? [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] So, I read this piece in the New York Times about you that's like actually kind of hostile and the story seems to be that you were on psych meds for a lot
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of your young life and then you got off them. And that's bad. That's bad. You might lead people to do the same. You might lead them astray off psychiatric medication, out of therapy, and into like independent happy life. Why would anyone be mad at
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you for getting off psych drugs? It's a good question. Well yeah. I mean, I think I think really there's just so much fear and greed and disconnection from, you know, emotional pain that people hear a story of someone
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who's decided to let go of dependence on professionals and pills and institutions and they just can't fathom trying it for themselves because they've built their whole lives around this idea of being sick and needing treatment and needing medical expertise
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and institutional authorities to guide them. 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
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in the world. And it makes me feel sad. That 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 and yet somehow a lot
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of people out there think I'm insulting them or attacking them. It baffles me. It baffles me. It's just, and I understand everything that you have said. I mean the, and I think you've got a lot of detail on this, but the
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country is pretty much addicted to these drugs. Like a huge percentage of the population takes them, can't get off them, unclear if they're benefiting from them. So, I understand that you're poking at something that people rarely mention in public and that goes
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deep. On the other hand, I thought the goal was health and independence and joy and connection between people and productivity and creativity and it doesn't even seem like those are considered virtuous goals by the New
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York Times, which does kind of give me the creeps a little bit. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, it is dark. Yeah. And I don't know if you looked at the comments on that New York Times article or if you heard about the kerfuffle
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you know, 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
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how basically what a fascist I am for entertaining the idea that you can take your body and your well-being and your identity back from a very powerful industry that profits off of us being
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afraid of our suffering. It's, and I'm literally a fascist now. I've been called that because 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
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independence, and that makes you a fascist. Yeah, basically. So amazing. Okay. I just want, I just wanted to set the stage for your story. So you're from Connecticut. You come from an attack.
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We had dinner last night. I heard all of this. It's an amazing story. And but you wound up on psychiatric medications and it began this whole odyssey. Can you just tell us what happened to you? Sure.
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So, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut which is, you know, you picture the most stereotypical kind of upper middle class affluent New England town, and it's Greenwich. And I was the kind of kid who was good at
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school. So, I happened to know how to get A's on tests and memorize and regurgitate information well and kind of follow the instructions of adult authority figures. So, I was good at school. I was
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a good athlete, you know, on paper. I had it all together, you could say. But when I was 13, I ended up having this profound experience one night in front of the bathroom mirror as
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I was brushing my teeth 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 at assembly with the head mistress and I just started looking deeper and deeper into
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my eyes as I was thinking about all that I had on my plate. And I ended up having this profound out-of-body experience where I lost touch with space and time and everything went black around me. And I
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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? What is this girl doing looking at me? I just was totally
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out of reality. And when I came to the only conclusion I could draw 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 have it all
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together. But who was I really? What did I really care about? What did I want to do with my life? I didn't know the answer to that. And that terrified me.
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And so I ended up trying to repress what had happened and pretend it hadn't happened. 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
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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.
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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? And my poor parents were just shocked and stunned at what had happened to their eldest
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daughter seemingly overnight. She was this, you know, maniac basically. 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
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what they needed to help me. They needed to pay someone who'd studied about kids like me to help. So, they sent me to a therapist.
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Your parents are, I identify with the parent in this, you know, 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, very much so. They did what they thought would be the most helpful for me.
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They're the opposite of negligent. I guess that's what I want to say. Like they're engaged. Yeah. They did the best they could with the information that they had at their disposal, which was, you know,
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really all they saw as a resource was the mental health system. There weren't any visible, you know, support groups for parents of struggling teens.
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No one was talking about, my gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too? No, there was no one talked about this then. And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health profess...
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No one was talking about My gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too? No, there was no one talked about this then. And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health professional. And so and this woman was
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this therapist was a very kind woman. She had the best of intentions. But when I was sent to see her each week, to me at the time, I experienced it as this profound violation of of my very being.
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I I interpreted this as a sign that everyone around me thought I was defective. I was the problem. And I knew in my heart that the anger I felt and the despair I felt were actually really meaningful responses to the environment
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that I was growing up in. this like really highressured intense environment where you know it's just in the air itself that that if you want to feel good about yourself you have to excel and I knew that that was the problem not
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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 so I ended up you know doing what I you being sent to therapy
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each week I felt humiliated I felt ashamed 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 wasn't that
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long before the therapist ended up recommending to my parents that they sent me to a psychiatrist because I was you know, pretty extreme. My my difficulties were, you know, not it wasn't enough to just see a therapist.
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And so my parents took me to psychiatrist, my mom took me to my first appointment. And in that first session I was 14 by this time. In that first session, after sitting down with this woman, this stranger whom I'd never met
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before. I think she'd been given some information about me by my parents and that therapist, but I'd never met her. I I poured out all my pain to her and at the end of that session she said, "Have
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you heard of of something called bipolar disorder?" 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. And the despair and the injuring you're doing to
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yourself, these are symptoms of depression. And this is a condition that you'll have for the rest of your life.
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But don't worry, there are medications that will help you manage this. 14, she told you stuck with this for life. For life.
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For life. That's how it always is. Anytime you're given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, you know, the the baseline operating assumption is that this thing we call mental illness is an incurable condition that you treat and you manage.
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But that that's that forms the premise of the entire business model of the psychiatric industry is that these are incurable conditions that require treatment indefinitely. And there there I was hearing this message as a 14-year-old girl. I'm like, excuse my
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language. I'm like, who the [ __ ] does this woman think she is telling me this?
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Exactly. But that that defiance that I felt, you know, I I had no one I I knew I couldn't resist that if I resisted that would be used against me. So I just kind of went along with it. I resisted
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that. It's like you've been taken in by the Bulgarian border police in 1975. Resistance is feudal. Well, it totally is. Well, and and interestingly, just to like pan out for a moment to this whole broader mental health industry uh you know at scale that is
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when you many people who resist their diagnosis or who tell their doctors I don't think I'm sick or that's actually is used literally to reinforce just how sick you are you lack insight quote unquote in into your condition so soviet
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I mean so like listening to the patient is that's been taken out of the process it has well in the sense that of course the psychiatrist is listening for signs of symptoms. You know, okay I'm I'm listening past what they're
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saying so I can determine if this person is entering an a hypomomanic episode or her depression is worse worsening. But they're not listening to the patient.
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I'll speak for myself. My whole very well-meaning therapists and doctors over the years were not actually listening to me from a premise of of me having um of me knowing myself better than them, of me of me having wisdom, of me
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have of, you know, they they lacked a respect for my own ability to to kind of um define for myself what my reality meant. So it sounds like they went into the in to the sessions knowing what you
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were sick with and everything that you said was confirmation of what they already knew. Exactly. It's all filtered through this clinical lens of translating your your you know deep human experiences into this clinicalized language of symptom, illness, disease.
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And so they're just they're trained to to do that. 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. And I
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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. But okay, so you're 14 that imagine telling a 14-year-old you have a
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lifelong illness from which you will never recover that will define you going forward at 14 you're telling somebody that on the basis of what evidence? Like where did you catch this ill like in the ladies room in an airport? Like where
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did did they explain where you got this illness? It's a very good question Tucker, and it's a question that we should be asking all the time about literally every single psychiatric diagnosis that is ever given to any human being because the entire model is
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built on subjectivity. 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
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they're grumpy, you know, it's going to infuse how they see their their patients. There are no objective biological tests. There are no there are no brain scans lab tests that you can do to say oh this is proof that you have
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this you know chemical imbalance in your brain or this you know faulty biioarker. There's no there's no objective measurable pathology of any kind in in any of these conditions literally all of them including the so-called serious ones like bipolar and schizophrenia is
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completely based on observation. 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 this is going to be with you forever kind of incumbent on them to
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explain where you got this thing its nature like what exactly are they talking about? Did anybody ever explain any of that? No. And in large part because I never asked. I mean of course I didn't ask as a kid. I I I was just so
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flumxed 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? It didn't. But honestly, I'm sorry, Lord, to say you have terminal
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cancer. Um, 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. Like and but the entire paradigm is that for every single person who has ever been
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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, you know, personal orientation.
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It's it's the entire thing. And I did not realize this because it never occurred to me to step back and ask these questions. And I think most maybe I shouldn't I shouldn't presume most but many people don't either because the the
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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 continued through high school playing the performance game knowing it was [ __ ] but not knowing how to get
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out of it. So, I ended up getting into Harvard and trying to tell myself, you know, maybe I'm wrong and I will actually feel okay in my skin once I get to Harvard and I'll just be able to say
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to myself like, you were crazy thinking this performance thing is [ __ ] It Harvard is amazing and now you're happy.
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So, of course, I didn't feel that way when I got there. And I was I instantly spun out. I 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. I still
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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. And that pain Well, you just won like the number
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one merit badge in the world, too. You get into Plus, you're playing at the highest level in sports. Yep. Yeah. I was playing on the squash team. I had on paper I had made it. I had arrived, you
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know, the the the pinnacle of what you strive for as a young person with in the kind of elite education industry. Like I won the jackpot. And yet I wanted to kill myself basically every day and saw no point to any of it. And so as I spun
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out with each, you know, through 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. And I was I was just a mess and
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getting myself into all kinds of dangerous impulsive, you know, really dark situations. 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
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this illness called bipolar disorder." I was like "Maybe she's right. Like, why do I feel this way? Why can't I get my [ __ ] together? Why am I such a mess?
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Maybe I really am sick." And so, it was at that point that I willingly voluntarily went back to psychiatry. I found a psychiatrist at MLAN hospital which of course you know is considered the the kind of the go the the golden
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psychiatric institution one of the oldest in the country this this most famous most famous yep Sylvia Pla anne Ston Ray Charles Oh yeah they all wrote poems and fiction about their experiences there and and so here I was
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now so privileged and blessed to be entering this hallowed psychiatric ground. I was just so excited. Did it work for Sylvia Pla or Robert LOL?
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I mean, we mean, but like it and and a lot of people say that, you know, from what I recall, and someone should, you know, confirm my facts, but from what I remember, um, years ago reading about Sylvia, I I guess she eventually ended
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up getting electroshock, which, by the way, is still alive and well. 100,000 people a year get electroshock in the US. MLAN hospital on its website a couple years ago was like bragging about how great its ECT center is. I I think
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Sylvia, you know, what ECT did to her brain and her creativity. I've heard that that played a part in why she eventually just couldn't be alive anymore because of of the adverse effects of of psychiatric treatment. So I knew none of this then. I was just
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desperate for relief. 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. And and that desperation drives you to just accept whatever
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promise is is offered to you because you just you're too tired of trying anymore yourself. Just someone take over here.
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Someone fix me. someone take this pain away. And that's the place that I got to that freshman year. And I think because of that, it it impaired any critical thinking capacities that I might have otherwise had to ask those questions of
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like, how do you know I have an incurable brain disease? Or can you give 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
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didn't care. I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted the pain to stop. Yes.
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Imagine if there was a file containing your name, your credit score, location medical history, even your online behavior. You probably wouldn't want other people to see that cuz it's not their business. Not because you're doing anything wrong, but because that's your
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extra four months for free when you use our link. Scan the QR code on the screen now or go to [Music] expressvpn.com/tucker and get four extra months of ExpressVPN. It's expressvpn.com/tucker. So at but at the same time you're going to class at
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Harvard, you're playing on the squash team like you're continuing to achieve kind of. I mean I 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
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you know, upper echelons of performance that I'd that I'd been used to leading up to then, which I think also was part of why I was just so desperate. Did when did they start putting you on drugs at
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MLAN? Right. Right in that first appointment with my new doctor. And I was put well I I had actually been put on psych drugs a week or two prior to that meeting my new psychiatrist at MLAN because I had come out as a debutant in
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a couple of debutant balls on around Christmas time which the good wasp girl that that I was like wasn't an option to not to not do and I had actually on winter vacation you know in this literal wedding dress this fancy white wedding
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dress. There I was up on stage like coked out of my mind completely trashed cuz that I had to be to survive doing such a thing. To be fair, everybody is at those things. Basic basically. Sorry excuse me. And you know in my long white
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gloves and I'm up on stage and I'm like I am literally a robot performing. I I just that was my breaking point on on Christmas vacation where I just was like I either need to kill myself right now
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or get help. And so so that that was I went to my parents. I said, "Please help me." I hadn't asked for for this kind of help from them in years because of how betrayed I had felt by them sending me
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to the therapist years earlier, but now I was at a breaking point. And so that was was I was put on a couple meds on vacation and then when I went back to school and started seeing the psychiatrist at MLAN, yeah, he continued
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me on those and he began to add new ones and that began what ended up being a decade of just the the polyfarm pharmacy highway, you could say. And I became basically a professional psychiatric patient. So what did they put you on?
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Um, so I I was from the beginning I was always on an anti-depressant of some kind, a mood stabilizer. Um, and then with the passage of time, um, antisycchotics were added in, benzo were added in. I was on
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ambient for a long time too. But um it was it was the kind of typical bi 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
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almost felt like the I had this impression that 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. I I the more meds I was on, the
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more cared for I felt and the 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 um on, you know, I I
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just my the more treatment I got um and the more compliant I was and the more differential I was to psychiatric authority, the more my life fell apart during the So you said you got meds in your f your first
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appointment. Did anyone ever say to you you know, you you obviously feel deeply unsettled and unhappy, at times suicidal. 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. Maybe you should
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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. Like it does seem just intuitive that if someone has pain, it's worth thinking about the cause of the
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pain. If I put my hand on a stove and it hurts, I don't take meds for that. I'm like, take my hand off the freaking stove. Did anyone ever address it in that way? Well, they they they can't
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really because this is the the bind of this medical model that the mental health industry is built on. So, so you're told you have a mental illness quote unquote, and that it's in your brain that that there's some kind of
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usually you're it's the chemical imbalance story, which by the way, 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 the first person I knew started taking
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an SSRI, Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wartzell. 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. And the question I always had is well, okay, if something's an imbalance
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what's balance? Is there a baseline? 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?
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No. 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 [ __ ] it's two, you know, two inches down. I got to
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pour another cord in. Is there anything like that with psychiatric assessment?" No. Okay. Nothing. and and you 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
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theory has long been debunked and there was an umbrella review published in molecular psychiatry two years ago that just kind of put the the final nail in the coffin on it.
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Um we it has been it has never been proven and that's been known all along.
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And yet if you survey American in 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. So So but that's like that's like utterly
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fake. Utterly fake because we can't define balance, therefore we can't define imbalance. Correct. Exactly. And and even if you know this the this is this medicalized framework that we use to to think about ourselves you know which has such a monopoly on how we make
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sense of what it means to be human now. I mean suffering anxiety um madness of all kinds. I mean you're most people view that as illness quote unquote like that medical framework is so ubiquitous and what it what it does
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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 because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry and you're just oh it's
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too bad you you had the bad you know genetic card and you have this chemical imbalance or 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
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circumstances. It's like it's one or the other. And so the the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient and I the experiences of so many of the more than 60 million adults who
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are on these drugs right now and more than 6 million children is that wait there's 60 million American adults and 6 million 66 million Americans total on these drugs according to the CDC in 2022. So those numbers could well be
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higher by now. That's craziness. Yeah. And we are told that that we're we're 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. We're told, you
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know, this is this terrible crisis and most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment.
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But no, if you look at the numbers you're like um basically everyone is like 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. The
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problem perhaps is is the mental health treatment. 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
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really treating it. I'm just giving like a pallet. So I give you a painkiller because you've got a burn on your hand.
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But if I never say, "How'd you burn your hand?" Well, I put it on the stove. I do it every morning. So I I think a a clinician who cared about the patient would say, "How about don't put your
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hand on the stove." Like there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life. I mean there in in in in therapy, I would of course talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but it was
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all the 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. And so any conversations
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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
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relationship or this kind of hard thing happened to you. We would talk about those things but not because we thought that was working through those would be what helped me resolve my my challenges. it was the meds that were
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going to do that. That that was, you know, what I was what I learned to believe. Um, and I and I think that's the insidious that's the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm is that it basically teaches you to let go of any
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sense of responsibility or agency over your life because you're just at the mercy of faulty brain chemistry. And so like, what's the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life because I'm still going to have this
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brain disease. So like why does it really a disease they can't define whose origin they don't even ask about um a a brain disease that's like in no scientific sense a disease literally is it contagious um wow that's
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wow that's even crazier than I speaking of crazy that's even crazier than I realized so okay so can we just go if you don't mind please since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs can you just go through in order what those
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drugs are generally and what the effects on a person are. So the different drug classes are anti-depressants of course.
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So you have the you know Prozac Effecter Symbalta Selexa Lexapro uh the mood stabilizers which many many of which are actually anti-convulsants used for epilepsy but they've over you know over the decades when when they were studying them they noticed that the you
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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. So so most mood stabilizers are actually anticulsants. So, those would be, you
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know lamed depth is classed as a mood stabilizer. It's literally a neurotoxin that, you know, it was banned in in the United States until um the late the early '7s.
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It didn't get approved until the early '7s 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.
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And I could talk a lot about lithium. I have a whole chapter on it in my book because of all the drugs that I lithium salts it used to be called. I think um they Yeah, they I think they that's one
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of the ways it's been described. Old old drug. It's been it's been around for a long time in 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. Yeah.
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It's been on a long time. Yeah. And and if you actually I I have I go I do a deep dive in in the chapter on it in my book because the story to this very day that most people are given about lithium
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is that it is the most you know it's been around the longest. It has this in really reliable evidence base because of how long how long it's been in use for.
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It's the gold standard. If if you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, I mean, they are the most shoddy unscientific completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine. You're just shocked when you and and this is
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the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market. 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
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studies section to see what trials this the approval was based on. Usually, it 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.
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Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts. This to determine safety and efficacy. I don't know 10 years. 6 to 8 weeks.
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Wow. Some of them last a week. Some of them last a day. Two maybe two studies.
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That's so these are not longitudinal as we say. There is zero evidence base for long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs. Zero. And there is also zero evidence base for polyarm pharmacy.
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These drugs have never been studied in combination with each other and yet most of us go on to take multiple of them for for years. Nor is the the mechanism of their effectiveness understood. Right.
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So you said for example mood stabilizers were used in on animals in anti- you know to 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
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brain. Correct. Yeah. Usually you'll see a line like that in the drug like the mechanism of action is not yet understood or something you know and it's it's it's I mean it is such a this is so reckless. it it's we are all
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guinea pigs in a massive experiment here and this unfortunately is the case outside of the psychiatric drug context too and and you know when you think about the hubris and the um you know we know so little about the
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human brain already as it is it's so mysterious to us how how it works and to think that you know we're just we're going to put in this psychoactive this synthetic psychoactive chemical, we're going to put it into your body. It's
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going to course through your blood through your bloodstream potentially for the rest of your life. To 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, you know, it
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it's it's it's one of the most horrible um crises of our time. I think it's it because to return to your question you know there besides the anti-depressants and the mood stabilizers they're the antiscychotics you know respols I prea
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geodon there are of course the anti-anxiety drugs the bzzoazipines clonopin valium adavan and there are the stimulants the so-called ADHD drugs like rolin aderall and then the sleep aids like ambient and lunesta so those are the all the that's the family the psychiatric
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drug family can we go okay so can we start at the beginning if you don't mind so the um anti-depressants so that would include SSRIs correct okay so you were put on that immediately what is the effect of
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that on you well it's such a tricky it's it's such a complicated question to answer because in ret 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
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subtle it was in some cases gradual so when I look back now at how my life the the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down I can see that they they you know they altered my my body physically so and not just anti-dep
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I mean I couldn't answer what anti-depressants specifically did so for me what the drugs did generally whichever ones did what, I couldn't say.
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But they interfered with my basic bodily functions. So, I pretty quickly began to have digestive issues. You know, you don't get told that it's like 90 to 95% of your serotonin receptors are in your gut. Picture the house of your dreams.
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cell phone bill in half for real. Go to puretalk.com/talker to support veterans and to switch to America's company wireless from pure talk. So the the point of these drugs is to regulate or affect or disrupt but change your
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serotonin levels. That's the crude way that we are that we understand them so far. So they obviously act so an SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So it's it's named as a serotonin drug so that it you know it primarily acts on the serotonin
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system. It acts on many other systems too because it's all interconnected. The human body cannot be compartmentalized but the serotonin system besides being you know largely responsible for your how your gut functions. It also, you know, muscle function. Um, I mean
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they're like basic primal, if I'm remembering correctly, I think it's the serotonin system that regulates like temp temperature um, uh, vomiting reflex. Like, it's really primal. This this it's not just about happy chemicals, right? And so when you're taking an SSRI or an SNRI
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any of these serotonin drugs, you're not just it's not just acting on the brain it's acting on the whole body. And so a lot of people, myself included, will get diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome or, you know, they'll have other kinds
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of digestive issues while they're on these drugs. 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 um medical treatments generally. At
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least I wasn't. And so, as my physical issues accumulated, I just assumed I was just you know, because I'm so mentally ill I'm not taking good care of myself, I'm eating shitty food, you know, I your fault. Exactly. Exactly. And it besides
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digestive issues um the you know the antiscychotics and um mood stabilizers cause serious weight gain. My weight fluctuated 70 lbs during my my mental patient career. I I can I mean I it's just I literally looked like a different person. I I should have
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brought an old picture of me. I mean you wouldn't have recognized me during my peak psychopatient era.
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They caused, you know, I had chronic aches and pains and my my, you know, I I had skin issues and my nails would flake off, my hair would fall out. All those all these subtle changes that hap that
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just grew over time, I never linked it to the to the drugs. And then and then in terms of their effects on me, you know, emotionally and mentally, a lot of people talk about anti-depressants especially as having a numbing effect. And and and
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which by the way can be helpful. I mean it's important to make clear here, my orientation to this is not anti-sych drug. I think, you know, we've been altering ourselves as human beings since the dawn of time with psychoactive
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substances. 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 were told about what they are and what they do. And if you're being told, you know, you have a
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chemical imbalance, Tucker, that's why you feel down in the dumps. Here's some Prozac. 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
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choice. You are not making you are co 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. They're based they're
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approved on the basis of very short-term trials. Um long-term outcomes are quite poor. If you actually look at the data that does exist, your serotonin system you know, controls a lot of really important functions, you know, if you
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walk them through if you are walked through all of that and then you still decide, you know what, 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.
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Like I am aware of the risks. 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 like good for you. That's informed consent is what
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you're describing. Exactly. And that is not if you are being told this is an anti-depressant medication. You're not making an informed choice because that is marketing language. This is not a drug that's acting against depression like targeting. Oh, let's get in there
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and there's where the depression lives and now we're going to target it. That's [ __ ] 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
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anyone is making a truly informed choice. So my sense of SSRI is that in some people they offer relief, which is not always good. I felt that way about vodka, you know, and it turns out it was causing a lot of
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problems that I thought it was solving. 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 I think it
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can es 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 that's going to help you a lot or might help you a lot and so
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when used in in acute situations or for a short term of short period of time I do think they can feel really helpful to many people the I I think a lot of this is is is around the long-term use of them
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which they were never designed for. Well, so but that's um I mean that's that's a 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
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your bloodstream 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 benzo are so terrifying.
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But but I guess my question is like does it you get the feeling that people on some of the anti-depressants SSRIs like seem kind of like dead inside. Did you feel that? I totally did, but I attributed it to how sick I was. Oh, I
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felt dead. I felt disconnected. I felt um I felt I felt like I was trapped in this kind of sludgy morass of of that was separating me from from the world around me. I I just and I I really truly believed that
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that was me and my own faulty biology. And so it's so insidious like you I think it's it's a psychiatrist named Peter Braggen um calls it medication spellbinding which I think is a really compelling phrase because the the very parts of you
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that are required to step back and think critically about what's happening to you are impaired by the drugs. And so you're in this for me like decade and a half almost like intoxication state, right?
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And 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. Like, let's try this new drug or let's up your dose or
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let's switch you to that." It's never like, "Let's all just pause for a moment here and step back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is is wrong and and you don't need any of this. No one is doing
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that, of course." And so as I went deeper into psychiatric patient and those physical issues worsened, my cognitive function worsened, you know memory pro, oh my gosh, when you're I mean, I don't know which drugs were the the biggest culprits, probably the
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benzo and the antiscychotics, but my capacity to remember things, to read, to absorb information, and actually comprehend information, I just dissipated over the years. And which was really hard for me as someone who had, you know, so much of
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my sense of self, however fake it felt was rooted in my intellect. And so here I was just feeling like um this mushy you know, just totally incapacitated mind that couldn't engage with the world anymore and let alone
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like feel creative and curious. And I was just I was just like a zombie basically. Was killing your life force.
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It sounds like it totally was. And that idea of a life force like to me this whole thing at the heart of this crisis that we are in because it is a crisis.
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It's just not a mental health crisis. It's a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis is what I call it. The word iatrogenic means treatment induced or doctor induced harm. I believe that this huge these huge numbers of people who who are in so much pain, a huge driving
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force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more more suffering. And it does and more violence, more violence, more disconnect, mo more polarization when you're under the influence of these drugs for years and years and years.
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Like you said, you do I won't speak for everyone. And I'll speak for myself and the thousands of fellows who whom I have known over all these years. You lose touch with with your human spirit with you know your your sense of aliveness in
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the world your ability to feel connected to to the sunlight on your cheek to the you know the sweet child on the sidewalk to to God to to serenity. you you lose the ability to feel connected to any of
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that and you're thinking the whole time it's you and you're just getting sicker. And when you 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
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realizing that this is happening to them because of this medication spellbinding phenomenon. 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. I'm not trying to say
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it's all psych drugs, but I think it's a big piece here of of why we're all so disconnected. Well, it's I mean, the main takeaway just listening to this is that it changes something essential about people. This is not on the
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margins. This is like the deepest thing in you changes. So the measure if you think the measure of happiness if is your relationships which I think is fair how how are your relationships? Oh my gosh. I mean I
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chuckle because I'm like first of all I'm like well what relationships really? But then of course I I did have I had boyfriends. I had you know people I would socialize with.
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It was all by the time I I graduated, 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. Um
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the fact that I made it through to this day, I don't really remember anything I learned there. I just was so foggy from it all. But by the time I left, I had no friends. I I had a tendency to be in I
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was a serial monogous, 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 and it was just I dated guys who were as lost as I was. So suffice to say it
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didn't look pretty. Um, that was my when when I would sometimes, you know, muster the energy to go out and socialize, like I'd had to I'd have to do drugs and get trashed because that was the only way
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that I felt alive. And of course, it was synthetic. So, and my family, you know they were my family hung in there with me through the whole the whole that whole thing that whole thing.
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Um, but of course they didn't have access to the real me 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.
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I would rely on them and I would come home and and they would take take care of me and provide for me as I, you know, bumbled along through my 20s like a total mess.
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Like I I could barely hold. They sound like really kind people. they the patience and the persistence that they all had and you know my my younger sisters and my parents you know it was not easy for them and it was not always
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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 so so understandably that created all kinds of challenges but they never gave up on me and I would
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just I'd come home whenever I couldn't function anymore and but I didn't feel I didn't feel connected to them, to myself, to anything. And again, I believed it was me. Oh, that's so that's like hell. You're describing hell.
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Dissociated from everybody, everything and from God. Do you think it's possible to have a relationship with God while on psych meds? It wasn't for me. I mean I I I wouldn't I wouldn't say that in a sweeping generalization, but it wasn't
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for you. It wasn't for me, for sure. For sure. And I think the other piece of this that is so important, especially because of how many of us are psychiatrists as kids, is that I had no I had no sexuality. I had no um kind
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of like erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer as a friend, as a appreciator of beauty.
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I had none of that. And I of course didn't realize what I was missing because I'd been psychiatized basically at the onset of puberty.
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And when you don't have access to that facet of who you are, it it makes for a very lonely ex alienating existence. And you know, I'm I'm so glad that when I got myself out of this mess years later, I
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regained my sexuality with because a lot of people like there's a whole movement now of it's called the there's this condition called PSSD, post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Oh, come on. There's a whole movement. They're incredibly well organized on X doing really important
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public awareness work around how many people 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 anti-depressant they lose it. Some some people haven't regained it for years and
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and so they're just dead. Yep. Okay. Really? And no one's gone to jail for this. No, because this is the it's the lack of accountability. And of course this is the whole pharmaceutical industry, not just psychiatry. It's designed in such a way
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that no one the most that they're held accountable is, you know, the occasional $3 billion fine for criminal activities.
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So, I guess we could say, but at least the suicide rate's going down and people are happier. I mean, you would think but as as of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes. I think it
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was 50,000 people killed themselves. So like that's kind of the bottom line. I don't 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
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rises and the suicide rate rises, you know, we can argue about cause and effect, but they're not working. I mean can't I mean, in what sense are they working if more people are killing themselves? Mhm. And what's wild
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Tucker? Am I missing something? I don't I don't want to be a Philistine here. I want to be like sensitive to the science. You're seeing it clear as day.
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And what's wild is that in these drug labels for many many years in the adverse effects section you will see anti-depressants have been documented to increase rates or increase suicidal and homicidal ideation even in some of some of the drug labels. So this isn't like
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we're just realizing that these drugs can actually make people worse. It's been in the drug labels the whole time.
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Well, I know from firsthand experience. So I knew nothing about this. I don't take any of that crap. I've always hated shrinks my whole life. Um, never been but no one I know who's been to one has gotten better, so that's why I don't
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like them. But anyway, 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 cuz there are a lot of shootings, right? And in
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every case you look at, the person's like just full of psychiatric meds. And so I brought this up a couple of times in public and whoa, you get attacked for even raising the question like is there a connection between SSRI and mass
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shootings? Like why is that a crazy question? Even the question and people what is that? It's it's it's you would think that people would of course want to have that question asked and answered and it and if they had if they had true faith
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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 cause cause violence. But of
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course, it's the opposite. There's it's you know, and I I know I know a friend of mine who's who's a professor at one point tried to foyer the medical records of various mass shooters and and couldn't get access. I
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mean I don't you're not allowed to know. Yeah. And and you know it's I don't I can't remember when um Coline was it like 98 or it was 97 I think something.
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And and as you said the '9s were so Prozac came to market in the late 80s.
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The '9s were declared the decade of the brain by our US government and and the '9s began the the basically the the ubiquitization of of psychiatric drugs.
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the normalization of them, the the kind of infusion of them into every facet of our lives and and 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
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health awareness month, we're in May actually Tucker, we're in May. May is mental health awareness month. Um these are all industry funded efforts to basically um infuse the cultural discourse around emotional pain with with this message that with this actually very just
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righteous message that you should never feel alone with your suffering. You should feel like you can talk about your troubles. That that is a really important message that that but that has been exploited by powerful corporations to basically
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now mean there's no shame in getting mental health treatment. And so they've taken this important message and and perverted it to basically link anyone who is calling into question psychiatric drugs with someone who doesn't care about suffering. I mean, it's amazing the the
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the number of times that I I share my story, and I'm literally just talking about my story. I'm not saying anything about anyone else. you know, the my the story of how I eventually left this all behind. People hear that as me denying
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the reality of suffering. I mean, you're you're you know, this woman doesn't think people are struggling out there.
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I'm like, where did I ever say that? It's actually the opposite. I I think there's I am first of all, I struggle a lot in my life. You know, I I'm by no means a happy, put together, mentally
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healthy person all the time. But how are you conflating me questioning the psychiatric drug paradigm with me questioning the reality of people suffering? Like it's if you think about it, it's just these industries have been so effective in conflating care with
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treatment. 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.
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policygenius.com/tucker. Does anyone doubt, I mean, just being honest, that if you got rid of all drugs, legal and illegal, listen and illicit, that the mental health crisis would would basically disappear.
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I mean, I'm sure it's, you know, it's it's if people stayed sober, I 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.
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And I know a lot of people in that exact position. Once you just like stop addling yourself with crap, you return to equilibrium. I don't know that. Yeah. Well, I think I think you the way I would think about it for
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myself at least is that when I let go of this medicalized way of understanding myself, you know, translating all my struggles into symptoms to take to a doctor, etc., etc. And when I came off the drugs and when I also then began to
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educate myself about like the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize the body and all these problematic ways. And so I I just kind of reconceptualized how I think about well-being and and the things I put in
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my body or don't put in my body. I I to your point I definitely have found my way to an equil a kind of equilibrium that equips me to face life's challenges which are inevitable. I mean it's I
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think it's a part of the human condition to suffer to struggle to to have dark nights of the soul and I think historically these were episodic experiences that yes that would you know some something hard happened in your
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life or even something not visible but you just are in a tough chapter you you kind of you just find your way through it. Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes a year
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but you move through it. I think that used to be prior to the rise of this medicalized mental health industry, that used to be the baseline operating assumption. And then since the rise of psychiatric drugs and since the rise of
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the chemical imbalance story and this incurable brain disease story, we've just forgotten that the struggles that emerge in life are responses to life and not permanent. if if you if you orient yourself to them in that way and
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actually um and actually believe and and tell yourself like this is a hard chapter that I'm in, but it's a chapter. It's not my whole story. And that's what I was taught by psychiatry is that my whole story, the rest of the story of my
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life is that I'm just so-called mentally ill needing treatment and that's all I have. They do that with alcohol, too. I can just I can speak from personal experience. Well, you're not I will always be an alcoholic. No, I'm not an
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alcoholic. I drank too much. Alcoholic I guess, but I don't drink anymore. So like, it's not the center of my life anymore. That's so I I have I don't I mean, I think that's a fair look, I'm not judging anybody. I I love AA. I
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don't go, but I love it. I I don't want to be judgmental, but like telling people they're weak and pathetic and will always be dependent on you is like it's a red flag for me. I'm so I'm so
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with you. 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
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med regimen, including like horse tranquilizer doses of clonopin is not a recipe for for functioning. And so I did eventually decide to quit drinking and was really active in the 12step world for a few years. And I hold a soft spot
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for it in my heart, but I came to the same conclusion for myself is, you know I had spent the most formative years of my life letting psychiatry define who I was. And then I moved into the 12step
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world and I took on a new label alcoholic, and I began to defer my authority to, you know, a higher power.
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And I do believe in God and I do I am connected to to this kind of like broader oneness of of of life around me.
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But I eventually realized that I have to stop turning it over. I have to stop seeking outside guidance, authority, expertise answers. And I need to start looking within myself and actually take responsibility for my life and my decisions and my
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relationships. And I I I realized like I have to stop labeling myself as anything really and and kind of buying into any ideology of any kind that tells me I have a problem it has the solution for.
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Now I'm like, you know, I in even in the wellness alternative health world, you you there are a lot of problems that you get sold into thinking you have that their products can help you help you solve. And I'm at the point where I'm
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like I I don't want to look out there anymore for answers to to anything anything internal to me. That's just me.
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So, what was the experience of therapy like? So, you're you're on all these drugs. How many drugs were you on at the peak? Five. It's unbelievable. Um but concurrently, you're you're sitting through therapy a lot. How often? Twice
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a week usually. Whoa. For how long? An hour each time. No, but for over how many years? Um, the whole I mean the whole time I was from 18 to 27 consistently in therapy. Sometimes I would enroll in you know programs too if
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I was so I was I was I ended up hospitalizing going to the hospital four times during those years and then afterwards you know you when you're discharged from a psych ward you're enrolled in some kind of like step down
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program you know an intensive outpatient program for you know where every day from 9 to5 for like a few weeks you go to the psych hospital and then you go home and then you downgrade to, you know, a lesser intensive program where
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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, man, that's a lot of therapy.
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Obviously, I guess I can skip to the end to the punch line. It didn't work cuz you hospitalized four times. So, it's like not working. But what that's nine years of therapy, you know, consistently full-time almost. Like, what was that
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like? What do you talk about? Well, that's that's the I I I won't speak for all therapists or the therapy industry as a whole. You know, some of my good friends are therapists and they they work with people in very different ways than how I
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was in therapy. But in my experience and I do think in the experience of a lot of people because because our society has lost so many because you there's so few spaces where you can turn to other human beings
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to neighbors to friends to colleagues to talk about how hard it is to be alive.
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Sometimes therapy becomes like the one place you have to feel seen and heard and understood. And so what happened to for me is that because I had no other place to where I felt like I could be open.
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Um, I I kind of I developed this like dependence, you could say, on my weekly therapy sessions and and this, you know, I just I kind of came to see my therapist as really like my substitute friends sometimes my substitute mother or some
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you know, they they kind of replaced what would have been authentic relationships had I not grown up in therapy. 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
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problems to talk about because otherwise you don't even that's just fascinating what you just said. So um you're basically paying people to be in relationship with you but because you were doing that and you were steered there. I mean this wasn't like a choice
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that you initially made obviously but but because you did that you actually neglected your real relationships. Is that what exactly? And what's what's so really nefarious about the whole thing is that you don't only neglect what it could have been authentic
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relationships. You actually for for me at least I actually came to dismiss the idea of like just a friendship. Like they don't understand mental illness.
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Like I need doctors, you know, how could a friend help me? Like I have a brain disease, you know? It it it that's so dark. It's like really I don't know if that happened. I don't know what percentage of psych patients that
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happens to but it happened to me and I saw it in you know the culture of the psych ward the culture of these all these programs that I was in.
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We were the only people we hung out with, fellow patients. 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
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the psychologists and social workers and doctors walking around with their badges and and you're kind of over in the corner like we're the crazy like [ __ ] up patients over here like we're not like them. I mean, there's this whole
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twisted almost like romanticized culture of psych patient where heroin addicts are like this, too.
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It's it's so gosh, it it 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 could never like we don't belong there.
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Like, we belong here on the on the hospital grounds. It's like I I used to feel really proud of like how crazy I was. I believe that it's so I mean I chuckle about it now, but I you know
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it's of course I I grieve too that that was my pride. My source of pride was what a good p successful psych patient I was. It's so deep and so sick. You see it with homeless drug addicts. There's a
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kind of pride like there's a there's a tribe. We support each other. We're, you know, we're sharing our misery, but there's a kind of feeling like we're in the elite, you know, we're junkies. And it's the same, it's the same kind of
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death worship. Yeah. Well, and and like we it it that word tribal, I mean, it because it exploits this like deep Yes.
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primal instinct that we have as tribal beings. It exploits that whereas, you know, once in our preodern pre-industrialized age, your tribe would have been your village, your local community. And of course people in that community individuals would have had
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crises and struggles but you all banded together and you had multigenerations of families. So you know grandparents had important roles grandchildren and the home the home was a place where the man and the woman had a kind of symbiosis
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and and mutual an interdependence and and I'm not trying to romanticize. I I literally have a family like that. So I 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
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live. Yeah. And and I think our our modern world does make it really hard. I think, you know, this isn't for me about individuals or in, you know, particular families being, you know, weak or lazy or bad. I think just we're in this toxic
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stew of of a culture in which we're, you know, the from the food we're so many of us put into our bodies to the screens that we're in front of all day to the just gross kind of consumerrist messaging
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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, you know, develop your own tribe, whether it's your family or your neighborhood.
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Like I think it's really important to say like this is not about individuals like [ __ ] up. 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
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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 not at all. So
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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 was in a dysfunctional relationship
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with. 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 that how hard it was. And um I talked about how suicidal I was. I was just
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suicide was like a constant companion of mine through my 20s until I did eventually actually it's an an important um part of my story to to bring up like the therapy the the meds you know by the time I was
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25 all I had was my relationship to my to the mental health professionals in my life to the the people being paid to be there for me and the pills that I would pick up at at the pharmacy every month.
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That was all I had. And I life had deteriorated to such a degree that I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't work. I had no friends. And I I was told like the message that I received was
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you know, unfortunately your bipolar disorder has progressed to such a degree that you're now treatment resistant.
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Come on. Come on. Yeah. Yep. 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." Literally. Literally. And and so you know this this this phrase treatment
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resistance like the craziest story I've ever heard. It's so crazy but it's a brilliant it's a brilliant business model because of course you know if you feel if you feel better after starting a psych drug the credit goes to the drug
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of course. See it's helped you if you don't feel better or if you feel worse.
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Yeah. It's never the drug. It's it's you and just how how extra defective you are and what has now happened. And Tucker you're not going to believe this. It's like I'm so laugh. This is just so bonkers. It did. It's totally bonkers.
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And what I what I would predict and because I'm seeing from my book, I I I did a lot of I woven a lot of research into my book and I I way more than I originally intended and my editor kept
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wanting more, which which is great. And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at the current landscape of psychiatry and like where is it heading because obviously these this drug-based paradigm is failing. So like what's next for them
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because you know the drug companies are not making are not focusing relatively much at all on on psych drugs anymore. They've kind of moved on. They've recognized this isn't where the big bucks are. And so I was just curious. I was like, "So where is
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it heading?" And what this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this treatment resistance concept. It's building a new a new chapter of medical devices literally inserting electrodes into the brain that are wired to it's called deep brain stimulation where you
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you if you have treatment resistant depression because your meds haven't helped you. Don't worry Tucker. Now you just go in for a simple procedure. We're just going to open up your chest cavity insert a heart, a pacemaker like device
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there, and 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. Is this is
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this you making this up or is this real? This is literal literally happening. Um besides deep brain stimulation, there's Do you think there's anybody who would allow a doctor to implant something in his brain? Oh, it it's happening. It's I
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deep DBS is not um wide under a wide by remote control. So, you're giving somebody else the power to control your physically control your brain. Yep. With electricity. You hear that clicking in the background? That's the sound of
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seriousness. That is the sound of the new Alp machined steel travel tin and it's made right here in Montana by our friends at Machining USA. It's milled from solid metal with the world's absolute best tactile feedback retention mechanism. It's totally real. It feels
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like closing the door on a well-built truck. It comes in cream, gray, green and black. You could drive over this in your truck and it would be totally fine.
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Drop in your bag, throw in the concrete doesn't matter. It'll still be there. This holds your Alp.
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[Music] And um there was I have read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who've had these these procedures and then afterwards like the battery dies and then and you can't get the divi the device out because it's
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like too complicated to remove it. So there's just like a dead, you know matchbox size thing that's like protruding from your chest under your skin.
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It's DBS is the probably the least common one right now. The the big push right now is for what's called TMS transranial magnetic stimulation, which is also for treatment resistant depression. So, you know there's a wide array of options for
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people. Don't despair. And you basically sit under this device that shoots like very powerful magnetic, you know, um, currents whatever you call, energy through your skull. And it's being marketed as a non-drug, you know, safe alternative because it's just magnets. Um, and don't
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forget ECT, electroshock, which is alive and well, and that's long been a treatment resistant depression treatment. Yeah, I had a relative who did it and then committed suicide. So yeah, it's uh been around for a long time. Yeah.
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Um uh 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. They will they will accept any treatment treatment
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because they're panicked and they're dying. So, I get it. And they see no other options 100%. I'm not judging anybody who submits to shock treatments or deep brain like whatever the hell that was. Um, but this is just the but
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does anybody ever say, you know, you really need to go outside more often get a dog, just make a date to sleep with your spouse every other day, get on your knees and pray to God. Let's just start there. Like maybe take your shoes
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off on the lawn occasionally. Did does any does any Cuz that would be my program just saying um and I I think that works. Did Did anybody ever say that to you? No. And if if like if you
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had met me 16 years ago and said that to me, I would have been like, "Fuck you Tucker. How dare you insult me? Do you not understand how seriously sick I am?
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You're telling me to get some sunlight?" And I think a lot of people feel that way. It's like it's invalid. It feels invalid. They're going to really go after you. I just had this insight because you're too articulate. You're
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your story is too great cuz you actually recovered from these tortures and um you're a real threat. I I just want to say that. I just want to be on the record saying that. So just a fact like
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that New York Times story that I thought kind of slammed you in a subtle way.
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That's just the beginning. Yeah. Did you There was a Washington Post book review of my book that was wild. I mean, I she was so I feel for her. I I feel for all the people who are just outraged by my story
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because I I know that at at the heart they're afraid. I know it's fear. And so I don't mean this in a you know, I mean it from a heartfelt place.
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She was so so set off by my story and her review. 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.
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It wasn't even really about my book this book review. And you know, I was ready. I've been ready. I I take it as a sign that I'm doing something right.
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That that these large corporate media outlets are really pissed that you got better. You got better. They hate that.
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And to be clear, and I 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 you can ask my husband like do not
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catch me on a day where I have you know I'm sleepd deprived and have been in front of my screen too much and I'm about to get my period and I feel really stressed like I got yelling children in
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the background. Oh. Oh yeah. I mean I I 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 I and I've always been a big feeler from you know I
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was a little girl like I have this vivid memory of one day I was outside in the sun in the summer and I saw this worm this dead dried out worm like shiny as it had been dehydrated by the sun and I
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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 gu my mother's garden and I just I couldn't handle facing the the the death of this little be. I mean
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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. Um I feel a lot of grief about a lot of things. Like I could feel myself right now. Like I could start
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crying just thinking about all the kids right now who are getting sent to their first psychiatrist. It's like a you if I sat down right now in front of a psychiatrist, they'd be like, "Oh gosh Laura, you're a little emotionally late
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pile. Maybe, you know, we might want to consider some, you know, symbalta or whatever." Like they they wouldn't be be able to compute like crying is actually a sign of being alive and being in touch with life. It's not a sign of pathology.
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And so I'm 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 like you so happy now and everything's great. I'm like I am a dark, twisted, [ __ ] up
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person. Like basically on a daily basis but you know what? I'm not afraid of it anymore. Like that's the big difference.
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Psychiatry and the mental health industry taught me to be terrified of my pain and my mind. And that's been the most liberating thing. But what's interesting is how terrified they are of healing.
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I mean, there's this amazing scene in the New Testament. 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." And he puts mud in his eyes and
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washes it off in a pool. And he's he can seem I mean, amazing. 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. Then they
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interrogate his parents. And their only interest is not they were infuriated by the fact he was healed.
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infuriated and they're trying to find Jesus to kill him. Wow. 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. It's like
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I don't know, Laura Delo maybe has emotional days, but like happily married, kids, like functional, like enjoying life, loving life, loving people. That's like such a massive win.
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You know what I mean? But they're like mad about it. I don't know. Yeah. No.
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And 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 the way that you are meant to be of service to the world. I mean, when you
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find access when when you find your way to those states, then 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 to
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being here. And I think that message is such a threat not just to the mental health industry but to so many some so much of consumerism more broadly if if you know once you realize a the answers and and and you know
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expertise 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, I find ways to get out of self. I mean
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that's like my go-to when I'm getting a little too occupied with myself, which a long career as a therapy patient primes you to to be. I'm like, "Okay, what's the fast fastest way I can forget myself?" Usually, it's like playing with
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my stepson or my son. Um or it's, you know, reaching back out to someone who's called me in in in a struggle in, you know, a tough spot. When you realize like you can do that anytime you want
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like get out of yourself. Then you're like, why would I go pay pay all these professionals to like listen to me ramble on about myself every week for five? So that was the thing that I was really struck by. Almost 5 hour dinner
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last night and I asked you all about your life and your story and your family and all this stuff. And so we talked about your life but a lot but you did not talk about yourself in a way you
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were at all. It was like and that was really striking to me because I do think the hallmark of a a therapy uh person is narcissism. I'm sorry to say that. I think they're really hurting people including people I love who go to
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therapy whatever. Um, so I don't want to be mean at all but I do think that narcissism is death.
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And I feel like it encourages it. Do you think that? 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 um to my
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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 right it's like yoga kind of yeah and so I think there some
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modalities that I'm sure there are million great kinds of therapy but the traditional like let's talk about your mother kind of thing I totally agree with you it it teaches you to naval gaze it teaches you that whatever like
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fleeting emotion or thought is in your head is like so important most important thing in the world nothing else matters but your own upset And and if you think about it, if you scale outwards and imagine that at
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scale, it's like what do you get? 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 and I my
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you know unscientific theory that I just based on my own experience and what I've seen in so many people is like I I can't help but wonder how much of that is is because a lot of these people grew up
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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 I am outraged like you hurt my feelings like now let's cancel you or you know I think the therapeutic element
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here is potentially a significant 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 and I don't want to be more precise because I don't want
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to race or class part of it, but it it it's very noticeable. You know, it's people in expensive therapy programs who are mad at their husbands and like talking a lot about themselves. Those the ones who scream at me. I've just noticed. Yeah.
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Yeah. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. Yeah. And it's so when you to to me the one of the great tragedies of this is that when you you know the because there are so few visible spaces in our culture right now where you can
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get help that isn't a paid service. Right. Exactly. You know people just they they just don't even realize that's an option in the first place.
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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. Um that that people don't even realize the power and capacity they have to to be with someone
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in great distress. like you know because of the work that I do and the work that my husband does like we we are often like our home for example we have a spare bedroom and the way we live our lives is
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like we have a spare bedroom like if you are in a crisis 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 you know hang out with our yell our
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yelling children and just be with us in our lives. And you know you're making me emotional. Well, that's like such a And you know, of course, we are in a position where we have a house with a extra room. Like I'm I'm mindful
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that so much of my story and I try to talk about this all the time like class economic factors are a huge are a huge factor here. So, I acknowledge that not everyone can do this if they wanted to, but just as an
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example, there's someone we know in our neighborhood who just I'll I'll anonymize the descriptors just to protect them. They're young. They got psychiatrist as a teen. Bad things had happened to them. They ended up instead of those bad things being addressed
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they ended up getting sent to a psychiatrist and diagnosed and medicated. Now they're in their early 20s and they really haven't yet figured out how to be an adult in the world because they're just emerging from the psychiatric
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nightmare so to speak. So this person called me up a couple months ago and I have to stop saying they. She was on her way she was on her way to the hospital. She's like I I love your
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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 to use a plural pronoun for for a second. I'm like, it's still anonymous. I love that. Thank you.
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I hate the word they. Not just because of the trans thing, but just Yeah. I couldn't do it. And I think it's it's still it's still it's still anonymous enough. There are a lot of women in in my neighborhood. 51% of the population.
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And she was like, "I'm on my way to the hospital. I think I think I'm going to die. I think I'm having a heart attack." And so I instantly was like "I think she's having a panic attack for sure."
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And and 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. And she's like, and
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I know what's going to happen. They're just going to admit me. And and I was like, and then Yeah. And then you'll be impatient. And then and I just walked her through just to help her remember like how this goes. Like you don't just
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go into the ER and then someone makes you a cup of tea and comforts you and then sends you on your way. like boarding sometimes for days on a psych ward with a security guard watching you and then you're carted off to some psych
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ward and who knows how long you'll be there and then you know it just disrupts like potentially months of your life.
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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." And she came over and just like the loveliest young woman who I see I get so emotional. I see so
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much of me in her. And she's like super lost right now. She's just trying to emerge from this dark dark experience of being a psych patient.
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And so she comes into her house and the first thing she says like, "Do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself?" I'm like "Girl, the [ __ ] does like I'm like me?
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Of course we have. Of course I 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?" And so what I think and I could feel in
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her instantly like a shift and her poor parent was out in the driveway, had been in driving her and I he was like a deer in headlights. I was like we're good. You go on. Like, we're good.
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I'll touch base with you later. And what she felt in me was that I wasn't afraid.
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And and instantly she I could feel her be like, "Oh." And I was like "Come on let's go eat." And we just sat down at the table. Our yelling children or like you know, being wild men. And we didn't
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we didn't over dramatize what she was in. We just like had a regular dinner together. And I could just feel her energetically like settling in, opening up. And she ended up staying with us for a week staying sleeping in our room. Like we
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hadn't planned on it. 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.
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We weren't afraid of it. We listen. We we we didn't make a huge deal out of it.
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We just like kind of brought her into our life and went on walks and we talked about stuff and she did need to talk a lot about stuff. There was stuff to work through, but it was that simple. And
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when I, you know, I 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.
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Human connection, love. Yeah. No, it's very possible. I mean, I'm with you. Possible thing. It's possible, but but again, like our social order is set up in such a way where it feels impossible for so many. Well, then commit the
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revolutionary act of loving someone one-on-one, non-judgmentally, bring them into your home, have dinner with them make them sit there, your kids cry.
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Like, that is the answer to everything actually. Yeah. And it costs no money. Yep. It it pays the college um the college tuition of no children. It's like just built on empathy. It's it's support built on empathy, not profit. And that's I think
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part of why a lot of people are pissed at me right now is that the the nonprofit that I started, Innercompass Initiative, that my husband Cooper now runs um our mission is to help people make more informed choices about all of this
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stuff. So like everything that you weren't told by your doctor, we have it available for free on our website. We teach you how to read a drug label. We walk you through like how these drugs are researched and brought to market.
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The history of the DSM, you know psychiatry so-called bible of disorders how unscientific it is. Like it's literally based on voting. You vote disorders in and out based on, you know the opinions of these the committee members, most many of whom have drug
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company money. So, we we provide all of that for free. But really the most 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
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like aa like that that that 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 and and service. And to me, that's the
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biggest threat to the mental health industry is when enough people realize 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 when you when you band together and you realize
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like we can help each other through dark nights of the soul. Like think about how much how how many services and prescriptions and facilities will be no longer needed. Um and yeah, the fact that that's a radical concept and a dangerous
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one. You're not a doctor. I mean, the number of times people are like, "You should be sued. You're practicing medical advice." I'm like, how is speaking about my own experiences um practicing unsolicited medical advice or whatever it is they say? It's just
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it's wild how dehumanized we've all been by these industries that that convince us we don't have the power to be with our pain, to be with each other in pain.
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Uh so I was really moved by that. I will say like emotionally moved by that and I a couple wise people in my life have convinced me of something in the last year or so which is stop being shocked
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by evil that you see in the world that's the status quo. It's always been that way. 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
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like no 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. So, uh, I believe that.
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I've come to believe that. And I was just I was absolutely thrilled um and moved by the love that you showed to the your neighbor who's having a panic attack. It's like if everybody did that once a week, like we would we'd be like
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living in the kingdom of God. I mean that's like Anyway, that's my view. Um so but I just want to you've been very nice about psychiatrists and you gave them uh the benefit of the doubt that these are
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people of goodwill and I love to hear you do that and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. However, I I maybe I think you're being a little generous.
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Like how can they keep doing something that's not working? And why is it that I'm sure they're great psychiatrists but every I've known a number of psychiatrists and they're the craziest people I've ever met in my life with the
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most screwed up personal lives. Like they have no standing to give other people life advice. Like what? So I don't know. Am I being too mean? I mean I think you're asking an important question. And I think, you know, to the question of why
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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 on a quest to understand yourself and and because the only visible place where not the
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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
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this or not. I do think maybe that's why you're pulled to this field. I get it.
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Okay, that's not a bad reason. And it's not it's not a justification or an excuse for them, but I I do think a lot of people come to this profession from a place of true originally at least like true curiosity
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and and openness and desire to help. Exactly. Exactly. I had problems. I want to help other people problems. I I think that's Well, you clearly feel that way in your own life. So, that's a good thing. I guess what I'm saying is you
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want wise people, compassionate empathetic people who really are putting others at the center of their lives.
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That's the profile of the of the healer. And I there are some exceptions. Anna at at Stanford is a wonderful person psychiatrist. But, um there she is right there on the cover. Is she really there on the bottom? H she's she is a huge
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exception to everything I'm saying. But um but in general like you don't feel a lot of wisdom coming off these people.
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And my what I think is part of why that ends up happening is that the the indoctrination that young medical students because I think this this goes beyond just psychiatry to much of kind of alipathic medicine where where doctor young doctors or you know
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young medical school students are you know in in year one for example I think to my understanding at the at least pre-COVID maybe things have changed with co but the beginning of your first year you're given your cadaavver and I I can't remember who
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where I read this but I read it many years ago from from someone who was writing critically about 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 and then the first
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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. I think that's a um it's really
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it's like a degradation ritual that that you are put through so that you can separate yourself from this fellow human and it becomes a specimen. It becomes an object an it. And so I think this phenomenon happens across medicine
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where 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 you know they are trained to not
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emote. They are train. 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 and opening yourself up and being vulnerable? Like you're meant
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to be closed off. Who came up with that idea? I don't know. I mean, I don't know enough about weep over your children.
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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.
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I 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 feasible to cross. So, let's go back to psychiatry. You know, if you're as a psychiatrist, let's say you work
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for 40 years, so you cross paths with thousands and thousands of people. You don't have the bandwidth to fully emote and and be open and be vulnerable. You have to to survive that. I mean my view is that and and knowing many mental
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health professionals like you either if if you are if you stay in touch 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 disconnect and and come to view your
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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 like quit or have a breakdown or like you it's I have to imagine that it
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is not 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 I almost like I feel for the spot that I do too.
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I just but there's an irreconcilable problem at the core of it which is you can't heal people without loving them.
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Period. you can't actually make the best decision for somebody else unless you love that person. 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 and like
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there's a lot of evidence we're destroying people and we're continuing to do it. So, like what does that tell you? They don't love those people.
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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 you
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can't they're in congress with each other. And so if what you're saying is true, which which I believe, you know what does that mean for the legitimacy of the kind of foundations of this massive like mega billion dollar
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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 all the industries that supply hospitals with food. And I mean
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when you think about how much money is made off of commodifying the care of suffering people and medicalizing that suffering um, you know, it's we're in quite a a dilemma here. And this isn't me saying like blow up the mental health industry.
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Like, it's obviously it exists. It's not going away tomorrow. But I do think like my view is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is helping people who in their heart feel that this isn't
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right for them. They like if if you feel helped by your meds, you love your psychiatrist, 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
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answer? Like is this really helping me? Is there something different, something more? Like if something in you is calling you to that question like those are the people who who I want to who I want to reach who I want to connect with
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and I think slowly over time the more of us 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
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evolution here. It's not going to change overnight, but when enough people with each passing decade re actually meet their neighbors, like go literally knock on the doors of their neighbors with a pot of soup saying like, "Hi, we've
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lived next to each other for 5 years." Like, I'm 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
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fantasies is that the three streets so we live on a in a grid and the street next to us on either side like you know I've thought often about making a flyer putting it in the mailbox of every single person and
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being like let's all get together and meet let's all share our stories with each other figure out who has what tools that we exchange and borrow, figure out who has extra bedrooms in case, you know, if your kid is in a crisis and you need a
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break, come on over here, you know, to really get that grassroots about it. Like this, it might sound crazy to you but I'm like, imagine if every town in every city across the country, like enough people realize how much power
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they have, lived normal lives like people have always lived, how we used to pre pre-industrial revolution, right? So um I think most people I'm definitely in the category would trade life expectancy for that. It's like oh it's been
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modernity has been such a huge win. Antibiotics I'm not against antibiotics. I'm against you know I'm for long life expectancy but like you also have to acknowledge what was lost. Yeah. Well I know life expectancy is dropping. Well
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I'm aware. I'm highly aware of that. Um okay. So I got two more big questions for you. The first is how did you go from being like damaged to the point of attempting suicide repeatedly like the most damaged he can be and still be
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alive to being someone with I can say having interviewed thousands of people a person of unusual wisdom truly unusual wisdom. How how did that happen? Like what was the moment where you set upon the path of liberation?
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Well, I think I think so. My my turning point when I realized like this this industry doesn't have my answers. Um happened when I was 27. It's 2010.
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Um, I was I you know just months of just unfolding dysfunction and craziness and um and I found myself in a substance abuse day program because I had decided to quit drinking specifically because I had been convinced that maybe the reason why all
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these meds weren't helping me was because I was getting shitfaced every night and if I So the booze is getting in the way of the pills. Yeah. Yeah. I mean they were making rather than ra I mean which was true. Yes. This is true.
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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.
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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, I heard I heard this message from a mental
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health worker about maybe try not drinking. And 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.
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If I stop drinking my super treatment resistant bipolar disorder, like maybe now it will be treated. So I was in this substance abuse day program. I was living with my aunt and uncle who had generously offered up their home to
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me and the psychopharmarmacologist on my like you know five person treatment team um kind of caught wind that I was like having a hard time and maybe becoming suicidal which which I was. And he he was like, "You know what, Laura, why
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don't you get a take a break? Like, why don't you go over to the short-term unit and just, you know, so you can feel safe?" And and I was like "You're right. I wanted to go. I loved I was so
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afraid of myself that I loved going on boards because it was the only place where I felt safe for myself." So, I it I was like into it. I loved it. So, I was a great idea. I just want to go home
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first. Let me get my belongings. It's not fun going onto a locked word 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
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"Well, you're suicidal right now, so I have to take you directly there. I can't let you leave." And I was like "I just told you I want to go. Like, I'm coming back. I really mean it." And I meant
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that. I was. I like, "I'm sorry." And I something in me it kind of like really outrage 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
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started to get more angry. He ended up calling security 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.
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Well, this progressed quickly, didn't it? Oh my gosh, in a matter of, you know, 15 minutes. 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
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this good little mental patient for so many years, doing everything my doctor said, always saying yes, taking my meds as prescribed, like so diligent and good at what I was doing as a patient. And now here I was
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non-compliant. And and that recognition that my psychiatrist had the power to strip me of my civil liberties and incarcerate me on a unit, stripping me of my right to fresh air and freedom dislodged this like deep deep faith that I had always had. Not all I
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mean not at the very beginning but from age 18 on that I had had in this system.
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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. Um, and then after I had been discharged from that what would be my last hospitalization, um, I slept through a
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therapy appointment because I was so tranquilized by that drug and my therapist called the cops to do a wellness check on me, which I talk about in the book. um those three experiences with the uh the the basically the the power that
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psychiatry has to force you to do things you don't want to do 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 so I was
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like really [ __ ] miserable because I just like just stopped I removed the one thing that I for relief without doing any work on myself. So I was really really miserable. But in that space opened up this new curiosity
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like 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? What would my personality be like? How would I think?
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What would I care about? 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, I just like I just opened up to the the possibility that not all was
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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.
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And in a nutshell he was curious about the fact that outcome long-term outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much better in the you know so-called third world and countries where we don't have where they don't have these
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sophisticated medicines. And he was like intrigued by that, like why are outcomes better 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
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he did this deep dive investigation and basically posits this very compelling um 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 there I was
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on five sight drugs previous 10 years of my life that I'd been this compliant patient like progressively falling apart every month month after month after month. I was physically sick, all these chronic health issues, no friends, couldn't work, suicidal all the time, totally
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financially dependent on my family, like a [ __ ] mess. And in that beautiful terrifying moment of like starting this book, I realized like, holy [ __ ] what if it's not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it's the treatment?
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It's coming from inside the house. That's like really wow. And that was like the beginning of of 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
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these drugs. Like I had to find out. And in the beginning when I was still like I I you know I still believed I had bipolar disorder. I still believed in the chemical imbalance theory. Like I wasn't even questioning any of that
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stuff yet. But I was just like I want to find out what my untreated bipolar state is. was like at least let me see maybe I could manage it you know without meds or you know so I started
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there but I quickly began to educate myself about the DSM you know this this textbook that the entire psychiatric enterprise is built around you know oh you have four out of seven of these symptoms it means you have this or you
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have three out of five of them means you have that 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 it this textbook that
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I had just assumed for all these years was this like rigorously researched like scientific text I quickly realized is like completely subjective completely unscientific and even the NIMH you know itself and like all of these kind of key opinion leaders in
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psychiatry admit this this is not controversial to say I learned that very quickly and that was just the first like onion layer of self-education that I basically just kept going deeper into and I realized like every single [ __ ]
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thing that I believed about myself like through the most formative years of my life about my suffering about my mind about everything was was like a marketing trick like everything I thought I knew and it was terrifying to
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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. And so, but I just was so determined to like figure it out. And
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then 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. And I want to
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make sure we like talk about this because 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 and that my brain was physically dependent on them. You had no
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idea? No idea. They So the physicians who prescribed them never told you that. Never told me. Never told be arrested.
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That's what I think. Well, what's wild Tucker, is that it is not even, you know, in certain certain drug labels acknowledge dependence, like benzoazipines. Those drug labels will acknowledge dependence. You can die getting off them. Yeah. You can have
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seizures if you stop them abruptly. Um, but a lot of drug labels say nothing about this. And the establishment kind of authorities often do not acknowledge this at least not for like all of the psych drugs. Benzo maybe they do but
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anti-depressants, mood stabilizers um you know obviously the sleep sleep aids which are very similar chemically to benzo. um stimulants all of them are psychoactive chemicals that you know when you take them regularly for years like are you are going to become
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dependent on them and so because I didn't know that I didn't know that I needed to taper off really slowly and by slow I don't mean like a few weeks or a few months like people who've been on
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these drugs for any length of time especially like a decade or longer often They need years of tapering. Years. I'm not even kidding you, Tucker. Because the withdrawal symptoms can be so debilitating if if they try going faster. And the in and the I feel like
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I've said the word insidious like 30 times in this interview, but so much of it is insidious. 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
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their patients this. When people come off their psych meds too quickly and they feel like [ __ ] intense anxiety insomnia, despair, panic, you know paranoia, whatever ends up happening they're told, "Oh, you're having a relapse of your illness." It's like
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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 and then they use that as a reason to go back on. Yeah. He's off his
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meds. I mean, exactly. He's off his meds. Exactly. And to return to the mass shooter thing for a minute, like you know, this is just total speculation on my part but obviously like the the narrative is often like, oh, these were mentally ill
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people who were untreated. That's why they committed these this violence. I can't help but wonder. I mean, I think in the case of James Holmes, I know in his journals, I can't if I he complained about being on
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segments and how they weird they made him feel. 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 I'm just speculating. I'm just I'm truly asking that question from a place of
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curiosity. 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.
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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 of, you know, the 66 million
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people on these drugs, more of them are going to realize they might want to pursue a different path for themselves. And my fear is that they won't know about dependence and how important it is to taper slowly. They'll come off too
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fast and it will be like talk about a crisis. I mean I have friends who who came off like anti-depressants for example basically in a couple of weeks because that's what they were told to do. They were bedridden. Like one friend
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I'm thinking of in particular, she had been on an anti-depressant and a benzo always taken as prescribed for workrelated anxiety. She went to a detox facility cuz she wanted to come off of them. They ripped her off in 2 weeks and
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she was bedridden for like 2 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 for like 2 years. She had to move in with her she
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was like 40 40 years old. She had to like move in with her parents. That's just one of like hundreds of thousands of maybe that's like at least 100 thousand stories online of people who didn't have this information from
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their doctors came off too fast often at their doctor's instruction because the doctors have no idea. You are taught how to put people on these drugs not how to get them off. And so people often only figure this out
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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, and then they find this online community of like at this point like thousands of Facebook groups and online
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forums. They find our nonprofit Intercompass Initiative. They start to learn about what they just did and they're like "Oh my god, I had no idea." Sometimes people recover from withdrawal within weeks or months. Sometimes it takes years. It took years for me
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really. And because I had a family again who could provide for me, like I made it through. 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
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survived this if I didn't have a family who could literally provide for me because I could not function. and 66 million people are on this stuff. Like it's this is a real crisis. That's this is the real crisis
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here that we need to be talking about. Oh, that's a it's a horrifying story.
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Um, how long did it take you to recover? 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. Um, I was
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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. And you know, everyone was scared because everyone in my family believed I had this serious brain
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disease and like someone with diabetes needs insulin, you know, I need like that whole thing like she could die like, you know, but my God bless my aunt and uncle, they just let me be a mess.
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You have a very nice family. Just they sound like nice people. I'm I'm really really lucky. I mean, so many people who want who would want the same things that I wanted, you know, with with getting off these drugs like do not
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have anything like a supportive family. I'm so lucky. I would I really would not be here. I I would literally I would literally be dead. And so I lived with them for basically a year. And I was super active in in AA at that time
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because I had quit drinking. And thank God for AA. I mean I went to a meeting every morning and every night, and I didn't even realize at the time that like most of my struggles were because I was in cold
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turkey withdrawal because I came off five drugs in 6 months, which is like cold turkey. Like I had no I thought that was I had that would have shocked me if you told me that was cold turkey.
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I'm like, what do you mean? It took half a year. And so I would just go to AA meetings cuz I was like so messed up. I was so paranoid and insecure and like I couldn't talk. I I felt like I couldn't
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articulate myself and I just had I was such a mess. But I had a a meeting every morning and every night and like I didn't even realize it was withdrawal for a while. It didn't matter. Like just being able to talk to other people about
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the most vulnerable, painful parts of my daily reality. Like what a gift. I think I'm so grateful for AA. At a I would say around a year off, I started to feel less shitty. Like I kind of like between
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years 1 and three, I I like progressively felt better, you know physically especially cognitively, emotionally. And by year three, 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
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actually have these like these are my fingers. Like 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 that level of like I exist. Like it was like
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so profound. And I and I hadn't realized that I hadn't been exist. like I didn't know what I had been missing. You know what I mean? It's like cuz my whole adult life I'd been on under the influence of these drugs. So
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it took me a long time. And what I will say is that very early on I found my purpose though. So, like even though I was super [ __ ] up in withdrawal, I started blogging about my experiences basically right after I
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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. I had reached out to him and had asked if I could
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write for his website because I was like, you know, I I grew up psychiatrist. I have no idea who I am.
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Can I write about what this whole thing has been like? And he said, "Sure." So I started blogging very early about what I was going through and began hearing from people like all over the world.
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This was 2010, so this was like not a commonly talked about thing online. Like mo most people then were like, "I love my meds. I've embraced my diagnosis." And like here I was being like, "I'm an ex-mental patient." Like what the [ __ ]
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just happened back there? And so I just realized so early on and God I'm so grateful like how what I went through actually has value and and if I take it's not it wasn't wasted time wasn't fruitless suffering meaningless suffering like
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this meant something this means something and if I if I put myself out there in the world and the more open I am about it like the the the more um the more of a chance I'll have at
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like actually helping others. And so I even though I was super [ __ ] up in withdrawal for a while, like I I was a lot I was living I was I was like connecting um and it was like what a
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gift. I mean at this point now it's like thousands and thousands of people have either emailed me or like I've met them at conferences or you know to me that if you know like the one takeaway from my book from my
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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 like it is so much more than just faulty brain pathology which is [ __ ] first of all
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like not even true but it's not wasted time. All is not lost. Like what you've been through might actually be the medicine that another person needs and like I just I I'm so grateful for all of it. I wouldn't change a minute of
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any of it because I'm just this is my purpose. It's like this is what I'm makes me cry like this is what I'm here to do is just literally just talk about how hard it is to be alive and and
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um and and just you know the power of sto the stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be human cuz like that's really all I've done. I've just changed the story. I let go of this
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[ __ ] medicalized pharmaceuticalized story that I grew up believing in and um and I'm like and kind of I've found my way to an actually like human one like life is hard. Pain isn't something to run away
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from. The best way to find your way to peace of mind is to get out of yourself. Um and and like mutual aid and and like the fellowship of other human beings is so simple and oftentimes like so
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powerful like to to help you kind of find your way through other people are the greatest gift. Let me ask you one final question. So I I think any person listening to this would conclude you know this is what it means to recover.
Speaker A
This is victory like you know once was lost now found. I mean, this is like the greatest story arc. How many of your professional psychiatric caregivers have called you to say congratulations? I'm so glad you're well. None of them. Okay.
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So, that um we're going to end on that Laura Delano, cuz that just kind of tells the whole story right there because it's not like you're in hiding and any, you know, you have an unusual name. Anyone who treated you is probably
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aware of how you are now. And anyone who's not thrilled by that is like serving darkness. That's my view.
Speaker A
But I'm thrilled by it. So, thank thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me, Tucker. Oh my gosh, the [Music] best. So, it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. On one level that's not surprising. That's what they
Speaker A
do. But on another level, it's shocking. With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics with the wars we're on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided
Speaker A
you should have less information rather than more. And that is totally wrong. It's immoral. What can you do about it?
Speaker A
Well, we could whine about it. That's a waste of time. We're not in charge of Google. Or we could find a way around it. A way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive. The way to do
Speaker A
that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel. Subscribe. Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video. That way, you'll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information. So
Speaker A
we hope that you'll do
Topics:Laura DelanoBig Pharmamental health crisischemical imbalance mythpsychiatric medicationPSSDmental illnesspsych medsmental health systemTucker Carlson
