The Mental Health Crisis Is Not What We Think It Is With Laura Delano

There is DEFINITELY a mental health crisis in the U.S. right now. But it’s not about a lack of access to treatment or meds. Nearly one in four adults is on psychiatric meds, and nearly one in ten children is, as well. The crisis has to do with med-induced harm, according to Laura Delano, the author of “Unshrunk”. And Laura speaks from her own first-hand experience with the American mental health industry. Since her early teen years, she has been on countless meds, including Seroquel, Prozac, Effexor, Provigil, Ambien, and Klonopin, all without any improvement in her worsening symptoms.

Today, she describes her own mental health journey, offers insights about what sparked her questioning of the system, and why she’s concluded that we would do well to question the nature of the crisis and to get curious about how to promote wellbeing with alternatives to psychiatric drugs.

Visit Laura’s website at lauradelano.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Laura Delano.

There is a mental health crisis in the United States, but it is not about insufficient access to treatment for the mentally ill. More people are on psychiatric drugs right now than ever before. Nearly 1 in 4 adults is on them, and as many as 1 in 10 children. What is the actual mental health crisis about? This is episode 562, and our guest is Laura Delano. Laura is the author of Unshrunk. She’s also the Founder of the Inner Compass Initiative and a leading voice in the movement to offer patients an alternative to the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry.

Laura suggests that our crisis has to do with medication-induced harm. How could she dare to think that the meds we’re using to treat mental illness could be harming more than helping? It’s because Laura has firsthand knowledge and experience of the industry since she spent fourteen years as a psychiatric patient. At various times, she was on various drugs like Ambien, Klonopin, Seroquel, and more. It was a prescription cascade that did no help in improving her worsening symptoms.

Laura even went through private therapy, group therapy, and all kinds of treatments with no healing in sight. She was even labeled treatment-resistant at one point. In this episode, Laura describes her own journey, what sparked her questioning the system in the first place, why she’s convinced that we should re-examine our understanding of the crisis at hand, and how to promote wellbeing with alternatives to psychiatric medication.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you that censorship is real. You can have a direct line of communication with the Weston A. Price Foundation by joining our email list. You’ll get action alerts for important topics and issues in your area related to food, freedom, upcoming events, and more. Simply go to The Weston A. Price Foundation and click on the button on our homepage to sign up. We are so happy that we’re going to stay connected. You’ll get exactly what you want from our email list.

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Welcome to the show, Laura.

It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Looking Back To Laura’s Psychiatric Journey

I read your book, Unshrunk, and it blew me away. All that you went through for so many years on psychiatric meds, diagnosed with various disorders. I want us to revisit some of that, if it’s okay with you, starting with when you were a young girl with anger outbursts and behavior shifts that led to your initial psychiatric journey. Can you talk to us about that?

Sure. As a thirteen-year-old, I was a very sensitive, bright, intense kid. I did well in school. I happened to be the kind of girl who could get good grades on tests and memorize and regurgitate information, so I seemed to have it all together. One night, I had this profound experience in front of the bathroom mirror, where I started my book.

I won’t share it in detail, but in that experience, I ended up realizing I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t think I had a real self. I realized I’m this robot programmed to perform and do well. I have all these expectations on my shoulders from all of these forces beyond me, but who am I? What do I care about? I tried to keep this realization that I didn’t have a real self to myself, but it was too much to carry alone. I didn’t tell anyone about it until I eventually started acting out at home, screaming and yelling. I began injuring myself.

I kept it all together outside of the home, but my parents couldn’t understand what was happening to me. God bless them. They didn’t see any other resources at their disposal besides a mental health professional. This was in the mid ‘1990s, so it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. They saw no one talking about this. They thought, “Something must be wrong with our daughter. Why is she acting like this?”

Isn’t this what most families would do? They’re like, “Our kid is out of control. We don’t know what to do. Certainly, a doctor with expertise in mental health will help direct us.” You’re right. God bless them. They were doing the best they could. What happened next?

The psychiatrist I eventually ended up in front of as a fourteen-year-old girl listened to me. I poured out all of my pain for an hour, and at the end of that one session, one hour, and I never met her before in my life, she told me that my anger, outbursts, and irritability were symptoms of mania. She told me my despair, hopelessness, thoughts about dark things, and injuring myself were symptoms of depression, and that I had an incurable brain illness called bipolar disorder that would need medications for the rest of my life.

Did they use the word incurable?

The idea that it was lifelong, yes. “This is not something that you’ll ever get rid of. You’ll have this for the rest of your life,” was the message.

To hear that at fourteen.

In one hour of this stranger hearing me talk about myself and my struggles. Then, my instincts instantly knew this was not true and not right. I was having a meaningful response to these pressures. I felt like this girl in an affluent town. I went to a private school. I knew that the anger, sadness, and sense of not belonging that I felt were meaningful responses.

To be told, “Something’s wrong with your brain that you’ll have for the rest of your life,” my instincts knew this wasn’t true, but I was a kid. I couldn’t stand up for myself or advocate for myself. My poor parents, because they were so desperate, confused, and scared, wanted me to feel better. You trust doctors. They go to medical school to become experts on this kind of thing. We’re not doctors. With good intentions, they followed her recommendations to start me on psychiatric drugs.

Were those psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label?

For anyone tuning in who isn’t familiar with that term, that’s for an age group or an indication that’s not approved by the FDA. Both of the drugs that I was prescribed at the time, one was Prozac, which everyone knows, and the other was Depakote, which is an anticonvulsant that’s marketed as a mood stabilizer. Neither of those drugs had been approved for use in kids. Prozac eventually did get that approval, not that that necessarily means it’s safe or effective. At the time, they were both off-label, but we didn’t know that.

As you said, you were trying to follow the prescription. What happened next?

For the rest of high school, I did whatever I could to not take these drugs. It felt wrong. They symbolized to me that all of these adults around me saw me as a defective person to be fixed with pills. I didn’t take them consistently. I hid them. I went away to boarding school, and I stopped refilling them. The sense of not belonging, of not knowing who I was, of not seeing the meaning in all of these performative games that I was trapped in, all of that pain continued and only worsened.

By age eighteen, I managed to get myself into an Ivy League school and accomplish these goals that I’d strived for my whole life, but I felt more empty, more hopeless, and more lost than ever before. It was at that point that I thought, “Maybe that psychiatrist was right. Why do I feel this way? There’s no reason why I should not want to be alive anymore.” It was at that point that I voluntarily went back and clicked right into being a compliant patient.

Since you were so smart, you started to do your own research after some time to see, “Is what I’m experiencing normal? Are all of the effects of these different drugs and these labels I’m getting put on me par for the course?” What did you find out about the many drugs you were on? This is a lot of questions at once, but let me ask you. How many drugs were you put on over the course of over ten years?

I’ve counted at least nineteen. Usually, it was somewhere between 3 and 5 of them at a time, but a total of 19. I love being asked that question about what it looked like, to begin questioning all of this. Before I get to that, what ended up happening in that ten-year span, and this is what I go into in the book in great detail, is that the more compliant I became as a psychiatric patient, the more I listened to my doctor’s recommendations, took my meds as prescribed, reported my symptoms, and focused on being a good patient, the more my life fell apart in mind, body, and spirit.

I began to have all kinds of health issues, digestive issues, weight issues, skin issues, sleep issues, aching joints, and all these kinds of chronic health problems. Mentally and emotionally, I kept spinning out more and more, and looking to everyone around me as “more mentally ill.” No one, including myself, ever stepped back to wonder what role these many medications might be playing. It was quite the opposite.

Eventually, in my mid-twenties, when I’d been a good patient for nearly a decade by then, and nothing had helped me, and I had gotten worse, I was told that the reason I was getting worse was that I had so-called treatment-resistant mental illness. That means you’re so sick or so defective that even all of these amazing medications can’t help you.

That story that I was told stripped me of any hope because I had invested all of my time, energy, and attention in being a compliant patient, hoping that, eventually, I’d start to feel better. I was feeling like, “You’re telling me all this treatment I’ve been relying on isn’t even going to be able to help me?” I lost hope at that point.

It’s that label.

It’s a brilliant marketing strategy, that’s for sure.

“If it doesn’t work, the problem is with you, not with the meds.”

If you feel better on the meds, it’s the meds. They’ll take the credit if you feel helped or if you feel better. If you feel worse, it’s never them. It’s never the meds.

That’s so crazy. You were fed up because you had tried to comply for so many years to be a good patient. They called you treatment-resistant. Is that when you were like, “I got to look into this?”

No, it took another couple of years. That was the point when I gave up hope. I’ll spare the details, but I made the decision to no longer be alive. Things didn’t click for me with that treatment-resistant label. It took another couple of years. What began to wake me up and what sparked my questioning was having a few experiences with various mental health professionals in which my basic civil liberties were taken away. I was forcibly hospitalized. I was made to take a drug that I didn’t want to take. Police were called on me when I was so tranquilized by that medication that I slept through a therapy appointment.

I had these experiences with force and coercion, and I realized the system I’ve been turning to for help and care is also about control. I hadn’t seen this before because I had always said yes. That got me questioning this faith that I had had in this powerful mental health industry. That questioning eventually led me to begin to educate myself about the drugs themselves and the diagnoses. That was at age 27 when that all began.

Deep Dive Into The Mental Health Crisis In The US

We always think there’s big pharma, big ag, and big food. We put these labels on these big corporations that don’t have our health in mind. Maybe the big mental health industry falls in that category, too. In other words, it’s a monolith that needs to be questioned because we’re blindly following their guidance, and it’s not getting us any better. Don’t you think there’s a mental health crisis in the United States?

We do talk about that. There is a mental health crisis. The argument that I make in my work and I’m speaking out about in my book is that the crisis is not what we think it is. The common way of talking about this in our culture is that we have a mental health crisis. The reason we’re here is because people aren’t getting enough treatment. They aren’t getting the treatment they need, and that’s why we have this crisis.

If you look at the numbers, more people are on psychiatric drugs than ever before. It is nearly 1 in 4 adults, and more than 1 in 10 children between the ages of 5 and 17. If you look at the teens, it’s something like 1 in 3. This is not about not enough treatment. I make the case that perhaps it’s a crisis of what I call psychiatric iatrogenesis. This term, iatrogenesis, for anyone not familiar, means treatment-induced harm. It is harm caused by medical care.

In my case, when I look back on that fourteen-year relationship I had with this mental health industry, to be clear, almost every single mental health professional I saw along the way was a kind, well-meaning person who cared about me. This is not about bad people doing bad things. This is about a system that is designed to create physiological dependency, but also existential dependency.

For me, as a kid, being told, “Your brain is broken, and it will be for the rest of your life. You need to rely on the pills and professionals,” you internalize that. For me, I gave up a sense of agency over myself and the belief that I had the capacity to grow and change because I had an incurable brain disease. When you think about that at scale, that powerful story, this medicalized story of suffering where we reduce it to symptoms of an illness that you will never get rid of, it makes sense that it’s both the medications and their adverse effects, especially in the long-term, but it’s also the stories that we’ve learned about our suffering and how disabling those stories can be.

I see a real parallel between the medical care industry and the mental health industry. A friend of mine was hospitalized with an issue with his appendix. The next thing I knew, they wouldn’t let him out. They were like, “Unless you take Ensure, we’re not going to let you go.” He was like, “Ensure?” He was scoffing because he’s a guy in our circle who wants natural. He was like, “No.” Suddenly, he was in an oppositional place. Why? It was for the same reason you did, because he wasn’t compliant anymore. They didn’t like that. It was rough. He felt like when he finally got released, it was like he was let out of prison.

Did they put him in a psychiatric unit, or was it in a medical unit, but they wouldn’t let him?

It was a medical unit, but there were lots of things that they were forcing on him and coercing him to do. They were like, “Your insurance isn’t going to pay for that if you don’t follow the standard of care,” this kind of thing. It ended up that he had all these abscesses, and he was convulsing as a result. I don’t mean to go on and on about this, but he was struggling with a lot of side effects from the meds that were supposed to help. Yet, they still wanted to cut him open again.

Finally, he signed some paper, and he got out of there, but he was aghast. His eyes were opened in much the same way yours were. He had more than one experience, but his was in this more recent experience. I’m so grateful that you’re getting the word out. Talk to us a little bit about the specific meds that you were on and what you found out when you dove into them.

The typical regimen I was usually on involved at least one mood stabilizer. All of these terms are marketing language. There’s no scientific basis to calling Depakote or lithium a mood stabilizer. It’s marketing language. Take all of these drug categories with a grain of salt. I was always on at least 1, usually 2, mood stabilizers, an antipsychotic, antidepressant, and anti-anxiety drug.

My last regimen in 2010 at age 27 was lithium, a mood stabilizer, Lamictal, a mood stabilizer, Abilify, an antipsychotic, Effexor, an antidepressant, and Ativan, which is a benzo. There are two things about that. As a professional psychiatric patient, because that’s how I think about this whole thing, that I became a professional patient, I felt proud of how many meds I took because, to me, they came to symbolize the depth of my suffering. The more meds I was on, the more it indicated to everyone how much pain I was in because I wanted to be seen and understood. I would look at five meds and feel pride.

This regimen was talked about. The term is sophisticated polypharmacy. I don’t know why they used that word, but they would talk about it as a sophisticated polypharmacy regimen. I thought they were taking all this care to a little bit of this and a little bit of that. In retrospect, I see it was a prescription cascade. At the beginning, I was on two meds, and then as I kept falling apart with adverse effects I didn’t realize were adverse effects, you medicate these effects, and then you medicate those effects. Before you know it, there’s the polypharmacy regimen.

The sophisticated word sounds so good. You said programming and marketing. It’s all there. Let’s go back and talk about what you found out as you looked into these. It is marketing, and some of these drugs lead to addiction and things that are worse than the illness itself.

Some of the most shocking things I learned when I began to educate myself about these pills I had been putting into my body for so many years are that, for starters, the safety and effectiveness of these drugs are determined on the basis of very short-term trials, 6 to 8 weeks on average. Yet, most of us take these drugs for years. It’s this message of incurable lifelong illness.

The safety and effectiveness of psychiatric drugs are determined on the basis of very short-term trials.

The evidence base for long-term safety and effectiveness of these medications is not there. There’s also no evidence base for polypharmacy. Similar to other pharmaceutical products, psychiatric drugs are not studied in combination with each other. When I was on 3, 4, or 5 at a time, that was a complete experiment. Perhaps the most important point, and I’m so glad you brought it up, is that no one told me that all of these medications or all of these drugs across all of the drug classes can cause physiological dependence when you take them for weeks, months, or years.

Your central nervous system changes how it’s structured and how it functions to accommodate these psychoactive chemicals. This means that when you then want to try to stop them down the line, you might have horrible withdrawal symptoms that usually don’t get recognized as withdrawal because doctors are not informed about this, and patients are not informed about this.

Wise Traditions | Laura Delano | Mental — Mental: Curiosity drove me through fear, confusion, and all the intense agonies I was feeling.

What ends up happening is someone has been taking Zoloft, an antidepressant, for thirteen years, and then they say, “I don’t think I want to take it anymore.” They stop it maybe abruptly, or over a few weeks, or over a few months, and they feel horrible. They’re told, “See? You’re having a relapse of your depression. This is why you need your medication.”

When you go back on it and feel better, you conclude how this medication helps me,” not realizing, “I feel better because my body’s no longer in withdrawal.” There’s this invisible epidemic of dependence and withdrawal that about 65 million people, by my calculations, are unwittingly a part of. No one is talking about this in the mental health industry. It’s the patients and very few critically-minded doctors who are starting to try to draw attention to this critical issue.

Extricating Herself Out Of Drug Dependency

You’re an individual who was in the system. As you say, psychiatrized. I’ve heard you use that term before. How did you extricate yourself? You didn’t do titration sometimes, and it was very painful and difficult. What gave you the guts to go there?

What drove me more than anything else was curiosity. I had spent all of these years of my life believing that I had two options. I can either suffer on with treatment-resistant mental illness, in and out of psych wards, not able to work, not able to have a family, and not able to take care of myself, or I can kill myself. Those felt like my only options.

When I began to educate myself about these drugs and realized, “What if it’s not treatment-resistant mental illness? What if it’s the treatment?” Suddenly, I had possibilities ahead of me because maybe there was another story for me. I needed to find out who I might become off these meds. That curiosity drove me through all the other emotions I felt, which were great fear, confusion, and all the intense emotional agonies that I was feeling because I came off these drugs so quickly.

I always say that the fact that I was born into a family that could take care of me materially, emotionally, and logistically is why I made it through. If I had to pay a mortgage, take care of kids, get myself to a job, and keep the lights on. I don’t know if I could have done it. I was able to be taken care of by my family for a few years while I recovered from pharmaceutical trauma, as I like to call it. That was a big part, too. I’m very blessed that I had a family that was able to help me get through it.

We’re blessed that you’re willing to tell your story. The emotions you were describing, the confusion, the fear, all the different feelings, anxiety, are part and parcel of what you say in your book. That’s being human. What if that is being human? What did you find, though, that helped you learn to navigate these scary emotions when you were no longer medicated?

Besides the curiosity and determination to figure out who I could become, what helped me find my way was connecting with how medicinal it is to be of service, to get out of myself, and to be there for other people. I’m not the only one who had this experience. When you become a professional therapy patient and psychiatric patient, you learn to become very focused on yourself and all your problems, everything you’re thinking about, and all your emotions. You talk about yourself all the time and think about yourself all the time.

Around the time I came off the drugs or the meds, I also quit drinking and found my way into the 12 Step world. I eventually left, but I have a very soft spot in my heart for it because it was there that I realized, “I could be there for someone else. This is helpful for me.” That was a big piece of it, and then eventually finding my way to nutrition.

One of the insidious things for many of us who are long-term medicated on psychiatric drugs is that we lose touch with our bodies. You lose touch with your body’s signals and your metabolic function. It becomes hard to listen to what your body is telling you and about what you’re putting in it, on it, and around it. Finding my way to that sense of communication with my own body helped me find a relationship to food that was nourishing and not poisoning. I found a relationship to consumer products that was far less toxic, and all these things or all these onion layers. That was a big piece of it as well.

The last big thing I’ll answer in response to your question, and it’s a universal thing, whether you’ve been on psych meds or not, is that I realized my pain is meaningful. I struggled for a reason. My emotional struggles were a response to what was happening in my life. My pain is valuable. I can turn it into something that can help other people through writing, speaking, or being a friend. That helped me embrace my shadow side, which we all have. All human beings have a shadow side. When you’re not afraid of it anymore because you no longer see it as pathology, you see it as a signal about your life, and then you can work with it differently. That was helpful as well.

I have a picture of you in a farmstead with your family or husband. Is that true? Where do you live? You don’t have to give all the details, but tell us a little bit about your life and how it contrasts with where you were.

I’m not living on a homestead. Although in my heart, that’s where I am. I’m in the mire of the suburbs for all kinds of complicated reasons. I have a stepson, a son, and a husband. I have my own business. I published this book. Life is full, meaningful, and connected. I feel so connected. I also still feel intense emotions. That’s the whole point.

One of the main takeaways that I want to share with the world is that sometimes, people think the end of my story is that I’m happy, and everything’s great. I’m balanced all the time, I’m productive, and life is amazing. It’s not that, and that’s the whole point. Life isn’t about that. It’s not about happiness. It’s about meaning, purpose, and service. My life is full of that, for sure.

Life is not about happiness but meaning, purpose, and service.

Being Courageous And Graceful With Yourself

That’s been on my mind a lot. We don’t want to live or be healthy for a long time. We want to have purpose and passion because that gives it all a reason. We need that reason for being. There are so many people out there who are lost, questioning their own sanity, and stuff like that. I know you’re not a medical professional, but by the same token, you’re a person who was in the system. What steps would you recommend that they take for coming to peace, as you’ve been doing, in terms of understanding their own emotions, realizing that they could be of service to others, and finding good nourishment?

It starts with getting curious, courageous, and open to investing time and space to learn. Diving into the history of the DSM, psychiatry’s diagnostic Bible, and the history of all these drugs I was on, and learning about dependence and how to safely taper. To quickly articulate what slow tapering needs to look like for many people, because of dependence, it sometimes takes years to taper off these drugs. It’s not weeks and not months, but years for some people. It starts there with being curious and open to learning.

It’s about listening too. It’s listening to what your instincts and what your intuition are telling you. It might be hard to hear that. If you are like me and you’ve lost touch with that, it takes time to hear it again and connect with it. From there, everyone has their own unique path. Once you start to listen to yourself, what you’re meant to do next reveals itself to you as long as you stay curious, courageous, open, and especially trusting in the unknown ahead of you.

Leaving behind diagnoses, lists of symptoms, and all of these boxes that can help you feel like you understand yourself, and then end up not necessarily being as helpful, it means coexisting with uncertainty, the unknown, and the undefined. In our consumerist world, we’re not set up to do a lot of that. It’s if you feel discomfort or you feel unclear, you’ll buy this, eat that, and take this. Sometimes, being with yourself is the most radical thing you can do in this time we’re in. It’s starting there, for anyone who feels something in them. A medicalized framework isn’t what makes sense for me anymore. When I think about myself, those are the starting points I would offer to anyone.

Years ago, we interviewed the producers and some participants in the movie, Medicating Normal. There was a young girl who had an eating disorder or something like that. Her family didn’t know what to do, so they took her to a psychiatrist. Suddenly, she was having suicidal ideation and all these things. It can be this cascade of pharmaceuticals that leads you further away from the angle, which is health and happiness.

To any parent tuning in to this, it takes so much courage to be with your child when your child is overwhelmed by pain. It’s understandable that, as parents, they end up turning to doctors and medications because it’s almost unbearable to stay with your kid when your kid is suffering. In the context of so-called mental health, if your kid is in the midst of a crisis of some kind or in a lot of pain, there’s an important reason. It’s not because of faulty chemicals in their brain.

It’s something about their relationship to the world around them, maybe to what they’re eating, or what’s going into their body. It may be what they’re surrounded by in terms of actual substances, the friendships in their life, the relationships, or the stressors. There’s always a story. It’s not always easy to figure it out, but it’s never because their brain is broken. To any parent who’s struggling, have the courage to trust that if you hang in there with the uncertainty, you give love and connection, and you have trust in your kid’s capacity to move through, you’ll eventually know where you’re meant to go next. It’s hard to do that in this day and age, for sure.

I loved what Kelly Brogan said on one of the episodes we did on this similar topic. She was like, “We’re all of a piece.” In our medical industry, we tend to specialize. You’ve got the mental health folks. You’ve got the folks who study the ear, nose, and throat. It’s all divided up, but the mind is connected to the body. What if they need someone to sit beside them, to nourish them well, and to walk through the pain with them?

Adopting A Brain-Friendly And Gut-Friendly Diet

I wanted to ask you a couple of more questions as we start to wrap up. Thirty-nine million Americans, you said in your book, are adults who take an antidepressant. These people were not pharmaceutical deficient. What do you think those adults may need? Talk to us a little bit about nourishment. What foods have you found nourished you deeply in a way that maybe the meds could never provide?

The fact that we have so many tens of millions of people on antidepressants is a testament to how much suffering there is in our world. In terms of how to nourish one’s body, what I found after I came off the drugs and began to listen to my body was not even yet knowing about Weston A. Price, but a lot of the philosophy of Weston A. Price. I ended up feeling my way in by listening to how I felt.

What that looked like for me was, at the time, the way I thought about it was a brain-friendly and gut-friendly diet. I realized these drugs had affected my central nervous system. More than 90% of our serotonin receptors are in the gut. When you’re on antidepressants for any serotonergic drug for any length of time, you’re causing potentially serious disruptions to your metabolic and digestive system.

For me, what helped me feel more in myself and vital was everything well-sourced, like animal fats, proteins, full fat, and well-sourced dairy. I ended up eating a lot of eggs, fermented foods, and a lot of leafy greens and bitter greens. My body craved what I only realized after the fact were liver-stimulating foods, like arugula and dandelion greens. I found my way into this by listening to how I felt. I didn’t read books until later on, and I’m like, “That was what I was doing anyway. That’s amazing.” That’s a testament to when you listen to your body, it tells you things.

When you listen to your body, it tells you things.

It’s so hard, though. Some of the many of these patients are where you were. They are outsourcing their trust to the professional, so they’re no longer trusting themselves. It’s a process of learning to trust yourself bit by bit, right?

It is, and baby steps, being gentle with yourself, and showing yourself grace. When you have placed deep faith in the allopathic industry more broadly, whether it’s the mental health industry or whatever aspect of that industry, it’s scary to turn that face from being directed outwards to being directed inwards towards your own instincts.

For me, the way I make sense of that is that it is also tapping into something beyond me, too. When I’m in alignment with myself and the world around me, my internal instincts almost feel like there is something bigger guiding me. It’s scary. It’s not meant to feel easy or straightforward. You practice, and be gentle with yourself when you end up eating a giant bag of chips. You need to forgive yourself and show yourself grace. We’re all works in progress. I definitely am, and I know I will be for the rest of my life.

Role Of Mental Health In Rampant Violence

Agreed. We’re all in that place. As we start to close, Laura, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what role mental health plays in the violence we’re seeing across the nation and the world in churches, schools, and different communities. What role does a lack of mental health stability play in outbursts of violence?

What I’ll say in the context of the mental health industry is that it’s well-documented in many drug labels that various psychiatric drugs can cause suicidal and homicidal ideation. There have been many court cases involving violence and psychiatric drugs. A lot of them end up settling and don’t end up making it into the public because of non-disclosure agreements.

We know from the FDA itself that some of these drugs can cause these kinds of things. I won’t speculate or make causal links, but what I can say for myself is that I was so disembodied on all of those meds through all of those years. I was so disconnected from empathy and from the capacity to feel bonded to other people, to feel intimacy, and to have any kind of erotic life force in me.

I had no sexual function, too, but that’s not even this deeper ability to feel desire, pleasure, and all these things. Much of that was numbed, suppressed, and disconnected without me realizing it was the meds, not me. I can’t help but wonder if when you’re in that disconnected, even dissociated state, that could be a big piece of the puzzle.

I have a friend who is a researcher who has had trouble over the years trying to get medical records of mass shooters because they’re not available. It’s worth asking this question. It’s very complicated, and I wouldn’t pretend to reduce it down to just that. I think it’s a piece of the puzzle. HHS, it seems to me, is eager to look into that.

Laura’s One Tip On Unlocking Better Health

I hope so because it’s evident that we are going down a bad path. It’s not that we need more people on more meds, but maybe the meds aren’t serving us as intended or as advertised. I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end of the show, and that is this. If the reader could only do one thing to improve their health, take one step in the direction of better health, what would you recommend that they do?

One suggestion I like to give, because it’s fun, is when you’re making a choice about what to eat, ask yourself, “Was this made in a factory, or did this come from the earth?” If it’s the former, that’s oftentimes a good indicator that another option might be more conducive to well-being.

I love that. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it has been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so very much.

It is such an honor to be here, and thank you all for the incredible work that you do.

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Our guest was Laura Delano. Visit her website, Laura Delano, to learn more. Here is a review from Apple Podcasts. Ashton Otte said this. “New WAPF member. I’m raising WAPF kids. As a young mom to little ones, becoming a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation has been the best decision I’ve made for my family this year. Between Sally’s Nourishing Traditions book and this show, I feel like I have an abundance of quality information that I can go to as I raise my family. When I first discovered this show a few months ago, I binged every episode. I look forward to listening to all of the topics that are covered. They are always wonderful and eye-opening.”

Ashton, thank you so much. This means a lot to me personally. I love to encourage young moms, especially. If you would like to rate and review the show, simply go to Apple Podcasts and click on Ratings & Reviews. Give us a bunch of stars and tell us how you’re benefiting from this information. Stay well. Thank you for tuning in. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Laura Delano

Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps people make informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. She is a leading voice in the international movement to offer patients an alternative to the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry.

Delano works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support during their withdrawal journeys and in their post-psychiatric lives. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children. Her book, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, was published in March 2025.