By Jill Erzen

The mental health system is failing children by treating everyday struggles as “chronic illness requiring lifelong pharmaceutical treatment,” former psychiatric patient Laura Delano told lawmakers this week.

“What we are calling a mental health crisis is, in large part, a crisis of overmedicalization,” she said at a March 26 roundtable held by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services.

Delano said many challenges people face are “rooted in nutrition, sleep, stress, trauma, substance use, relationships, vocation, environment, economics, meaning, faith and purpose.” Yet the system often reduces those issues to medical diagnoses, she said.

Drawing on her own 14 years in the mental health system, Delano told lawmakers her experience reflects a broader trend.

Now the founder of Inner Compass Initiative and author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance,” Delano said more Americans are seeking mental healthcare than ever, but outcomes — including suicide rates among young people — continue to worsen.

‘Two meds became three, four, five. My life unraveled’

Delano said she began treatment at 13. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and told she would need medication for life.

“You’re told this is an incurable illness. You’ll have this for the rest of your life. It’s manageable with medications, but you will never not have it,” she said. “And that’s the story that many, many people are being told about these conditions, which is simply not true.”

Over time, her diagnoses expanded and her prescriptions multiplied.

“Two meds became three, four, five,” she said. “My life unraveled.”

She said she gained weight, developed chronic health issues and became “increasingly anxious and suicidal.”

“Eventually, I couldn’t work or take care of myself,” she said.

Delano told lawmakers her experience points to a lack of informed consent.

“Nobody told me” that many psychiatric drugs were approved based on trials lasting “on average 6 to 12 weeks,” or that the long-term effects of taking multiple drugs together have “never been properly established.”

She said she wasn’t warned that medications could cause “serious physical health problems,” impair sexual function or, in some cases, increase suicidal thoughts.

When she tried to stop taking the drugs, she said she experienced withdrawal symptoms, but was told it was a relapse.

“Nobody told me that what I experienced … was withdrawal,” she said. “Instead, I was told that my worsening state meant my illness was so severe that it was now resistant to any treatment.”

At 25, Delano said she believed there was no hope. She attempted suicide.

‘This is the next opiate crisis, and I think it’s bigger’

Delano’s testimony comes as mental health outcomes worsen, even as diagnoses and prescriptions keep rising.

From 2007 to 2021, the suicide rate among people ages 10-24 increased by 62%. In 2023, over 49,000 Americans died by suicide — the highest number on record, and about 20,000 more than in 2000.

Among adolescents in 2024, 2.6 million reported serious suicidal thoughts, 1.2 million made a plan, and 700,000 attempted suicide.

At the same time, diagnoses have surged. Today, about 23.4% of U.S. adults — roughly 61.5 million people — experienced mental illness. This includes more than 36% of young adults.

Medication use has climbed alongside those numbers.

Since 2006, the use of SSRIs in children has more than doubled. A December 2025 report found that 6.1 million U.S. children ages 17 and under are taking at least one psychiatric drug.

“This is the next opiate crisis, and I think it’s bigger,” Delano said.

Doctors are increasingly medicalizing ‘normal human unhappiness’

Other experts at the roundtable raised similar concerns about diagnosis and treatment.

Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said clinicians often blur the line between clinical depression and life challenges.

“I can’t tell you how many people … once got a diagnosis [of depression], but their diagnosis is really demoralization,” she said.

“Do we need medications for that?” Satel asked. In some cases, what patients need to hear is, “Your life is difficult. You’re actually having a rational response to a difficult life,” she said.

Satel also said psychiatrists do not prescribe most psychiatric medications.

Primary care providers and midlevel practitioners write many of the prescriptions, she said. “That’s definitely … a problem.”

“We are overdiagnosing,” she added. “We’re turning … normal human unhappiness into … diagnoses that we then prescribe medications for that probably won’t work.”

‘Doubling down on what we’re doing … is not going to get us anywhere’

Dr. David Hyman, a physician and legal scholar, drew a similar distinction.

“Sadness and depression are two different things,” he said. Treatment — and not necessarily with medication — should focus on the latter, he added.

He also warned against a system that increasingly defaults to prescribing. “Doubling down on what we’re doing, which isn’t working, is not going to get us anywhere better than where we are,” he said.

Hyman challenged how psychiatric drugs are evaluated over time.

While medications must show safety and efficacy to gain approval, he said, there is no consistent system to study the long-term effects or what happens when patients stop taking them.

“There’s not a mechanism or systematic reevaluation of things after they’ve been approved,” he said.

Tapering can take ‘not just months, but years’

Delano said that gap is especially clear when patients try to taper off medications.

Asked how often patients receive full information about their diagnosis and medications, she said: “From what I’ve seen, never.”

“It took 13 years to realize I needed to get out,” Delano said. But getting off the drugs is “incredibly difficult.”

“We have a system set up that makes it incredibly easy to start these drugs that were really only ever studied for … short-term use,” she said. “Yet, most people stay on them long term for years and have zero safe off-ramps.”

Without clear guidance, people often stop too quickly, feel worse and assume they need the drugs indefinitely, she said.

Delano called for updated drug labels, public education and clinical guidelines for gradual tapering.

She stressed that these medications can create physical dependence. “Not addiction, it’s different than addiction,” she said. It’s a biological effect that can make stopping difficult.

“It sounds so unfathomable that a capsule … might require chipping away … over not just months, but years,” she said. Yet for some patients, that level of gradual tapering is necessary, she added.

Now 16 years off psychiatric medications, Delano said her experience drives her work.

“It’s urgent that we better understand what is happening in people’s brains and bodies from using these medications long term and from trying to get off them,” she said.

Watch an excerpt from the subcommittee hearing here:

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘Unshrunk’: Overcoming the Downward Spiral of Psychiatric Drug Addiction
• ‘Hidden Epidemic’: She Was 7 When Doctors Prescribed Ritalin — By Age 20, She’d Taken 14 Different Psychotropic Drugs
• 12-Year-Old Died by Suicide 3 Weeks After Starting Prozac, Mother Blames Social Media and Antidepressants
• ‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old

The post ‘Nobody Told Me’: Former Mental Health Patient Calls for Long-Term Safety Testing of Psychiatric Drugs appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.

 

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