On today’s episode, we talk to Laura Delano, mother, writer, and peer-to-peer psychiatric support advocate. Laura was like many teenage girls, crushed under the pressure of perfectionism. She was diagnosed at fourteen with depression and prescribed psych meds, even though she knew in her heart that her rage, pain, and grief were logical, natural reactions to the society in which she was contorting herself to fit.
So began decades of psychiatrization, learning to identify her mental landscape as broken, ill, and disordered. Psychiatry became a gateway to medicalization in other ways, and she developed an autoimmunity, low libido and other conditions. She was chemically castrated with birth control for many years, with no understanding that this could actually worsen depression symptoms.
In this episode, Laura takes us through her journey and brings the research of many scholars that she learned along the way. She debunks the serotonin theory of depression, and lays out the truth of how depression and its treatments are marketing terms for the pharmaceutical industry. In a special bonus episode, we will be talking about tapering. We’ll make this bonus episode available free to all for a very limited time, and only on Substack, as it will get censored on other platforms.
Laura is the founder and Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people make more informed choices about today’s mental health industry, and about taking and coming off psychiatric drugs.
Separately, Laura consults with individuals and families looking for information, guidance and support during the medication withdrawal process. She has spoken and led workshops in Europe and across North and South America and is at work on a memoir about her experiences called UNSHRUNK, which will be published in the US, UK,and Commonwealth countries later this year. Find out more at www.LauraDelano.com.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LauraDelano
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_lauradelano_/
FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/laurafdelano
FB Account: https://www.facebook.com/lfdelano
Learn more about Inner Compass Initiative and about safer psychiatric drug tapering
here: https://www.theinnercompass.org
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