Psychiatric Drugs: Help, Harm, and Honesty
Psychiatric medications sit at one of the most difficult intersections in public health: suffering, science, identity, autonomy, evidence, and trust. For many people, these medications are helpful, stabilizing, and even lifesaving. For others, the experience is more complicated, involving side effects, emotional blunting, withdrawal, stigma, or the feeling that their pain was too quickly reduced to a diagnosis.
Sec. Kennedy’s interview with Laura Delano raises serious questions about informed consent, polypharmacy, withdrawal, coercion, and the social conditions that shape emotional distress. Those questions deserve attention. At the same time, we should be cautious about how these critiques are being elevated and framed by political leaders. When an administration casually borrows phrases like “gold standard” while also advancing highly selective or ideologically convenient interpretations of science, public health communicators have to listen with both empathy and skepticism.
Our goal is not to dismiss Delano’s story or tell people what to do with their treatment. Her experience matters. But lived experience should not be turned into a sweeping anti-medication narrative, just as clinical authority should not be used to silence people harmed by treatment. The task is to hold multiple truths at once: psychiatric medications can help; psychiatric medications can harm; withdrawal is real; untreated mental illness can also be dangerous; and people deserve honest, evidence-based, non-coercive care.
The commentary below adds context at key points in the interview. We approach the conversation through the values of social justice, patient autonomy, evidence-based treatment, and the prevention of misinformation. That means asking hard questions not only about psychiatry, but also about the political uses of psychiatric skepticism.
As always, our asides will be framed in this color box
Laura Delanom: Long-term use of these medications is making us on the whole sicker, more disabled. And there I was on five medications the previous decade of my life that I’d consistently been on them, just progressively worsening dysfunction, despair, inability to take care of myself and it all clicked. And I said in that moment, “Oh my gosh, what if it’s not treatment resistant mental illnes? What if it’s the Treatment?”
Secretary Kennedy: Hey everybody. I’m Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Your HHS secretary and welcome to the Secretary Kennedy Podcast. Today, my guest is Laura Delanom who has had a really interesting saga and is one of the leading advocates in the country for, I guess you would call yourself as an opponent of aura critic of some psychiatric drugs. And Laura is an author, speaker, mental health advocate, focused on informed consent, patient autonomy, and improving how we understand and treat mental health conditions. She has a lived experience in navigating the psychiatric symptoms from a young age, including years of treatment and multiple diagnoses. And she has since dedicated her work to helping individuals and families better understand their options and make informed decisions about care. And you recently participated in our women’s health conference. So tell us about your personal story, because that sounds interesting.
Laura Delanom: Well, the briefest way to summarize my story is that I grew up psychiatrized is the term I use. I was an intense, bright, very sensitive.
Secretary Kennedy: And you grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Laura Delanom: I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut with a lot of resources, a family who could provide every material need I had. I grew up in a very highly pressed environment. So in the air was this taken for granted assumption that your worth as a person was very much tied into how you performed. And so that was the culture I grew up in. And as a kid who happened to be a good student and a good athlete, I could perform well.
Secretary Kennedy: What was your sport?
Laura Delanom: Squash was my main sport. I played that through college, which when you grow up in Greenwich, Connecticut, chances of you being handed a squash racket are pretty high. And so I was top 10 nationally ranked player and just on paper I had everything together and student government president well respected by my peers. But as a 13-year-old girl, I had this profound experience one night in front of the bathroom mirrors. I was getting ready to go to bed where I just started looking deeper and deeper into my eyes and I ended up having this out of body experience where everything went black and I was just floating in space looking at this stranger in front of me and I just, “Who is she? Who is this girl?” And when I came back from this out of body experience, the only conclusion I could draw was that I didn’t have a real self.
I was just this robot program to perform, but who was I? What did I care about? It was this in retrospect, it was almost like an ego death, but at the time I was terrified by what had happened and I didn’t tell anyone about it. I just tried to pretend it didn’t happen and continue on performing well, but I just fell apart inside and eventually began acting out at home and I was yelling a lot and cursing and I started pushing my mother and scaring my sisters. I started cutting myself. I really fell apart at home and then again outside kept it all together. So I had this totally compartmentalized
Secretary Kennedy: Did you have food issues?
Laura Delanom: My gosh. Yeah. They hadn’t started yet, but boy did they start and eventually alcohol issues. I mean, the gamut of really seeking control seeking behaviors that was all on the horizon for me. And so my parents of course were just terrified because here’s this girl who was not that long ago- Perfect.
Secretary Kennedy: … doing
Laura Delanom: Fine. Yeah. And now she’s slicing up her arm and talking about death. And so God bless them. They were just so afraid and didn’t know what to do and they didn’t see any options besides a psychiatrist’s office. So I found myself by age 14 in front of a psychiatrist, a very nice woman. And I just want to be clear, mental health professionals, especially psychiatrists, they come to this work because they care about people. They care about suffering. They want to relieve people suffering. And 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. And I had an incurable lifelong illness called bipolar disorder, but don’t worry, there are medications that will help you manage it. You’ll have to take them forever, but they’re going to help you.
I was 14 and that set me on this journey that took me another almost decade and a half to kind of extricate myself from-
Diagnosis can be lifesaving when it helps people name suffering, access care, and reduce shame. But diagnosis can also become a story people inherit about themselves, especially when it is delivered to a child as permanent, biological, and lifelong. A justice-centered mental health system would ask not only, “What symptoms are present?” but also, “What happened? What pressures is this young person living under? What supports are missing? What choices are being offered?” Evidence-based care should never require people to give up curiosity about the social, developmental, and relational roots of distress.
Secretary Kennedy: Mean, back then they were treating bipolar with lithium, right?
Laura Delanom: I did end up eventually on lithium. That’s still considered the gold standard, even though if you actually … I have a chapter on lithium in my book on shrunk because if you actually look into the evidence base for it, it’s not as promising as the stories we hear about it. I was first put on Depakote, which is an anticonvulsant. To this day, it’s still not approved for psychiatric purposes in children. This was in the mid ’90s when I was put on it and I was put on Prozac, which at the time wasn’t yet approved for adolescent for juvenile use. I experienced it at the time as a profound insult. Here I was having this very meaningful anger and despair over how powerless I felt over my life and this loss of meaning I sensed and being a human, noth made sense. And then to be told basically your brain is broken and you’re going to need pharmaceuticals every day for the rest of your life.
It felt like a profound insult. And I know everyone involved in that had good intentions and was trying to help me the best they knew how, but it really internalized this notion that I was broken and I tried to fight it, but within a few years I ended up actually really believing it was true.
Secretary Kennedy: And then you had this extraordinary educational experience where you went into your field, which is really actually because two of my kids went there and had a wonderful experience.
Laura Delanom: Grade School.
Secretary Kennedy: And then to Harvard. And while you were there, you were sort of debilitated by your psychiatric drugs the entire time.
Laura Delanom: Yeah. And when I went away to boarding school to Deerfield, I actually left all my pills at home and luckily was left alone for the most part. And I’m really grateful for that because between those years 14, 15 to 18, I wasn’t actually consistently on the medications, but I was still playing the performance game. I was still training and getting good grades and I just couldn’t figure out how to extricate myself from it. And so by the time I got to Harvard, I was just hoping and praying that maybe I’d gotten it all wrong and once I actually get to a place like Harvard, I’ll feel okay in my skin, I’ll feel at peace, I’ll feel happy even. And of course I didn’t when I got there. I was still the same me with the same loss of purpose and meaning. And so I really rapidly spun out freshman year there.
I was doing a ton of drugs like cocaine and alcohol and ecstasy and throw anything at me that can numb this agony that I feel and I wasn’t sleeping and I was doing totally impulsive, reckless things. The icing on the cake was the winter of my freshman year as was tradition in my good old WASP family. I had to come out at a couple of debutante balls in New York City, which I really didn’t want to do, but it was a part of our family’s tradition. And that was my breaking point. There I was in a literal wedding dress on stage at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City curtsying and almost-
Secretary Kennedy: Sounds like a nightmare.
Laura Delanom: This is a practical joke. I mean, how is this my life? I’m literally performing on stage right now and I was just out of my mind on drugs and drink and champagne. I was just a mess. And the next day I completely broke apart and was just bawling hysterically. I said, “Please, mom and dad, I need help.” I mean, it evokes tears in me just thinking about that desperation. And I really want to name that desperation because a lot of times people hear me speak and they think that I’m judging people who take medications or that I’m shaming them, which I am by no means. I am not anti-medication. I am about informed choice. And what I know more intimately than I want to even know is how when you are overwhelmed by pain and you are desperate for relief and you are desperate to understand why you’re feeling the way you feel, it can be incredibly validating and hopeful to be told by a doctor, “You’re not a bad person, you’re not a lazy person, you’re a sick person and we can help you and these treatments are going to help you.
This distinction matters. Public health conversations about psychiatric medication often collapse into two unhelpful camps: medication as miracle, or medication as harm. Neither frame is adequate. Many people benefit from psychiatric medication. Some experience side effects, dependency, withdrawal, emotional blunting, metabolic changes, or worsening quality of life. The ethical standard is not ideology. It is informed consent, shared decision-making, ongoing monitoring, and access to non-pharmaceutical supports. Combating misinformation means resisting both overpromising and fearmongering.
And at that point at age 18, I was on the verge of suicide. I was at the edge and so I really embraced this idea that I had this incurable brain disease and from there was on two meds and then three meds and then four meds and then five meds by incredible doctors, Harvard Medical School trained affiliated with McLean Hospital. Again, everyone trying to help me and with the more medications I took and the more diagnoses I accumulated, the more my life fell apart. And all along through my early, mid 20s, we were thinking this was my illness getting worse. Laura’s bipolar disorder is progressing. Now she’s 25, she’s completely dependent on her family. She can’t work. She can’t hold down relationships. She’s a total mess. She’s a total alcoholic. She can’t take care of herself. Unfortunately, her bipolar disorder is now treatment resistant.
The phrase “treatment resistant” deserves careful scrutiny. Sometimes it accurately describes a condition that has not responded to well-delivered care. But it can also hide other possibilities: wrong diagnosis, inadequate therapy, trauma, substance use, poverty, loneliness, discrimination, medication side effects, or the effects of multiple drugs interacting at once. A public health lens pushes us to ask a broader question: resistant to what kind of treatment, under what conditions, and with what supports? The danger is not treatment itself. The danger is a system that interprets every worsening outcome as proof that the person is sicker, rather than asking whether the treatment plan itself needs to change.
It’s just so severe that the treatments that we have can’t even help her. And that message to me was so hopelessness inducing that I did eventually try to kill myself because it felt like I’d exhausted every possible option to help me. You’re telling me nothing’s going to help me. This isn’t a life worth living. And to this day, it may sound controversial to say this, but I have deep respect for that choice I made to kill myself because given the story I’d come to believe about myself, it was the logical conclusion. Of course, the problem is I had learned a false story of myself.
Secretary Kennedy: I mean, during this time, you said you were a class president.
Laura Delanom: And when I was younger,
Secretary Kennedy: Yeah. When you were younger, but did you have friends and relationships or were you just torching everything?
Laura Delanom: My gosh. Well-
Secretary Kennedy: I mean, were you a leader? Were you-
Laura Delanom: That’s such a good question because that really gets to the heart of all of it is the relationships that we have. Through boarding school, I had incredible relationships. And again, I wasn’t really taking medications during those years, but gosh, once I was at Harvard and on all those meds, my life rapidly got so small. And the connections that I forged were with other lost people, other people who were going to McLean Hospital and we would commiserate in our shared illness journeys together. But by the time I finished Harvard and I had to take a year off at some point to be hospitalized, I was hospitalized multiple times over the years, but by the time I managed to finish, I had zero friends. I had zero job prospects.
The only thing I was connected to was my psychiatric treatment and my identity as a mentally ill person. That was my life’s purpose was seeking treatment. And I love that you asked that because I know you’ve had your own dark journey in the past with addiction and all of those things. And to me, it all comes down to your connection to the world around you and to yourself. And when that’s broken, it’s really hard to stay intact, to stay integrated and it’s so easy to just turn all the pain you feel and all the anger and the grief and the sadness on yourself, which definitely happened too
This is where the interview moves from an individual story to a population-health issue. Mental health is not only located inside the brain. It is also shaped by relationships, housing, work, school pressure, racism, gender expectations, social isolation, economic insecurity, and whether people have places where they belong. Evidence-based treatment should include clinical care, but it should not end there. Public health has a responsibility to build conditions that make connection possible: safe schools, supportive families, community-based care, peer support, meaningful work, and protection from coercion and stigma.
Secretary Kennedy: Me. I mean, addiction makes your life very small too, because really it’s a disconnection from everything. But I had a friend who went to see a psychiatrist recently and the psychiatrist asked them one question, “Do you have friends? Are they long-term friendships?” And when she asked, “Why did you ask that question?” She said, “That’s kind of the primary metric for telling whether or not somebody is healthy or not. If they burn all their friendships, but you had friendships when you were young, you had a capacity to have those deep relationships with other people and to be intimate with other people, but something took that away from you.
Laura Delanom: Yeah. And I think in my case, it was a combination of this identity that I internalized that I was feeling this intense suffering and had been taught to see it through this medicalized lens. Oh, these are just symptoms of faulty brain chemistry. They’re basically random and you’re just unlucky. And so I disconnected my suffering from the context of my life, which of course all suffering is rooted in the context of your life. You struggle for a reason. And because I was seeing myself through this medicalized lens, I stopped being curious about the fact that I had lost all my meaningful friendships or the fact that I didn’t feel connected to any sense of purpose, the fact that I had no capacity to feel intimacy with people, to feel creative. I stopped asking questions about my life because they didn’t seem relevant because I just had a broken brain.
This is a useful place to name a common oversimplification. The “chemical imbalance” explanation has often been used as a simple way to reduce blame: you are not weak, you are ill. That message can be comforting. But when presented as the full truth, it can become misleading. Human distress is biological, psychological, social, and political all at once. A more honest message would be: your suffering is real, your body and brain are involved, treatment may help, and your life context still matters. That kind of explanation reduces shame without reducing a person to brain chemistry.
And I think the other piece too that this was just my experience, many people have different experiences. A lot of people also have my experience, but 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. And again, this is not me saying that these medications are bad or that people shouldn’t take them, but I think part of the crisis that we’re in right now as a country, this mental health crisis that we’re in is actually rooted in the fact that these medications were really only ever intended for short-term use. The drug trials that the FDA approves these drugs on the basis of are quite short, six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, yet most of us take these medications for years. And so I was on five of them at a time, lithium, Lamictal, Abilify, Effexor, Ativan.
This is a legitimate evidence question and should not be dismissed as anti-psychiatry. Public health depends on knowing not only whether a treatment works in the short term, but what happens when millions of people use it for years. Long-term outcomes, deprescribing guidance, side-effect surveillance, comparative effectiveness studies, and patient-reported outcomes all matter. The answer is not to frighten people away from medication. The answer is to build a stronger evidence system around real-world use, especially for children, adolescents, pregnant people, older adults, and people taking multiple medications.
I mean, this was considered a sophisticated regimen of polypharmacy. I felt proud of myself because, wow, they’re really focusing on helping me. Look, I’m on five of them. They’re putting in all this thought. And in retrospect, I have a different interpretation, but to grow up so heavily medicated, I had zero sexual function, I had zero creativity. I was so disembodied and I thought that was all symptoms of my illness. And now in retrospect that I’ve been off of these medications for going on 16 years, I see how much of it was actually this overmedication, this prescription cascade that I grew up on. And I think that’s a big piece of this crisis that we’re in now is that it’s so easy to get on these medications and there’s so few checkpoints for people to pause and reflect. Is this still helping me? Is this actually maybe causing me some adverse effects or maybe I don’t need to be on so many?
There aren’t these checkpoints built in. And so people just stay on these medications for years after year after year after year, oftentimes feeling progressively worse, not realizing the medications might be a piece of that story.
Secretary Kennedy: In retrospect, do you think your diagnosis as bipolar was a correct diagnosis?
Laura Delanom: Good question. Within the logic of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, I think it was correct. I was accurately diagnosed according to the American Psychiatric Association’s textbook. Where I’m at now is that, but so what-
Secretary Kennedy: Yeah. I was going to ask, do you think that you’d be diagnosed as bipolar today?
Laura Delanom: Not today. I would probably get anxiety disorder, that kind of thing. But for me, the language of the DSM isn’t relevant for me today because for me, I no longer make sense of my emotions and thoughts through this medicalized lens. I love that you asked that question because people often think my story is a story of misdiagnosis and I’m like, no, no, this is actually, my story is a story of the American mental health system working as intended. And really what changed is that I decided to stop making sense of who I was with its medicalized story because I still struggle today. Life is hard. And I think that’s one of the biggest, most liberating realizations I made once I got off all these medications is the purpose, the objective to living isn’t happiness. It’s not the absence of pain. It’s connection, it’s meaning, it’s purpose and the 12 step world taught me a lot
Secretary Kennedy: Of this. And figuring out how to overcome a spiritual advancement that you get from … But what occurs to me is that I’m around a lot of young girls all the time and they all seem like really crazy at that part of their lives. And if you put them on a regimen and then most of them just get through it and figure it out. But if you put them on a regimen of psychiatric drugs at that age, they may not be able to go through the things that they need to go through to find the techniques for coping with anxiety and uncertainty and fear and all of that stuff that makes people crazy.
This moment needs correction. Ugh. Adolescent distress should not be dismissed as girls being “crazy.” That language reflects a long history of minimizing, pathologizing, and gendering young women’s pain. At the same time, the broader issue being raised is important: adolescence is a period of intense biological, social, emotional, and identity development. Some young people need medication. Some need therapy, safety, family support, sleep, food, protection from abuse, school accommodations, or freedom from impossible performance demands. The public health challenge is to respond seriously without turning every painful developmental struggle into a lifelong disease identity.
Laura Delanom: It’s such a true observation. So as an elder millennial, I came of age right at the beginning of the kind of therapeuticization of American adolescent, especially American girlhood and young womanhood. So I was really at the beginning of what is now this ubiquitous phenomenon of young people and especially girls growing up infused in this kind of therapeutic framework of understanding themselves. And I think because young people today are yearning and seeking meaning and belonging and there’s so much precarity in the world around them and they feel so lost, they’re hungry for a place to belong and for a framework of self-understanding that helps them feel like they know who they are and why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling. And I think the therapy industry and the mental health industry more broadly have really come in and filled that void. And so the number of girls and young women I cross paths with who are my sisters, I’m just a little further along the same path that they’re on who are so deeply identified with their diagnoses and with how many meds they’re on where you almost wear it as a badge of honor because … And I remember feeling this way, like, look, I have five prescriptions, see how much pain I’m in, do you see?
And if someone had said to me, “Well, Laura, maybe you’re having a meaningful response to this really intense, high-pressured life you’ve grown up in. Maybe you’re not sick, maybe there isn’t anything wrong with you. Maybe you’re actually, this is a sign of your wisdom.” I would’ve been insulted. I would’ve said, “How dare you invalidate my suffering? I am sick. How dare you just tell me I’m human?” And I think that phenomenon is ubiquitous now on TikTok and Instagram. And really, I think at the heart of it, it’s a spiritual crisis. We’ve lost touch with what it means to be human and that pain is an important signal. I mean, I look at my pain now. I cry all the time. I have intense anxieties, I feel deep grief. I wouldn’t remove that for all the money in the world because I know these are messages that are telling me something about my life and sometimes telling me something that’s very practical like, “You’re eating way too much processed sugar, too many kids’ birthday parties, Laura.” Sometimes it is a sign to me to make different choices about how I’m taking care of my body, but oftentimes I realize I just need to feel this pain and not try to do anything with it.
And I want young girls to hear that message.
Secretary Kennedy: I’m at the edge of my seat. So how did you flip?
Laura Delanom: Oh my gosh, Secretary. I just feel so grateful. When I think about that turning point in my life, I feel so much gratitude because it was nothing that I could have willed. It was nothing that I just decided to do. So my turning point came in 2010. I was 27 years old. Two years earlier, I’d had this really serious overdose where I had just truly not wanted to be here anymore. And I was going to day treatment at McLean Hospital every day. It was basically my job. I’d go there in the morning, go to groups all day, go to the cafeteria during lunch and look at all the doctors with their badges and wonder in some alternate universe would I have been one of these people if I hadn’t gotten so sick? It was my life was treatment. And I ended up having a few encounters with a side of the mental health system that I hadn’t experienced before.
I’ve seen it from afar, but I’d never been through it myself. And that is the power that mental health professionals have to strip you of your civil liberties if they decide you’re a risk to yourself. I go into all of it in my books. I’ll skip over it here, but basically I was made to go into the hospital when I didn’t want to go into the hospital. I actually wanted to go. I just wanted to go home first to get my belongings because there’s nothing like being locked up on a psych ward with none of your stuff. It’s a very sterile experience. So I was made to take a medication that I didn’t want to take. And then I’d also had this experience with sleeping through a therapy appointment because I was so tranquilized by that medication and having my therapist call the police to do a so- called wellness check.
So I’d had the sequence of experiences over a few weeks that dislodged my previously unquestioning faith in this system. I’d always just taken for granted this is about care and compassion. And now I realize, but it’s also actually about control. I just didn’t see this because I had always said yes, and now I was saying no. And so I just was-
Coercive mental health care has not been experienced equally. Poor people, Black and Indigenous communities, disabled people, unhoused people, incarcerated people, and people who use drugs are more likely to encounter surveillance, force, police involvement, and loss of autonomy. Emergency intervention can sometimes prevent immediate harm. But a just system must treat coercion as a last resort, not a substitute for care. The goal should be more voluntary, community-based, culturally responsive, trauma-informed support before crisis occurs.
Secretary Kennedy: You never read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Laura Delanom: Well, I’d seen the movie, but it hadn’t, I think because I was so heavily medicated, the significance of that failed didn’t link the dots. And so I was in this place of questioning and it was at that point that I stumbled upon a book by a medical journalist named Robert Whitaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic. And it’s this incredible … This was back in 2010. I saw it on a bookshelf in a bookstore. It had just come out. It had one of those old phonology heads on the cover, but in each compartment it had a different psychiatric drug name. And I was like, “I’ve been on that. I’ve been on that. I’ve been on that. I’ve been on that. ” I was like, “What is this book?” I didn’t even know what it was about. And when I sat down and began to read it, it blew my mind.
And basically this journalist, he’d found some long-term who studies that found that people in the so- called developing world actually had better outcomes, people with the schizophrenia diagnosis had better outcomes than in the so- called developed world. And he was like,
Secretary Kennedy: “Why?” They live normal lives kind of. Yeah,
Laura Delanom: Totally. And he was confused by this because he figured we would have better outcomes because we have all these sophisticated medicines here. So he began this investigative quest to look at the long-term evidence base for psychiatric medications. And what he found was that if you actually look at what evidence there is, long-term use of these medications is making us on the whole sicker, more disabled. And there I was on five medications the previous decade of my life that I’d consistently been on them, just progressively worsening dysfunction, despair, inability to take care of myself and it all clicked. And I said in that moment, “Oh my gosh, what if it’s not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it’s the treatment?” And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.
For some people, worsening symptoms may reflect medication side effects, withdrawal, polypharmacy, or poor clinical monitoring. For others, medication may be protective, stabilizing, or lifesaving. Public health should hold both truths at once. The question should not become “Are psychiatric drugs good or bad?” The better question is: how do we know when a treatment is helping, when it is harming, when it is no longer needed, and how to change course safely?
I realized in that moment I have to give myself a chance here. If my life doesn’t have only basically psych wards and disability and dependency or suicide, if there’s another option, I have to try it. And I want to pause here because the decision I made to come off these medications was the scariest, most overwhelming decision I ever made. And this issue of coming off these medications is so important for our culture right now because we have, by my calculations, 2022 CDC numbers, those are the most recent ones I can find. We have about 65 million Americans, 61 million adults, four million kids on these medications, and there are zero safe off-ramps from them. So in 2010, when I decided to come off, I had no roadmap. My doctors didn’t support it. They had no idea how to do it. I had no idea how to do it.
And so I came off five medications in about half a year, which is basically cold turkey. And if I didn’t have a family who could take care of me, I wouldn’t have made it through. And it was at that point that I realized, oh my gosh, I’m in withdrawal. And I began to educate myself about how these medications can lead to physical dependence such that when you try to stop them, I know you’ve spoken about this so powerfully in the recent past, you feel horrible when you try to come off these medications and because we don’t have a well-informed public and clinicians are not educated about this, people don’t realize it’s not a relapse of your illness. It’s not proof that you need your medications. It’s actually withdrawal. It was the hardest thing I ever went through
Withdrawal, recurrence, and relapse can look similar, and confusing them can lead to harm in either direction. If withdrawal is mistaken for relapse, people may be told they need lifelong medication when they actually need a slower taper and better support. If relapse is mistaken for withdrawal, people may be deprived of treatment that could protect them. The responsible message is not “stop your medication.” It is: do not stop suddenly, do not do it alone, and make sure clinicians are trained to distinguish withdrawal from returning symptoms.
Secretary Kennedy: And the clinicians see it as a relapse and they say the only solution is you go back on them.
Laura Delanom: Exactly. And then you feel better
Secretary Kennedy: When- It takes a year.
Laura Delanom: And for some people it takes more than that. For some people it takes multiple years.
Secretary Kennedy: No, I have a relative who was on the same kind of regimen and she got off them and she was suicidal every day for a year.
Laura Delanom: Yeah. And like you said, you go to a mental health professional with that and they say, “Why are you putting yourself through this hell? You need these medications. Your illness is untreated.” I mean, that’s what at this point I’ve connected with thousands and thousands of people through my work who are told this and these aren’t bad or mean doctors because they don’t know this either. It’s this total void of awareness around the fact that all psychiatric medications are psychoactive chemicals and if you take them consistently, your body’s going to acclimate to them. It’s like basic biochemistry. And so this all clicked for me and I realized, holy moly, here I am really well resourced. I have a family who could take care of me while I was going through this and it’s taken me years to recover from coming off of these medications. What about the people who don’t have the resources that I’ve had access to?
And so that was what led me to start Intercompass Initiative, the nonprofit I founded years ago, because I realized there’s a total void of information, resources, and support for people who are questioning their relationship to these medications and maybe want to change it. They have nowhere to turn. And again, this is not about being against these medications or telling people to come off of them, but the reality is we have tens upon tens of millions of people on these medications. Some percentage of them are going to decide they don’t want to take them anymore and where do they turn for help? Right now it’s the layperson withdrawal community, people like me who’ve been through it ourselves who are the world’s leading experts on tapering, which is wild. It’s wild that that’s the case.
Secretary Kennedy: Well, we’re about to change that in this agency because we’re going to change the labels on these medications. We’re communicating with therapists all over the country to explain to them this phenomenon and also outline protocols for tapering from the various medications. But what actually is the biological mechanism for this? Because when you get off of heroin, which I was on for years, it’s five days and it’s over. It’s five days of pain and it’s over. And so you know you’ve got 72 hours and you just have to … But with this stuff, it’s a year or six months. It seems insurmountable when you feel that badly about the world. But what is it that your brain stops producing serotonin or …
Laura Delanom: It’s a good question. And I mean, we need research into this because I think there’s very little understanding of the iatrogenic effects of these medications of the harms that these medications can cause. And the very crude high level sense that I have is that it depends on which drug class you’re talking about, but in certain instances, receptors are downregulated. In other instances, receptors are upregulated. So basically, ironically, the drugs themselves are creating an imbalance, so to speak, in what would otherwise be just normal receptor function, whether it’s the serotonergic system or the dopaminergic system, they obviously affect multiple systems. And so the idea is that because the changes that these drugs can cause are so fundamentally mechanistic and structural that to remove the drug too fast, things don’t just bounce back to how they would’ve been. They’re left in this state of … The set for nervous system is in this state of dysequilibrium, which is what sets off all of these symptoms that are oftentimes misunderstood as a relapse.
And the idea is that if you taper really slowly and hyperbolically, so not in a straight linear way, cutting the same amount each month, but cutting a particular percentage of whatever dose you were previously on. So the amount you’re cutting gets smaller and smaller over time. There’s interesting research and we need to do more research into this, but there’s interesting research that kind of shows why this hyperbolic tapering is more effective. And in part, it’s because there isn’t a direct relationship between dosage size and the effect the drug is having on your brain. It has a hyperbolic effect. So this might sound a little obtuse, but the relatively smaller doses of a medication are having a much more dramatic effect on the receptor function in your body. And so when you’re coming down on a medication, you can often go a little bit faster when you’re on higher dose, but the lower the dose gets, the slower people often have to go, but that’s the opposite of what they’re told by their doctors.
This is a practical systems failure. If people are prescribed medications that may require careful tapering, the health system has an obligation to provide tapering guidance, appropriate dose formulations, clinician training, and insurance coverage for follow-up care. Leaving patients to split pills, make home mixtures, or rely entirely on online communities is not patient-centered care. It is abandonment. Evidence-based treatment includes evidence-based discontinuation.
They’re told, “You’re on a subtherapeutic dose. You should be able to stop.” And so people think, “I’m just too weak. I can’t do this. It doesn’t make sense. I’m on this tiny little amount.” And that’s one thing too, that because right now these drugs are not manufactured in dosage sizes and forms and formulations that are safe to taper from, people have had to become their own pharmacists at home making mixtures with water and using slip-tip syringes to remove 2% of their dose. It’s the wild, wild west out there of what people are having to figure out for themselves. And I’m just so excited to hear that this is a priority. And I know you’ve been a champion of this. It’s a dire public health crisis in my opinion.
Secretary Kennedy: How many people are on them now?
Laura Delanom: 65 million. I think it could be higher. Those are 20, 22 numbers.
Secretary Kennedy: And does it worry you that pregnant women are being given in some cases?
Laura Delanom: It does worry me. And it’s such Adam Yurato as a colleague of mine and he’s an incredible advocate for informed choice in women making these decisions around pregnancy and antidepressants. I think women are understandably … I’ve been pregnant. I have young kids. It is so hard. Our culture is not set up in the way that our DNA needs it. We’re made for villages and multi-generations of women helping each other. I mean, the struggles that we have as women in pregnancy and with young children are so deep. And so I really want to name that. It can be really hard to navigate pregnancy. And at the same time, I do think we have not been informed as women about the risks of taking these drugs during pregnancy. And it’s the kind of information we need as teenagers. I mean, once you reach your childbearing years, you as a woman need to know, by the way, if you end up starting this Zoloft right now, make sure you factor in a long-term plan here and potentially years of tapering if you do end up wanting to have kids one day.
Women need this information until now and they aren’t getting it. And it’s been seeing that FDA expert panel last summer was surreal for me as someone who’s cared about informed choice for so long. I’m just so excited that you’re all prioritizing.
Pregnancy is one of the places where misinformation can do the most damage. Some people face real risks from untreated depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis, or suicidality during pregnancy and postpartum. Some medications carry risks. Stopping medication abruptly can also carry risks. The ethical response is not blanket reassurance or blanket alarm. It is high-quality counseling that respects the pregnant person’s autonomy, explains knowns and unknowns, considers the risks of both treatment and non-treatment, and includes social supports such as paid leave, housing stability, food security, and postpartum care.
Secretary Kennedy: People who are listening to this and who may be on these drugs and wanting to get off, what would you recommend to them?
Laura Delanom: It’s a great question. Start by getting informed. Our website, Intercompass Initiative has … We have tons of-
Secretary Kennedy: What is it called?
Laura Delanom: Intercompass Initiative, the website is the intercompass.org. We provide tons of free information about the diagnoses, about the medications, and about what it looks like to taper safely from these medications. We have a free manual that walks people through what it looks like. I think starting with taking all the time you need to get properly informed is number one. Number two is making time to really reflect on the deeper existential, even spiritual questions like your relationship to your suffering. Where are you at in your life right now with the pain you’re feeling? How are you coping with it? If these medications aren’t working, what else is in your toolbox that you can lean on? And also how can you cultivate practices that enable you to be with your pain in a different way? Really making time to think about the stories that you tell yourself about your mind, your emotions, because I know for me, letting go of that old story that my brain was broken and I need these drugs for the rest of my life.
I didn’t know who I was beyond that story and I had to go on this spiritual quest really to this day. I still don’t know. And I’m kind of at peace with not knowing now. But 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, all the things that are part of the maha missions. I think those are absolutely essential to preparing for a medication tapers, ensuring you’re getting healthy fat, which your brain needs to function and gut-friendly foods, the parts of your body that are altered by these medications. How can you use food as medicine to help restore health there? And then the support system piece, to get back to your point about relationships, what is your support system like? Do you have family who is by your side in this and friends?
Food, sleep, movement, sunlight, social connection, and reduced substance use can all support mental health. But we should be careful not to turn lifestyle advice into moral judgment. People do not need kale instead of care. They need access to affordable food, safe housing, time to rest, primary care, therapy, peer support, and medication when appropriate. “Food as medicine” is most useful when it is paired with food justice. Otherwise, it risks telling people to heal themselves with resources they do not have.
Does your doctor or your therapist, are they on the same page with you about this? If not, how can you help them get on the same page and support you? I think this is where my years in the 12 step world, which I hold so fondly to my heart because AA is what helped me connect with the power of service and getting out of myself and taking my pain and using it as a catalyst to help others. I think that’s a key piece of this journey too is if you’re going to come off these medications or change your relationship to them in some way, realizing that what you’ve been through means something really important, the struggles you’ve had are actually the medicine that someone else needs and finding ways to take what you’ve been through and be of service, use it in service to others to me is the best medicine. That’s my go- to. Whenever I’m getting stuck in my head, I’m like, how can I get out of myself now and just be there for someone else? It’s simple, it’s free, it’s easy. We all have that power.
Secretary Kennedy: One of the people who really talks a lot about their relationship between food and mental illness and these interventions, the benzos, the SSRIs, the antipsychotics, antidepressants is Mikaela Peterson and she makes the case that she healed herself with food. She also talks a lot about her father, Jordan Peterson, who had a terrible experience with these medication almost killed him.
Laura Delanom: Oh yeah, I heard about that.
Secretary Kennedy: How important is your diet?
Laura Delanom: Oh my gosh. It’s at the heart of everything. It’s absolutely fundamental. And when it comes to coming off of these medications, people find different, I don’t want to say protocol, that’s too formal of a word, but different foods work differently for different people during the process of coming off these medications. I know some people for whom ketogenic diet has been life changing. I know other people who actually did something totally different. It’s about listening to your body and paying attention to how you feel, which is certainly for me after growing up medicated and having the signals of my body, being so disconnected from them, I had to learn what that was like.
I spent my teens and 20s with all kinds of eating disorders, fat-free, sugar-free. Don’t even get me started on that. And so to actually practice sitting down and eating some rib eye and some beautiful arugula salad and actually feeling how is my body responding to this versus how it used to respond when I’d have the fat-free processed turkey slices with what … I mean, it’s amazing when you realize my body’s talking to me, it’s telling me what it needs and what it doesn’t need. And I think that’s really the journey. The journey away from these medications is a journey back into your body and into integration. And once you click with that, you feel so powerful because you realize I’m in the driver’s seat of so much of how I feel in mind, body and spirit, and it all comes down to what I’m putting in my body.
Secretary Kennedy: Yeah. The eating disorders, we talked about this earlier, they always seem to me to be the most intractable of all the kind of addiction models and really debilitating for people and hard to transition out of. Is that your experience or?
Laura Delanom: It was a hundred percent the hardest prison to liberate myself from without a doubt because you have to eat. Abstinence isn’t an option and it’s such a fundamentally … I mean, at least what helped me find my way out was realizing this is a fundamentally spiritual malady that I’m grappling with here and this is not about control, that I will find my freedom from this in letting go and surrendering and trusting, which when you grow up with eating disorders is antithetical to your entire-
Eating disorders are not vanity, weakness, or a lifestyle problem. They are serious, potentially life-threatening conditions shaped by biology, trauma, control, culture, gender norms, weight stigma, and the food environment. Any commentary on psychiatric drugs should avoid implying that people can simply think or eat their way out of severe mental distress. Recovery often requires skilled, compassionate, evidence-based care.
Secretary Kennedy: Because it’s all about control.
Laura Delanom: All about control about … I think about the role that my eating struggles played for me and it really was … It feels like your life is chaos and unpredictable and unsafe and whatever it is that you’re feeling, what is one thing that you do have tangible, measurable control over your body and it becomes this punching bag, this whatever analogy you want to use. I disconnected so fundamentally from my body, I think fueled in part by the polypharmacy that I was on and it was the only place where I felt like I had any measure of power was over my body. And now to be in this just so far away from that, it’s so far in my past, I sometimes can’t believe how free I am from it because to find your way out of that is agonizing and terrifying and takes so much trust and so much faith.
And yeah, I’m deeply grateful to be free of that.
Secretary Kennedy: Were you sick all the time?
Laura Delanom: All the time. Chronic health issues, chronic metabolic … I gained 70 pounds on psych meds. 7-0. I had chronic pain on my-
Secretary Kennedy: That must be tough, funny, you got body does this morph.
Laura Delanom: Oh yeah, because I would swing, binge eating and then restricting and compulsive over … Oh my gosh. I was always sick. I always had colds and bronchitis, metabolic issues, holy moly, my metabolic issues on antipsychotics. I was always on antipsychotics. My hair was falling out, my nails were flaking off. I got autoimmune thyroiditis, which I have since reversed through nutrition, but lithium gave me that. And I remember at the time being basically told that I was overreacting for having an autoimmune condition. “Oh, it’s easily, man. Just get you on Synthroid, not a big deal. And now in retrospect, I’m like, how did I … Okay, doc. “I was always sick, always sick. And I thought, always because I’m mentally ill so I don’t take care of myself so I don’t blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I see is a combination of diet and the polypharmacy regimen. I mean, my body was just crying out for help for years.
Secretary Kennedy: Laura Delano, thank you so much for joining us. That was riveting. I appreciate it.
Laura Delanom: It’s such an honor to be here, Secretary. Thanks for having me. Produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
This interview is most useful when read as a challenge to build a better mental health system, not as a reason to reject treatment. People deserve access to psychiatric medications when they help. They also deserve honest information about risks, side effects, withdrawal, uncertainty, and alternatives. They deserve clinicians who listen, systems that do not default to coercion, and communities that address the social conditions that produce suffering. The public health task is not to replace one oversimplified story with another. It is to make care more truthful, more humane, more evidence-based, and more just.
