By Jill Erzen

Years of declining mental health and escalating prescriptions led Laura Delano to a breakthrough: What if her diagnosis — treatment-resistant mental illness — was wrong? What if it was the treatment that was making her worse?

“And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it,” Delano said this week on “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast.”

A psychiatrist diagnosed Delano with bipolar disorder at age 14 during a single appointment and told her she would need medication for life — a path Delano noted took almost a “decade and a half to kind of extricate myself from.”

She said her experience is not a story of misdiagnosis, but of a mental health system that too quickly turns emotional suffering into lifelong psychiatric treatment.

Her concerns come as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) moves to expand awareness of psychiatric drug withdrawal, reduce unnecessary prescribing and place greater emphasis on nonmedication approaches to mental health.

“We’re going to change the labels on these medications,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Delano. “We’re communicating with therapists all over the country to … outline protocols for tapering.”

U.S. facing ‘dire public health crisis’

Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance,” called the situation “a dire public health crisis.”

“We have tens upon tens of millions of people on these medications,” Delano said. Yet few patients are adequately warned about the challenges of long-term use or discontinuation.

A December 2025 report found that 6.1 million U.S. children under age 17 are taking at least one psychiatric drug. Those numbers are one reason HHS is moving to curb psychiatric overprescribing, particularly among children, according to Kennedy.

The agency’s initiative also promotes informed consent, shared decision-making and “a more holistic approach to mental health.”

Delano said her experience reflects the kind of withdrawal and overprescribing problems that federal officials are only beginning to acknowledge publicly.

“I’m just so excited to hear that this is a priority,” she said.

At 14, Delano ‘internalized this notion that I was broken’

Delano said her struggles began at age 13, when “I just fell apart inside.”

By 14, emotional distress and self-harm led her parents to seek psychiatric help because they “didn’t see any options.”

“This psychiatrist, with the best of intentions, told me in one hour, my first appointment with her, that all my anger and irritability were symptoms of mania, and my despair and the self-injury were symptoms of depression,” Delano said. “And I had an incurable lifelong illness called bipolar disorder.”

Delano said she believes most psychiatrists genuinely want to help patients and alleviate suffering. Still, she said the diagnosis led her to see herself as permanently damaged.

“To be told, basically your brain is broken and you’re going to need pharmaceuticals every day for the rest of your life. … It really internalized this notion that I was broken,” she said.

‘The more medications I took … the more my life fell apart’

Over time, two medications became three, then four, then five, Delano said. During the course of her treatment, her prescriptions included Prozac, Depakote, lithium, Lamictal, Abilify, Effexor and Ativan.

“The more medications I took and the more diagnoses I accumulated, the more my life fell apart,” she said.

Looking back nearly 16 years after discontinuing psychiatric drugs, Delano said she now sees much of her deterioration as part of a “prescription cascade” fueled by a system with few safeguards once patients begin long-term medication use.

“It’s so easy to get on these medications, and there’s so few checkpoints for people to pause and reflect,” she said. “Is this still helping me? Is this actually maybe causing me some adverse effects?”

By her mid-20s, Delano said she could no longer work, had become dependent on her family and struggled with alcoholism. Doctors eventually said her bipolar disorder was “treatment-resistant.”

“The only thing I was connected to was my psychiatric treatment and my identity as a mentally ill person,” she said.

Years of treatment conditioned her to interpret her struggles primarily through psychiatric diagnoses, preventing her from questioning whether the medications themselves might be contributing to her decline, Delano said.

“Being on so many medications, especially in those critical formative years of young adulthood, really ended up in the long run adversely impacting me in mind, body and spirit,” she added.

Mental health system ‘actually about control’

Although Delano said she is “not anti-medication,” she questioned the widespread practice of keeping patients on psychiatric drugs for years or decades, when many U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval trials lasted only “six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks.”

“These medications were really only ever intended for short-term use,” she said.

Delano never second-guessed her treatment in the early years of care. But her perspective shifted in 2010 after a series of involuntary psychiatric interventions that dislodged her “unquestioning faith” in the mental health system.

Until then, Delano said she had viewed the system as compassionate care. But after being compelled into treatment against her wishes, she realized “it’s also actually about control.”

“I just didn’t see this because I had always said yes,” she said.

Around the same time, Delano read Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” Whitaker questioned whether chronic psychiatric drug use may worsen mental health for some patients.

The book, combined with her own deteriorating condition, led Delano to reevaluate what doctors had labeled treatment-resistant mental illness.

Despite remaining consistently medicated for more than a decade, she said she was experiencing “progressively worsening dysfunction, despair, inability to take care of myself.”

“And it all clicked,” she said.

“Oh my gosh,” she recalled thinking. “What if it’s not treatment-resistant mental illness? What if it’s the treatment?”

The ‘wild, wild west’ of tapering off psychiatric drugs

Delano eventually decided to stop taking psychiatric medications, calling it “the scariest, most overwhelming decision I ever made.”

Neither she nor her doctors understood how to taper safely. “I had no road map. My doctors didn’t support it. They had no idea how to do it.”

She experienced severe symptoms while tapering off the drugs, and realized that many patients misunderstand those symptoms.

“People don’t realize it’s not a relapse of your illness,” she said. “It’s not proof that you need your medications. It’s actually withdrawal.”

Psychiatry has largely failed to acknowledge the physical dependence psychiatric drugs can create, she said.

“All psychiatric medications are psychoactive chemicals, and if you take them consistently, your body’s going to acclimate to them,” she said.

Delano later founded the Inner Compass Initiative, which offers information and peer support for people questioning psychiatric medications or attempting to taper off them.

She said many patients are effectively forced to develop their own tapering methods due to limited medical guidance.

“People have had to become their own pharmacists at home,” she said, describing patients using water mixtures and syringes to make tiny dose reductions. “It’s the wild, wild west out there.”

‘My body was just crying out for help for years’

Delano said her recovery involved far more than simply stopping medications.

“The other thing people need to really, really take seriously is how they’re caring for their body, the food they’re eating, the products in their household, the amount of sunlight they’re getting,” she said.

She linked mental health recovery to nutrition, sleep and environmental factors — themes that also appear in HHS’s recent push toward nondrug mental health interventions.

Delano said it is “absolutely essential” for people preparing to taper off psychiatric medications to support the body nutritionally, including consuming healthy fats and gut-friendly foods, because “the parts of your body that are altered by these medications” require support during withdrawal.

She also described years of chronic health problems while taking psychiatric medications, including metabolic dysfunction, autoimmune thyroid disease and recurring infections.

“My body was just crying out for help for years,” she said.

Now off psychiatric medications, Delano said she no longer sees emotional pain as evidence that her brain is broken.

“People often think my story is a story of misdiagnosis,” she said. “No, no. … My story is a story of the American mental health system working as intended.”

Delano said she now understands suffering as part of being human rather than something to eliminate chemically.

“The objective to living isn’t happiness. It’s not the absence of pain,” she said. “It’s connection. It’s meaning. It’s purpose.”

Watch Delano on ‘The Secretary Kennedy Podcast’ here:

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘Nobody Told Me’: Former Mental Health Patient Calls Out Dangerous Side Effects of Psychiatric Drugs
• ‘Unshrunk’: Overcoming the Downward Spiral of Psychiatric Drug Addiction
• RFK Jr. Calls Out Skyrocketing Use of Psychiatric Meds
• ‘Hidden Epidemic’: She Was 7 When Doctors Prescribed Ritalin — By Age 20, She’d Taken 14 Different Psychotropic Drugs
• ‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old

The post ‘My Body Was Just Crying Out for Help’: Former Psychiatric Patient Says Drugs, Not Illness, Fueled Decline appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.

 

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