The Cat Is Out of the Bag

When I first saw Laura Delano’s story was being published by Penguin, a major publisher, I knew that we were on the brink of change by way of the public narrative around mental health in the west.

Here was Laura, a powerful and honest voice, recounting her story of being “psychiatrized,” as she calls it; diagnosed with bipolar in her teens just like I was, and then subjected to countless treatments that caused her a tremendous amount of iatrogenic harm.

Laura and I were born right around the same time. She and I were also diagnosed with bipolar, right around the same time in the ‘90s. Laura spent over a decade on various cocktails of prescription drugs. Descendants of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her family had the means to get her the best in care, which is exactly what they tried to do.

Laura declined, in spite of having access to what was considered top quality care: the therapists, psychiatrists, drugs, and even in-patient facilities. At one critical juncture in her journey, she recounts, “For years, I’d been classified as treatment resistant, but a spark had ignited in me: it was time to resist treatment.”

When I saw her words in print, I knew something had shifted. Laura’s book has since been reviewed in The New York Times, among other major publications, and she’s making her rounds on the podcast circuit accruing millions and millions of views.

Laura is clear in her message: we’ve been told a story for decades: that mental illness is the result of a “chemical imbalance,” and “lifelong brain disorders. We’ve been told that psychiatry is objective science when in reality, she and so many others have held it up to a microscope only to discover that it is pseudoscience created and supported to fund the pharma industry itself.

When I read Laura’s book, Unshrunk, I was shocked to discover that I too had been prescribed prescription drugs as a teen that had never been tested on people my age. That I had been told by psychiatrists that I’d need a lifetime of “medications” that in reality provided no therapeutic benefit, countless horrendous side effects, and had never been tested on any human over the long term.

She goes on to explain how the industry itself has propped up expert “scientists” to essentially be the mouth pieces for big pharma, and advocate for widespread and long term “medicating” of “disorders” like ADHD, bipolar, and borderline personality disorder, among countless others, when in reality there is absolutely no objective criteria for making these diagnoses or for “curing” or “treating” them with so-called medications.

Like Laura, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age seventeen. Over the next two decades, I cycled through seven psychiatric hospitalizations. Each time, the interventions were the same: more diagnoses, more medications, more illness and dread.

Not once in all those years did a medical doctor ask about my trauma history. Not once did any psychiatrist test my hormones, assess my gut health, take labs and evaluate my bloodwork, or talk to me about how nutrition, sleep, social situations, or blood sugar could be influencing my mood and state of mind.

And not once was I told by a conventional psychiatrist that there might be another way.

For a long time, I believed I was broken, and that I’d have to settle for a life of being partially disabled. I had learned helplessness through being fed this narrative that my brain was “disordered,” and that narrative did not empower me in any way, shape, or form to take charge of my wellbeing.

But in 2022, after a major psychiatric crisis, I began to pull the threads. This was my seventh hospitalization, and after once again being faced with this dehumanizing experience of forced drugging and lost functioning, I decided that this would be the last time.

I found an array of providers who believed I could get better, and understood that mental health was not a lifelong, genetic brain disorder. I slowly tapered down on the drugs, and replaced them with a medicinal lifestyle: making intentional upgrades to my nutrition, movement, and rest. I made every effort to surround myself with supportive people. And I’ve healed; not overnight and not without effort, but I’ve healed and today I feel the energy and vitality that I once had, before my own psychiatrization began as a teen.

Laura Delano went on from her journey to create an organization dedicated to the deprofessionalization of mental health. She runs a company specializing in guiding people to safely taper off of meds, and to reclaim their identities as normal human beings and not psychiatric patients.

I stumbled upon Laura’s book when I was in the final stages of editing my own. Laura’s book is mainly memoir, recounting how she shifted her philosophies and providing a robust evidence base for why those philosophies make more sense than the pseudoscience we’ve all been fed. I was so moved by Laura’s line about treatment resistance that I gave her an epigraph in one of my chapters.

I wrote my book, Mental Health Reclaimed, because I want people to know what I wish someone had told me at seventeen: You are not broken. You are not your diagnosis. And you can get better.

Laura’s story making its way into mainstream conversation feels like a crack in the dam. For years, voices like hers, and mine, have been dismissed as fringe, anti-science, or dangerous. But the danger is not in questioning the system. The real danger is what happens when we don’t.

The truth is that the chemical imbalance theory was debunked long ago. Psychiatric diagnoses are not medical diseases and they’re not based on objective data. They’re clusters of symptoms, often reported and evaluated subjectively, and often shaped more by insurance billing codes than science.

And while drugs may be helpful for some in the short term, they also carry serious risks, especially long term, and by and large the public is not responsibly informed about what the real risks may be, and how common those risks actually are. I could make you a laundry list of negative health consequences I’ve suffered from a cascade of drugs I was prescribed that had never been subjected to any testing in conjunction with one another.

Yet this information rarely reaches the people who need it most. We’re not given informed consent. We’re not told about root-cause healing. We’re told to comply. To quiet down. To take our pills, and to accept the label and the lifelong prescription.

But finally, the tide is turning, and this couldn’t have happened soon enough.

People are beginning to ask questions. Parents are wondering why their kids are being prescribed stimulants, SSRIs, and antipsychotics at alarming rates. Adults are realizing that what they’ve been told about their brains doesn’t match their lived experience.

Survivors of the system are finding their voices, and we are also finding each other.

Perhaps psychiatry has helped some people, and I do believe that there are kind and well-meaning clinicians doing their best within a broken framework. But this doesn’t excuse the harm, and it’s time for the truth to be told.

We need a reckoning, not just with psychiatry, but with our willingness to hand over our agency to systems that profit from our oppression.

It’s time for us to ask: Who benefits from the disease model of mental health? Who profits when people are told they’re permanently ill?

And on the other hand, what happens when we begin to believe that healing is possible? And what’s possible when we realize that our entire lives are intertwined with our mental health, and that we are empowered to make informed choices that can deeply impact our own mental wellbeing?

I believe that stories like Laura’s and like mine are rising to the surface for a reason. We’re at a turning point. The pandemic, rising rates of mental distress, and the cracks in the current paradigm are forcing us to look more deeply. To question the narrative. To find better ways forward.

Healing and wellbeing aren’t just possible. I believe that they are our birthright.

We are living in a time of profound mental, emotional, and spiritual disconnection. And while drugs may have a place, this cannot be the only tool in the toolbox. We need to look at nutrition, sleep, trauma, relationships, community, purpose, and we have an evidence base to support the importance of doing so.

No, these lifestyle-based solutions aren’t being marketed to us en masse on slick TV commercials like their chemical counterparts, but we have the data now to understand that there is nothing inherently wrong with humanity that has brought about the epidemic levels of mental suffering we’re witnessing right now. The problem, as we’ve seen, has grown in proportion to the growth of the industrial “mental health” complex.

We need to return to the basics of being human.

The cat is out of the bag. And now that it is, we have a choice.

We can keep clinging to outdated stories about broken brains and chemical cures. Or we can lean into the discomfort of unlearning and choose a new story; one rooted in truth, dignity, and the radical idea that people can get better.