176. Misdiagnosed & Drugged at 14 Laura Delano Played Russian Roulette w/ Psychiatry
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (00:01.529)
Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I'm Dr. Roger McFillin. You know, there's something deeply alluring about a simple explanation and a quick fix. When a medical professional in a white coat hands you a diagnosis, it can provide this immediate sense of relief. Finally, our struggles, they have a name, a cause, something tangible that can be addressed. We naturally assume these diagnoses are
backed by solid science, must be years of rigorous research supporting both the identification of the condition and of course the medicines developed to treat it. They're medicines, they're medicinal. Add credentials from doctors at prestigious universities and hospitals and that feeling of comfort becomes even more reassuring. We've been conditioned this way in Western societies, haven't we? Health is something outside of us. We go to the doctor.
They give us health, you they prescribe the drug, the magic pill that makes everything better. And I'll tell you what, that belief is powerful, very, very powerful. But the complex reality of being human, our thoughts, our memories, our emotions, our mistakes, our struggles, the shame, the fear, the uncertainty, our vulnerabilities to disease, the pain we feel, we're conscious beings, painfully aware of our own mortality.
Those deep questions that thoughtful people ask themselves, like, who am I or why am I here? These aren't easily answered with a prescription pad. Yet our minds are drawn to mental shortcuts and simple explanations. It's easier when we're operating from that survival focus part of our brain. An entire industry has developed around categorizing, medicalizing and treating the full spectrum of problems that emerge through this human experience.
We've constructed the idea of mental health, the assumption that mental illness, another term we manufactured, can be treated like any other medical problem because, you know, we call it illness. You see now it exists for medical professionals, so they must be able to treat it. But what are the consequences of this approach for individuals, for society, for public health? Is our society actually better off?
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (02:25.167)
Have we truly demonstrated some advancement in curing human suffering? Is there a decline in what we call mental illness? Are we happier, more fulfilled, more connected? Mental illness, that psychiatric lexicon has seeped into every aspect of our culture. My OCD, my ADHD, my anxiety, my depression. It's as if we refer to them as parasites we've obtained. Like unknowingly we've contracted this psychiatric disease and we need doctors to medically manage them.
We've professionalized and medicalized help itself. We are so in dire need of critical thinking, courageous voices, radical honesty. A movement is growing across the globe. Patients who've experienced harm and who no longer accept the propaganda that shaped their very sense of identity and kept them trapped in an oppressive system. These individuals are refusing to simply swallow pills and swallow bullshit and surrender their autonomy
to mental health professionals. It's almost like waking up from a long dream, or should I say nightmare. They've dared to question whether the treatments they were told were necessary have actually been making them sick all along. Their awakening challenges us to reconsider what true healing actually means, who gets to define it, and what actually does it actually mean to be a human being? I think I found somebody who woke up from the nightmare and wasn't afraid to face it.
to challenge it, to ask uncomfortable questions, to even accept responsibility, to face those who kept her asleep, and to make sure she never forgets. Laura Delano is the author of Un-Shrunk, a story of psychiatric treatment resistance. She's the executive director of Intercompass Initiative, a charitable organization that she founded to help people make more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses.
drugs and drug withdrawal. She is a leading voice in the international movement of people who've left behind the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry to build something different. Laura works with individuals and families around the world seeking guidance and support for psychiatric drug withdrawal and life post psychiatry. Laura Delano, I want to welcome you to the Radically Genuine Podcast.
Laura Delano (04:48.844)
Thanks so much for having me, Roger. It's great to be here.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (04:51.621)
You know, it's a strange experience reading somebody's memoir because it's like I really know you really well. And I'm calling up, that's like, know your family, I know your background, I know your college life, I know your sex life, who you dated, you know, your medical history. I guess I just want to first check in with, you know, your intention around doing this and some of the risks that you've taken to kind of put yourself out there.
What's it like being you right now?
Laura Delano (05:24.922)
Well, you know, I often have thought about whether it would be nice to just have gone through what I went through and then say to myself, yeah, let's move on from there and just go do something else. But I think something deep in me has been alive since that first moment all the way back in 2010 when I woke up from the spell, so to speak, that
that has insisted on me making this my life's purpose. So that conviction I feel to take what I went through and turn it into something that might help others, that might help spark a broader societal conversation, that might help families heal. That outweighs any awkwardness or self-consciousness or...
embarrassment that, you know, maybe in the past I felt, which I certainly did at the beginning. Now I'm at the point where, you know, I talk about my first orgasm, like I'm talking about making a cup of coffee, because I just, it feels so important to me to be as open and vulnerable as I can possibly be, because I know it was hearing the open, vulnerable stories of people who'd come before me that helped me really click with what I needed to
needed to do for myself and I want to pass that on. I will say that writing this book, I began officially writing it back in 2019 and I don't think I would have been ready to write it any earlier. I needed enough distance from my psychiatrization and I needed enough of a life built beyond all of that for me to really return to the past more as a journalist and an investigator than anything else.
So it certainly took a while to feel ready in the way that I am today to just pour it all out there. But I always knew from the beginning that I would. I couldn't have headed down any other path than this one.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (07:35.505)
The beautiful balance about the book was the intimate nature and the stories about what you were going through, combined with what I thought was really strong historical context and some research support. So we have to tell your story and we have to start at age 14 because that's your introduction into the mental health system and in the world that I live and work.
that's a very vulnerable time. I think that we have to be very protective of people across the lifespan because I think there's these critical, sensitive and vulnerable periods. One of them is entering into puberty, the early stages of adolescence. It's such a critical period for identity development and your story is such a...
description of a developing identity and what happens when it interfaces with the psychiatry culture, you know, that we've been in the past 35, 40 years. So, let's just talk about everything you were going through leading up to that one day of sitting in front of Dr. Patel.
Laura Delano (08:47.778)
Mm-hmm. So I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is your kind of stereotypical wealthy New England town. And so my childhood was surrounded by a lot of material plenty and extracurriculars and beautiful houses, white picket fences. So I was immersed in a local culture that kind of conveyed
really in the ether itself that to be a worthy person was to be a person who succeeded and performed well in life. And so that was the environment I grew up in, going to a all girls private school, playing competitive sports. I just, and I was good at conventional school, quote unquote. I could be given an assignment and.
regurgitate back whatever information the teacher wanted and get an A. I was a good listener. I did have this kind of people pleasing tendency in me to excel and be a good student and a good athlete. And so that was really how I spent my whole childhood. And then at age 13, went on paper, I had everything together and I was a...
top squash player and I had good grades and I was president of the middle school. Everything looked perfect quote unquote on paper. I had this really profound experience looking in the bathroom mirror in which I just kept looking deeper and deeper and deeper until I left my body. Everything went black and I basically just staring at this strange girl in the mirror wondering like, who is she?
And I look back now all these years later and I see that that was arguably like a profound ego death that people meditate for hours to achieve. The wisdom in that experience that I had back then, this girl waking up to self, to society, to an individual discrete identity and realizing like, does that even mean? What does it even mean to be a person?
Laura Delano (11:06.68)
That could have been a really transformative and empowering experience had I had a frame of reference to put it in, had I had reference points to learn from, had I had mentors who had gone through their own crises of self, but just given the circumstances of the town I lived in, this was the mid 1990s, I saw no space where I could talk about any of this. So I just kept it in.
and I kept pretending to be the good student and the good athlete and it all felt fake and I felt like I was trapped in this performance and I was controlled by these forces. Again, like really profound stuff that I think probably a lot of young people recognize at some point. I just, I felt convinced I was the only one having this experience. And so that isolation with it, I think is what led me to eventually lose my shit, to put it bluntly and.
start acting out and cutting myself and just basically trying to release all this stuff that was built up inside of me that I didn't understand. And I just was convinced only I was going through, which I'm very sure I wasn't now looking back.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (12:23.983)
Yeah, I mean, I think what happens is I actually think that it's quite unique what you were going through at that age. think people go through it at some time, but you were quite young to start kind of like thinking that way. If you, let's say you came into therapy with me at that time, I would have been very excited to have somebody who I thought was kind of spiritually advanced and probably would have kind of reframed the entire experience for you. But again,
Back in the mid 1990s, it's a much different time than it is now. you started and you became a little bit more rebellious from what I understand from reading the book. there were things you were doing that were no different than what I was doing with my friends between the ages of 14, 15, 16, 17, including like partying, drinking, experimenting. And so you were entering into that as well. But
I had the sense given the culture you grew up in, your family background, and what the expectations were of you, that you interpreted and saw it much differently than maybe I did.
Laura Delano (13:33.834)
I do think I think I was naive in my what felt at the time like my path to freedom. If I just reject everything that I was previously doing, all the ways I was previously behaving, all the things that I was previously supposed to be doing, then I'll be free of all of it. And so I think it felt, and maybe all kids.
think that's freedom actually, but it did feel, think because my family, I grew up in a family that didn't necessarily make as much space as we could have for all kinds of understandable reasons to have deep exploratory conversations about painful things. There was, I just, don't remember
feeling like that was something that I could dive into. And so I think I took all the darkness that I felt and I channeled it into acting out and I convinced myself that the only way I'm gonna really be free of all these oppressive adults around me is by being a bad girl. And I just don't recall actually sitting down to have a constructive conversation about this with my parents and finding our way to...
meeting point in the middle or it was just a very, you we're either pretending that everything's okay or we're in this crazy conflict where everyone's upset with each other. And so I think that compartmentalization made it really hard for me to feel any kind of anchoring anywhere. I just felt like I was either performing this way inside school, this good girl, rebelling outside of school,
or basically like alone wanting to die because none of this made sense to me. And I didn't have a place where I could kind of bring all of those different parts of me together to explore and talk about with my parents or with anyone else. And there's only so long you can continue on compartmentalizing like that, I think, before you eventually break down, which of course is what happens.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (15:52.689)
And I found myself reflected when I was kind of reading your story a little bit, was reflecting upon, thank God for art and literature. Throughout the course of the written word, human beings have spoken about this journey that we're on that includes the thoughts, feelings and experiences that you've gone through. And in fact, we rely, I think that as a culture, we rely upon art as a way of communicating
the depths of that experience. But there's something unique to the time that we're in right now, that this experience lands you in the office of a psychiatrist. So take us through that experience and why you believe like that was the option, you know, for your family to take at that time.
Laura Delano (16:43.736)
So first my parents had taken me to a therapist who, which I found very offensive because originally it was meant to be family therapy, the whole family would go. And then pretty quickly after that, it was just me who was getting sent there. I took, so that introduction to the therapeutic encounter set a tone for me that everyone saw me as the problem. And when that therapist before long,
was basically to my parents saying, Laura's too serious, she needs to see a doctor, an MD. I felt so far away from any sense of connection with my parents that that just felt like icing on the cake. They'd already betrayed me by sending me to this therapist was how I felt at the time. And now they're sending me to this doctor who of course, within the first session, 50 minutes told me that
I had an incurable brain disease. And, you know, she put it, she put it, she didn't necessarily say the phrase brain disease, but she said, you have bipolar disorder and it's an incurable condition, but don't worry. Don't worry. There are medications that will help you manage it. And here I am, 14 fucking years old, sitting in front of this stranger I'd never met before with all these diplomas on her wall. And I remember knowing then.
that those diplomas meant authority and knowing I have to be careful here, just sensing that, like having that wisdom already at that age of medical authority and what it can do to you. already sensed that. so I, course, just, know, offended is the nicest way I could put it. I just, in my head, I said, who the fuck does this woman think she is? And...
At the same time, I recognized my powerlessness as a kid. I recognized that I had no say here, that this was being done to me and that for all the good intentions that these adults around me had because they desperately wanted to help. I do to this day, I completely understand why my parents sent me to the psychiatrist because that was the only help they saw on offer. And it was a private, almost shameful help to be seeking at that time.
Laura Delano (19:05.612)
and in that town that I grew up in. I'm sure they were, I know that they were terrified and confused and had no idea what to do to help this daughter who was slicing her arms up and like talking about killing herself. So I get why it happened. Every moment of it leading up to me sitting with that psychiatrist for that first session, it all, I understand it all now, but what it did to me in that moment was basically, A, tell me that
that the world saw me as defective and not only defective, but defective for life. And B, that I couldn't trust anyone, that I was on my own here and that all these people who were saying they wanted to help me were actually trying to control me and imprison me was how it felt at the time. And when that psychiatrist gave me those prescriptions, those first prescriptions I ever had for any psychiatric drug, was Depakote and Prozac.
It felt like an assault on my being. Just how dare you think I need pills to be fixed? Again, how wise I was then. I saw this clear as day for what it was, but yeah, I was a kid. I couldn't stand, you know, it was only a matter of time before I just kind of broke down enough that I just caved and gave into it. And then eventually started to actually believe it, but that happened a little later.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (20:32.817)
Okay, so I had some really strong reactions to this part of your story. I think the first one was this, that a medical professional can have the power to provide such a diagnosis to a 14-year-old that's associated with rather severe impairment in functioning. It's got a
that's a certain relationship to the understanding of who you are in American culture, like to be bipolar in 19, I don't know, 95, 96, whenever that was for you, you know, is a pretty impactful medical diagnosis that was made on a few on some behaviors and self reports of a 14 year old while your mother sat in her car.
Is that accurate? Like she was not even brought in evaluate. This wasn't done over weeks or even months of data gathering. with, with, with parental involvement, was just slapped with a very serious diagnosis that historically has not been applied to developing teenagers. And you walk out with a prescription for Depakote and Prozac two drugs at the time.
which were not evaluated on young developing teenagers. There haven't been researched for efficacy or even safety. They're really experimental. They are now as well. but to, to see you, a young child and in early adolescence as someone who can accept that diagnosis and then be prescribed these experimental drugs without parental involvement. I know it happens. It still happens now.
but it is infuriating and I want to make sure I have the facts on that correct.
Laura Delano (22:35.0)
So I was dropped off. I don't think my mom waited the whole time. She dropped me off and then came back to pick me up. And what I do know is that that therapist I had been seeing in the months prior to being sent to the psychiatrist had given the psychiatrist all the backstory. I imagine my parents probably, it's very possible they gave her some backstory on a call or something like that.
I don't know that for sure, but yes, this was a situation where I was dropped off at this woman's house. An hour later, I walked out with a new diagnosis and these prescriptions. And I think, you know, really don't, I grew up in a family that had deep respect for doctors. And this was, I think because this woman was an MD,
There was just this assumption that, she's a doctor like other doctors. we differ our, we, we kind of, you know, turn ourselves over to, to tell us what to do to be healthy is the kind of, you know, is it your typical American family who is a faithful abider of medical authority when you get your checkups. So that was the kind of family I grew up in. So I, I get why my parents just went, went along with this in the way that they, did and didn't.
want to be more involved or insist on being more involved. I think they were also just so terrified and they felt so powerless to help me that they just almost like... I think they kind of sold themselves short in their own capacity to help me as parents because they were so overwhelmed by fear, which I think a lot of parents are. I think a lot of parents get this message from
the society around them from their own upbringing, from whatever else that when your kid is struggling, like you're not a professional, you don't know what you're doing, it's irresponsible and reckless of you to think you should try to figure this out, you need to send them to a professional to get some help. Of course that's a travesty that parents are, so many parents feel this way, but I get why my parents did what they did.
Laura Delano (25:05.132)
I really think fear was at the heart of it and concern. They didn't want their daughter to die. And I was literally like talking about wanting to die.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (25:14.641)
Yeah, and historical context means a lot right now too, because around this time and we have the United States are one of two countries that have direct to consumer advertising. And we're starting to get bombarded with this idea of mental illness. You know, it does start with Prozac being approved in 1987. It's this idea that of the chemical imbalance myth of mental illness, right? But for that at that particular time, it wasn't necessarily a, it wasn't viewed as a myth. was viewed as scientific advancement. There was a narrative.
that was really told to all of us, your parents included, that there are some people who just have this biological vulnerability to this mental illness and we're making all these advancements and we have these drugs to treat them. And there's something, again, there's something alluring about this simple explanation and quick fix. And even for parents, like, my daughter's in pain, she's suffering.
It's something biological. like it's outside of her control. It's outside of our control and she needs to be taken care of by the best medical doctors that this country can provide us. Instead of really like facing exactly who you are and what you're going through and taking a look at aspects of yourself or your family or your culture that are really difficult and challenging that you're going through as an adolescent as you're trying to determine your own identity and who you want to be in life and
There is a profound kind of spiritual experience that you're going through where it isn't somewhat of an ego death and you're questioning things that are somewhat atypical to your age. So if you look around, you're not really having these conversations with your friends and you start to feel a little bit on the outside. And there seemed to be like there was a bit of a disembodiment that, you know, that existed that you weren't truly fully connected. Your body's changing yourself. You have all these expectations and standards. You're questioning who you are.
These things require time. And the other thing is like that 14 year old girl, have a center here that works with girls just like you at that time, many of them self-injurious. And we know this now to be non-suicidal self-injury and people cut themselves to try to feel better. It's a way of trying to even feel something sometimes when they feel numbed or disconnected. And so there's functions to this and there's ways to help them safe ways that these tend to be episodic conditions that
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (27:35.249)
You know, people move through and we're not saying that, you that you maybe didn't need some professional help at the time, but it's like, what kind of help is that? And since we don't really have ways of like peer support and other things about our culture, like if you go around to different points in history, or you go other places around the world, maybe culturally, they think about these things different. Maybe it's the role of elders and it's the it's
role of stories or faith or religion or all these things, but in the United States, you know, the medical establishment has somewhat, you know, taken the place of that. But it's so medicalized and it was so serious that your parents and you now believe you have this severe mental illness called bipolar disorder, which another important point of context here is the story of Joseph Biederman, Dr. Joseph Biederman. Do you want to share a little bit about him at that time?
Laura Delano (28:30.478)
Sure. So Joseph Biederman, who passed away a few years ago, was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital and was considered kind of a founding father of the juvenile bipolar diagnosis. he, beginning a few years prior to me getting that diagnosis, so I was diagnosed in 1997, he'd publishing papers with
his co-authors in the years leading up to that, he basically made the case that up until that period of time, it was thought that children and adolescents really didn't get bipolar disorder, so to speak. But what he discovered is that there's actually this huge epidemic of undiagnosed bipolar disorder in children and adolescents, and we just hadn't noticed it.
until then because the symptoms of mania look different in children than they do in adults. And Roger, you'll never guess bipolar mania in children looks like irritability, anger outbursts, quick to temper. And of course, when that information gets out there and is disseminated through guild journals and...
your average psychiatrist is getting her latest subscription of whichever journal she's reading and she's seeing this. She's going to instantly see a lot of bipolar kids because what kid is not angry and out having outbursts when they're hitting puberty. And so I was, you know, I couldn't have been better timing. couldn't have been a better time for me to turn 14 and hit puberty than the mid 1990s. And of course it would come out later through an investigation led by
Senator Charles Grassley that Biederman and his colleagues had been receiving millions of dollars from drug companies to literally establish a center to show the efficacy of drugs that could be used for bipolar disorder in children. Emails released during the investigation.
Laura Delano (30:50.382)
Like I have a quote in my book, I can't remember the exact wording, but it said, the purpose of this grant is to establish the efficacy, I think of risk for it all for use in children. And so of course my parents had no idea about this at the time. Of course I had no idea. My psychiatrist likely had no idea either. And so I think that part of why I wove in so much history and, you know,
research more broadly in my book is because I wanted to show how my story and the story of so many millions of us right now is about so much more than us as individuals. It's the story of the monolithic pharmaceutical industry and all these other adjacent industries of so-called mental health that have basically laid these foundations in such a way that nearly all of us now meet the criteria for
their treatments. It's a brilliant business model, that's for sure.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (31:50.349)
It is it's this diagnostic expansion where when you have a profession as subjective as psychiatry or psychology, you know, mental health in itself, you are now
you're now being determined a medical diagnosis through the subjective lens of the individual assessor. And so everything can be viewed from the lens in which they've been conditioned, right? So if you're, you know, you're told these things, it seeps deeply into your consciousness, right? And now you're prone to these attentional biases where you see normal adolescent behaviors that are episodic, that's existed really throughout the course of history.
are now signs of a burgeoning mental illness. And we have these drugs that are really kind of sedative, they're tranquilizing in nature, and they're repackaged under these words like mood stabilizing, right? So it's very digestible. you know, families in Greenwich, Connecticut can say, hey, you know, we can level out my daughter's moods without thinking about the consequence to this. The other thing that's interesting about this time is
we're starting to see the uptick in SSRI prescriptions and SSRIs have a very known stimulating effect. For a lot of people, yes, it's emotional blunting, but for a portion of people, they induce mania, they induce agitation, they impact sleep and so forth. And so we would be placing people on SSRIs who then would be diagnosed bipolar after the effect of the SSRIs. And so now they're combining an SSRI and a
and depakote, is I guess it's an anti psychotic, which is repackaged as a mood stabilizer, somehow as if this combination is going to induce a greater sense of stability in your life. And what is that based on at that time?
Laura Delano (33:47.234)
Well, at the time there was, Depakote was not, to this day actually isn't, was not approved for use, psychiatric use in children at all. It was approved for epilepsy. It's officially an anticonvulsant, which most so-called mood stabilizers are. So how my doctor back then, what information she had imbibed that led her to conclude that
putting 14-year-old girl on this anticonvulsant that had zero evidence base for pediatric psychiatric use. I have no idea. Similarly, Prozac had not been approved for adolescent use at that time either. If I'm remembering correctly, think it gained that approval around 2000. I might be misremembering that. It's in my book. So clearly she had been influenced by some source or sources to make this
medical decision on my behalf. don't know. I don't know. I can only hypothesize as to where, but it was based literally on zero evidence, literally.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (34:56.987)
So when I'm at my worst, I go to extremes and I come to this conclusion that someone like her and many like her, these psychiatrists who are treating, you know, young people in this manner are either very incompetent, extremely incompetent, or they're just sociopaths. And there's nothing in between for me. So the incompetence is who could not foresee
An experimental drug acting on the brain during a sensitive critical period of adolescence wouldn't have adverse negative effects. That's the incompetence piece. The incompetence piece also is, well, the fact that we don't have sound science to support that they're safe. How do you fucking take the risk and sleep at night? That's into the like sociopathic, you know, aspect. How can you be so detached from humanity that you don't feel for that person? Work hard to try to understand that.
person better and not just in 50 minutes, one time, but over the course of an extended period of time. And you care about what you're putting into the body of that person. Is that is that too extreme?
Laura Delano (36:09.87)
Well, I feel you. get why you go to those two places. I think I have a more perhaps charitable perspective on it, I didn't always have. Early on, it was much harder for me to access the ability to step into the shoes of my parents, my doctors, every player in this game.
of that I encountered. But I did eventually realize that every single, you whether it's the doctor, the prescriber or the therapist or the nurse on the psych ward or the parent, they are making a decision that has its own logic given the history and context and training.
indoctrination, know, all, all, everything that led that psychiatrist to that seat in her office on that day, where when she first met me, had primed her to see this little girl in front of her as a list of symptoms to intervene upon. And so, you know, just as I eventually became totally indoctrinated into being a professional psychiatric patient, basically, and what I call, you know, psychiatrisation, which I think
is a term that I'm really wanting to get into the zeitgeist because it is this profound ideology that you take on as a patient. I think also she and all of the psychiatrists out there have their own, they from day one of medical school onward, everything that they're learning and all the ways they're being trained to see fellow humans
is geared around medicalization with a pharmaceutical or medical device intervention, because of course they're doctors. And so when all you have is a, what is it? Hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so I think this isn't me absolving that doctor of responsibility or any of these other doctors, because in an ideal world, all of us pause here at this moment in our cultural history and step back and say like,
Laura Delano (38:36.408)
What the heck are we doing here? And why are we doing these things? Like that needs to happen. Do not get me wrong. And there needs to be a really a truth and reconciliation process here, I think. I don't, however crazy this might sound to you, like I don't blame that doctor for what she did. She did exactly what she thought was the right thing to do, especially because doctors are free to prescribe off-label. A drug company cannot market a drug for off-label uses, but doctors can do whatever the heck they want.
with the drugs that they prescribed. So she was actually not doing anything illegal or unethical according to her, the guidelines in which she had grew up. Again, is not me justifying it, just more to say like, I could get some point Roger, was like, I have to understand, I have to find a way to step into their shoes to see the world through their eyes, otherwise.
How are we ever gonna like come to the table and have a real conversation about this if we can't see this issue from each other's varied perspectives? Even Joseph Biederman's perspective. I passed him once in a hallway, by the way, I was at MGH many, many, years later. And I walk in and this was someone who was about to die. It was a really traumatic time in my life. And there's Joseph Biederman.
walking towards me down the hallway and I'm like
This man has no idea the role he's had in the course of my life.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (40:07.153)
I probably would have tackled him right there in the hole.
Yeah, I mean, you're a better person in this regard. So, you know, I'm starting to think about things a little bit differently. Now there was a time I think I was giving a lot of physicians the benefit of the doubt, but here we are, in 2025. And in my community, I'll have psychiatrists who've never met me, never had a conversation with me, bad mouthing me to families and parents, calling me words like anti-psychiatry, anti-medication, dangerous.
you know, and, and these, these people are provided a, a privilege in society where that privilege comes with extraordinary responsibility and the ethics of goes beyond just, you know, do no harm. have laws around informed consent and you weren't provided informed consent because this person who is prescribing the drug.
wasn't fully aware of the potential harms and the dangers. And that's the responsibility of the prescriber. That's the responsibility you have in our society as being a physician. You have to protect the welfare and rights of the patients. And so you don't have the freedom to be brainwashed or indoctrinated. You don't have that fucking right. It's your responsibility to take care of the person that's in front of you and you have to be
transparent. If you don't know you say I don't know. Hey, this is an experimental drug. It's new. It went through this trial for this population. We're going to try it on you and we should monitor it. No, you don't get that. You don't say hey, we really can't really tell what's going to happen to you one year down the line. Hell six months from now two years down the line. We know nothing. This is an experiment.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (42:06.437)
But I believe in my field, I believe in my ideology, I believe in the burgeoning science doesn't mean you have to. But you know, this is what this is what I'm suggesting based on what I what I know you don't get any of that stuff. You get the pharmaceutical salesperson's pitch. You know, and that's what they've been providing for the past 30 to 35 years. And it's killed people. You know, and we have people who die by suicide.
after being prescribed drugs that are known to increased suicidality amongst another a number of harms that make people want to kill themselves like akathisia and then they say they died by mental illness and you know that's just the risk we take by treating this population they're protected and they can't be protected anymore they need to assume responsibility because it's still still occurring now only you can speak to the nuance and intricacies
that this had on your developing identity, your relationship to self, how you viewed yourself, and then what the consequences were of that down the line for you.
Laura Delano (43:16.782)
So, you know, I did resist and reject what that psychiatrist told me for a few years, from ages 14 to 18, even though I was still, you know, I was seeing her regularly until I eventually went away to boarding school, which enabled me to kind of disappear from her radar for a while. But I knew in the back of my mind that I'd been given this diagnosis. I had the...
pills, I avoided taking whenever I could. And then once I got to boarding school, didn't take. And no one in my family asked me about that. No one encouraged me to see a psych, there wasn't even a psychiatrist at the time on campus there. I think now there are entire giant mental health clinics in every New England boarding school, but then there wasn't. So, so luckily between those, those highs in those high school years, I was
mostly not on the drugs, only sometimes on them, and did not internalize that diagnosis. Like it just was more in the background, kind of like whispering to me. But at the same time, I still felt so trapped in this life that felt inauthentic, that I felt like a performer in. I felt like I had no idea who the fuck I was and how I fit into any of this. So I was in a lot of pain.
I was writing dark poetry and doing a lot of ecstasy and deconstructing space and time and language and really spinning out in many ways. I did maintain really meaningful friendships in high school, but thank God. And so I was still rooted in the here and now in a lot of ways that I wouldn't be later once I really got psychiatrized.
but nothing really changed at this deeper, like existential, spiritual, philosophical level. So by the time I got to Harvard, because of course I was still thinking in the back of my mind, maybe if I do get into a school like Harvard, maybe I'm crazy and this whole performance game is actually real and I'm tricking myself into thinking it's bullshit. And so if I get into Harvard, I'll prove myself wrong, because I'll actually finally feel comfortable in my skin when I get there. Of course I didn't.
Laura Delano (45:40.02)
And so I really spun out freshman fall in college, which I think is another critical turning point for a lot of young people, this big transition into a new environment that has all of these kind of taken for granted assumptions about what it's meant to do for you and be for you. I really, really spun out that fall and.
started doing a lot of cocaine and was not sleeping and was found Michel Foucault and postmodernism more broadly and just like really lost touch with a lot of the day to day here and now reality. And I was eventually just so desperate for relief from this pain and this loneliness and this sense of alienation from the world around me that that little whispering voice in the back of my mind like bipolar, bipolar, bipolar.
I basically was like, shh, that doctor must have been right. Like what a fool I've been for refusing to accept it. Like there's no reason why I want to die right now. There's no reason. Everything's going the way that it's meant to go. And so that desperation is what drove me back to psychiatry, this time from my own will. And I think that I, the word desperation, I think that feeling.
when you're just so tired of the pain, you're so confused and overwhelmed and afraid, and you're convinced you've exhausted every option on offer and you're fucked. there's nothing else you can do besides kill yourself. I flesh that out a lot in the book and whenever I'm sharing my story, always try to paint a picture of what that felt like because that is the critical juncture for so many people who go on
to be psychiatrized, that desperation and that fear of the unknown and what isn't making sense to you and just wanting relief.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (47:45.979)
So I'm so glad we're at this point, because we're going to use your wisdom now to try to reflect back on what you think you really needed or what could have helped you at that time. Because those are some of the answers. This is where we get, we do get stuck as a society is when someone's on that edge right there. I find therapists are too scared to be on that edge with somebody. And then there's the whole liability factor.
you know, the fear that's indoctrinated in all of us that the life is in the hands of a client who comes to see us, that we tend to outsource it, regardless of the outcomes of that, right? Like even if I know that just by outsourcing you to psychiatry and going on this drug or that drug that we've now dramatically increased the risk that you actually will die by suicide, it's at least off of the therapist's hands or the family's hands or something else.
So what do you think you needed at that time?
Laura Delano (48:47.298)
Hmm. And I want to circle back to that point you just made about the responsibility that's on the shoulders of mental health professionals, because it's a really important topic. Hindsight, with hindsight, you know, it's such a hard question to answer because there's so many layers to, to, there are so many layers to what happened to me that night in the mirror. There were so many layers to what happened that fall at Harvard and
And it really goes back to, know, at the heart of it, it's like we are living, like if you keep peeling back onion layer after onion layer, eventually you get to the layer of our modern industrialized day and age is anti-human and basically designed to, not designed like it's deliberately designed necessarily, but has unfolded in such a way that we are blocked from our true nature as humans and
disabled in so many ways by these various systems and industries that we've all been taught to think are about serving us. The education industry, the elite education industry, that I spent my entire life thinking that going to a good school would help me feel good about myself. That story right there is worth unpacking in a...
an episode itself, because of course that was one component of why I was spinning out, because I'd put all this faith in this idea that an Ivy League education, you know, lighthouse on the horizon up ahead, once I get there, then I can feel good about myself. You know, that's just one kind of layer here. There's the layer of the food I was putting in my body and the way how just disconnected I was from what my body actually needed, you know, between eating disorders and...
fake sugar, artificial sweeteners and low fat-free diets. That was a whole thing. Those are just two of hundreds of layers that I would have needed to have unpacked in order to actually get what I needed, which to put it succinctly was the chance to step back and evaluate my entire life right down to the food I was eating all the way out to
Laura Delano (51:12.332)
my values and belief or lack thereof in God. I just needed space and time to explore, unpack, discuss, to read philosophy, to read spiritual texts. I didn't have any of that space or time, and I don't blame anyone for it. It wasn't like it was being kept from me. It was just like not a visible.
offering in the particular life that I lived. I mean, the simplest answer to that question of what did I really need then is, you know, maybe if I had happened upon a woman, you know, a young woman a few years older than me who had her own dark night of the soul and emerged on the other side and could kind of like come back and say, I've been where you've been. If you had done this path of medicalization, like
you're gonna lose a lot of opportunities to actually go deep into what this wisdom is here. Like, that's the quickest answer I could give, but as I was saying earlier, it's so big. It's so fucking big. And that's part of the problem is that if we want to really help young people especially, this isn't about each individual getting a better intervention or a better offer. It's like literally stepping back and assessing our entire society and like how we've configured everything.
to say, this conducive to well-being and vitality and meaning or not?
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (52:42.491)
So a sick culture is going to produce people who feel very, very sick. So I'm so glad that you kind of talked to the complexity of this. We seem to still, we remain in this healthcare system and in the mental health care system where we're still looking for these magic bullets. You whether it's the right pill, mean, give you a psychedelic, everything's gonna get better, keto diet.
You know, we're still trying to hammer home like this one intervention that makes sense for everything. It's a quick fix. It's that explanation. We're falling right back down to the same path. I think that we have for, you know, the past century. And so I think if I, my head always goes to, right, what if you're in front of me, what do I do? You know, you're in Harvard and you're going through those things. I think the first thing is trying to establish some degree of hope. Okay. That this can be temporary and meaningful.
So as difficult it is to talk about this existential angst and this dark night of the soul to be something that you want to escape, would probably be encouraging you not to escape it and let's be together in it. I would certainly be concerned about behaviors that could lead you to end your life either purposefully or accidentally. And we would have to prioritize trying to change those behaviors.
And you'd have to have some supports to allow you in those moments to be able to get the help you needed. For me personally, it's something called coaching calls. It's where those types of clients have my personal phone number. And for at least a period of time I'm saying, Hey, listen, I might be seeing you on a random Tuesday at four o'clock. You might actually need me on a Friday at, you know, one in the morning. And so at least till we get some things.
understood and you get to help in those moments that you need here. You're going to have, you're going to have my cell phone. I trust that you're going to use it respectfully. And when you, when you really need it, and I also trust that you don't going to feel like a burden, you're going to reach out and I wouldn't give you my number unless I could really help you. And then I, would be addressing the things that you're talking about. Like it's prob you're probably not going to feel better. you know, eating shit or not eating at all.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (55:01.081)
and dousing that with like vodka at night and, you know, weed. And where are you in your willingness to try to change this? And if you're not, let's understand what the consequences of that are. And knowing that in some regard, that's a choice. There's agency in you choosing that lifestyle. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, but how willing are you to now start walking away from that? And then I think the third piece of this is, you know, you're a human being.
Um, you have a soul, a psyche, whatever we want to call it, a spirit. And your life is really, really meaningful. And everything you're going through is ultimately to serve you. And what that means is it doesn't mean it feels good, but even in the worst, darkest moments of your life, there's, there's something, there's a purpose that's going to be attached to it that you're not going to understand till later in your life. And so Laura, here you are sitting with me, of course. Um, you know, this is part of your purpose. mean,
what an incredible book, what incredible life-changing work you're doing. I think you're on the edge of real genuine cultural shifts through these conversations. So I think reflecting back, you're not here without going through these experiences, right?
Laura Delano (56:17.235)
totally. And I wouldn't change a minute of any of it if I could.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (56:21.103)
So if that message could be communicated to people who are in a dark place.
Laura Delano (56:25.902)
Well, and here's the question. And I'm curious what you think about this, Roger, because everything you just said, I'm like my neck's hurting. I'm just like nodding with you, everything you just shared. And as you're talking, I'm like putting myself back in that 18 year old time of my life where A, I had, I had felt so betrayed by adults, adult authority figures because of the experiences I'd already had with that first therapist. And so like how willing would I have been?
to go deep with another adult when I had felt so betrayed, like trying to think that through. And then B, that desperation had distorted any, if I had once had the bandwidth to like take time to figure things out, that felt gone. I was so desperate for relief that I can't help but wonder if hearing that message of like,
The only way out is through like all these messages that are so meaningful to me today and that I literally talk about all the time as you do. Would I have actually been able to hear any of that? And I don't know the answer to that, but I'm curious when you meet young people, whether they're teens or young adults who are in those places already, how do you break through that? what's, maybe you, I don't know if you have a particular anecdote you could share, cause I'm like, I don't know how, if I had sat down with Roger,
Would I have actually been open to hearing what I had to say or would I have been like, fuck you, I have a brain disease. I don't have time for this.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (58:02.511)
Yeah, no, it's a good question. And I would be dishonest with you if I said I didn't come across that and lost. you know, I did, you know, and at times in my career, I've, I've had to adapt and adjust my style. I've had to grow and learn from mistakes. You know, one of the things I say to all my, clients is that you're my teacher. I, try to eliminate the, to the best I can, that kind of authority figure that I'm, I'm in. And I.
I'm very outspoken against my field, but I work in it and I try to do the best I can in it. So I devalue diagnosis. I try to give them information and I try to connect on some degree of a human level. I tell stories a lot. know, so for example, there, you know, there have been people that maybe I worked with at one point in time where I said some of the things that I said to you.
You know, and thought I had them on board and then poof, they're gone. I don't see them again. I reach out heartfelt email. Don't see them. And then three years later, you know, they come into my office out of the blue, sat down and said, you know, I wasn't really ready to hear it at that point. and I was really angry and I dismissed you in my mind, but I haven't stopped thinking about some of the things that you've said.
Laura Delano (59:29.133)
Mm-hmm.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (59:30.903)
And, this is what I've done. Or, you know, I've gotten just a random call from people I don't even remember, you know, on a call in my voicemail that says, maybe you don't remember me. You only met me once. But what you said was impactful. So I try to, with courage, try to inspire hope and try to give people an alternative way of thinking about it. The younger they are, the more that conversation is now with families.
because the families have to protect their kid from going down the path. And to me, it's about giving them information. I recognize I'm vulnerable to as a psychologist, I have my own ideas, I have my own viewpoint, and other people may not be there. And so the best way for me to express humility is saying, hey, listen, coming to see me, I'm not the savior. It doesn't mean you come and see me as opposed to doing this route and you get better.
But here's what I believe. Here's what I've seen and here what I'm trying to protect you against. You have freedom and you have the option in this mental health world to hear another pitch from somebody else. But what I'm going to ask you to do is do a little of the research on your own and understand the risks that you're taking because you can't really go back once you make that. Like, I think you said something in your, in your book that you played Russian roulette and you won.
And that was a powerful statement, right? mean, and the book is full of them. And I felt that because there are people who have played Russian roulette and they've lost. They've died. know, parents have lost their, their children. I've sat in front of a grieving mothers who's teenager who was not suicidal before they went on the SSRI died by suicide and
I don't want that feeling and that pain to ever leave me. And every day that I get the new opportunity, I'm going to share these stories. And the honesty of this is there's nothing that's quick. There's no quick fix. And I'm telling you now, you might not believe me, but your pain has value. It's an energy. It's an energy you need to experience. And it can...
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:01:58.29)
transform you into a new person. There's a death and a reborn that exists over and over and over. We can call it a resurrection that's going to exist throughout our life. There's parts of us that are going to die and there's things that are rebuilt and they come through awakenings and we can only do it like in the dark, in that pain. And I can't even begin to tell you what I've seen from the most wise people I've ever come across in my life and still to this day have gone through
some of the worst shit, you know, they've, they've been traumatized, neglected, they've been drugged, they've been in the dark side of all aspects of life that we fear that we don't want to talk about. That's not polite at parties. And they communicate an inner wisdom from coming through that experience. And so I just don't want to devalue the dark side that someone's in. And what that does, in my opinion, is it alters their relationship to it.
Instead of judging it as something that's pathological, instead of believing that the only way they can survive and function is by escaping it or numbing it, they now have a new relationship to it. Now I realize the responsibility I take on to have to be able to help them in that relationship to that pain, but that's my only worth. I'm not really good at anything else, Like that's what God put me here to do. I have a high tolerance for pain and suffering.
I enjoy being in the experience with somebody and the brilliance and wisdom. And I believe I know how to get people from point A to point B. That's all I got. If you want to go on this journey with me, you know, I'm in it with you. But if you think there's some magic pill, or you think I'm God, or I can relieve that suffering from you, that's not that's not who I
Laura Delano (01:03:51.31)
It fills my heart with such joy and gratitude that so many young people and families cross paths with you and that message. It is the conundrum, the mystery in all of this is that, because I think about this all the time, could I have had the awakenings, the shifts in understanding of myself,
Could I have had all of these gifts come into my life if I hadn't gone through all that darkness? I don't know. And I often wonder about, if someone had somehow managed to sit me down and my parents down at the very beginning of the whole thing and map out a clear picture of the lack of evidence base.
for the drugs I was about to be put on and the history of the DSM and the fact that this is not a scientific text with any reliability or validity and corporate corruption and all this stuff. Would that have been enough for me to be like, okay, I'm not gonna go there now. like, I need in some deep unconscious way to go through this and...
emerge on the other side to be able to realize that life isn't about the absence of pain. I don't know if I could have, I don't know if there could have been any other way. And I love how everything you just shared, I relate to it so much. And I was getting teary-eyed hearing you talk. And I say in my book, because people often assume that now I'm mentally healthy, quote unquote, and I'm happy and I have my shit together and life is good and like,
Wow, success story, you recovered, yada, yada, yada. And I find myself in this like strange position where like, no, actually, if I saw a psychiatrist, they'd have plenty of diagnoses to give me. I still meet the criteria, quote unquote, for plenty of things. The difference is that that framework has no relevance to me. And also, I'm not afraid of my pain anymore. So like, why do I need to, I don't feel the need to go define it for myself.
Laura Delano (01:06:15.786)
and name it as a problem to solve. I do think sometimes when I'm in pain, it is a message about needing to change something in my life. Like if I'm eating, know, if there happen to be a bunch of kids birthday parties in this short period of time and I go hard on birthday cake too much, I feel really shitty. I feel anxious. I feel headachy. I feel lethargic. Like that's a signal, that pain is a signal. Like are you in touch with your body in the way that
Are you, you nourishing your body in the way that it needs right now? okay. Maybe I'll take a break on eating that, all that processed sugar. But there are other times when my pain is so, especially the grief that I feel and the anger that I feel about the state of the world right now in so many ways. Like there's, this is not something to take action to, to change in myself. This is pain that I need to take action to change the world with. And I think it's about
So besides letting go of the fear of it all and instead being curious about my pain when it comes up, I also have developed to the best of my abilities this discretion about it. Is this a pain that's telling me to take different care of myself and care not in a mental health way? Or is this pain that's sending me a message that things are off in the environment around me or the world around me and that's what needs to be acted upon?
And think once you click with that, that, wow, my mind is not something I need to be afraid of. Just it changed everything for me and the amount of the year, the years and years and years I spent running and seeking, just terrified of my own capacity for madness. And now I like, I struggle in all kinds of ways these days. And I'm just like,
Find it humorous, like, wow, my mind goes to some really twisted places. This is hilarious.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:08:25.509)
I think we need to get into the therapy industry a little bit to talk about how the therapy industry in itself kind of feeds into the psychiatric industry. They become kind of one in the same, but the dichotomous confusing aspects of the extremes of therapy and psychiatry are quite confusing to me. On one end, you'll talk to a therapist who has high more, a lot of that intolerance for emotional pain and.
sees the value in facing it and even talking about it. The type of therapies you're in by no means probably resemble the work that I do, but that psychodynamic kind of work that you went into with some of these psychiatrists or therapists, you know, it's around this labeling and this assessment and we're evaluating and we're ruminating and we're going back in the past and we're trying to make sense of and you're facing it. And then there's always this
confusing dichotomy that exists or, well, there's too much. So then you have to go see the psych psychiatrist, like, and the psychiatrist is going to give you the kind of the opposite message of the therapist in a lot of ways. You know, that's too much feeling. I don't like those thoughts. Let's see we can level you out. Let's see if we can numb you. And then you go back to the therapist and they want you to cry, or they want you to experience emotion. And they view that like I had a great session today because my client cried.
It's like, what the fuck? Like, how do you make sense of this? You, you numbskull. And I'll get in these, I'll get into these conversations with, with therapists who love to send their, their clients for psych drugs. And I'm like, are you aware of this confusing message? And then they say dumb things like, well, I just think they can use this as something to help them get through or take the edge off or other
nonsensical bullshit. What do you mean tech the edge off? What's the edge? Like, what do you mean? They can't feel too much? Well, what's what impact are you having on your client when you're sending that they can't handle certain thoughts or emotions? Because that's what you're communicating. And the truth of the matter is they've never fucking thought through it. They go and they become indoctrinated and they hear hear bullshit, like, oh, the best way to help somebody who's depressed is therapy and a drug. Right? Did you ever look back?
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:10:48.943)
or try to investigate how that narrative came to be pushed on all of us. I have, I looked back at how they distorted research that comes from like the TAD study for children or, you know, other NIMH funded studies that turned out to be fraudulent. And they take certain data and they say, well, we combined cognitive behavioral therapy with an SSRI and that proved the best outcomes. No.
that that's not what happened. That's not what the data says. You're lying. But they don't feel like they have the responsibility to ever look at that. So they're not really thinking for themselves. They're just kind of absorbing what they're told and they enter into the industry and they just do it. They throw the diagnoses at them. Well, I think you have a touch of OCD. You know, it might not be bipolar disorder. I'm considering borderline personality disorder. Now, I don't want you to be frightened by that.
And I'm going to add in my fourth diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder. It's not real yet, but they're researching it. I just think it's been a little too long that you've been grieving the loss of your child that died at age one. Like it's the most nonsensical bullshit and no one thinks through it. Now, the therapy industry seems to feed into the rumination. It seems to...
feed into the identity struggles that you were experiencing at that time and in no way really helped you to deal with what you needed to at the time. And there's moments in the book where I think you're honest, where you were just like hoping somebody could sit you down and like just be real with you and say, you know, and say, like, listen, I'm scared for you and the things that you're doing. Let's have a plan for this. Let's change this. Let's just stay with your life right now and not talk about, I don't know what happened to you when you were eight.
Laura Delano (01:12:45.748)
It's such a, it's the current configuration of this whole industry is so, it's so complicated. When you think about how the incentive, basically the incentive structure throughout is antithetical to
A to making a therapy feel obsolete to the patient. B to actually individualizing and personalizing what the person actually needs. Because I imagine when you're trained in a particular modality and that's the lens you're wearing and you're just imposing that on every person who sits down in front of you.
I mean, how can that actually ever be truly effective? I mean, I think the whole thing is set up to fail. It's set up to fail, obviously, the patients themselves. It's also set up to fail the therapists and the doctors and everyone. But I think what gets distorted there is that because we have this added element of this diagnostic, you know, the medical model where
Any failure is just pathologized further so that no one ever has to actually step back and say, whoa, I'm not actually helping people. They're just saying, I am helping people, but this poor person just keeps getting sicker and sicker. So I think the whole thing is set up to not actually help anyone ever. I know for me, the therapy, and I had a lot of therapy. I was totally therapeuticized. mean, basically from day one. And because...
I had this core belief that I had this incurable brain disease. My understanding of the purpose of therapy was to basically just talk about my endless list of symptoms and keep a long list of symptoms to talk about because otherwise, what am gonna talk about in therapy? And so my therapists who were all very kind people, I don't, again, I don't think they...
Laura Delano (01:15:09.644)
I think they really truly were trying to help me. had this, they had their own tunnel vision, distorting their capacity to actually see what was really happening for me, which was psychiatric iatrogenesis, first and foremost, meaning for anyone not familiar with the term iatrogenesis, meaning injury or harm caused by treatment itself. So of course that was not being recognized, nor were any of these onion layers of,
just kind of cultural, these cultural between the education system and the food system and all these systems that I was enmeshed with that were harming me. You of course no individual therapist is going to be able to see any of that, let alone actually help the person do that. And so I just, I literally thought therapy was about talking about my problems with this nice person.
paid to listen to me. I did all, CBT, DBT, mentalization, I did all of it, all of it. But I always just had this deeper sense, none of this is really gonna help me because I have a brain disease. What is any of this really gonna do for me? So that core belief, as long as I was there, no therapeutic modality would have helped me. But even if that hadn't been there,
life is so fucking complicated and then in the needs each person has are so unique and complex and that we think we can just like, this modality is the most effective for the treatment of social anxiety disorder. Like, what does that even mean? How do you even judge that? It's just the whole thing is set up to just kind of perpetuate itself while not actually
ever helping people leave it because they're doing well. It's a real mess, for sure.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:17:15.919)
Yeah, I know when I go off like I just did, it can come across like somehow arrogant or no better, but I'm really angry with myself. So I've been in it. I was trained in it. The people that I right now I'm critical of and debate against, I was that, you know, at least at some points in my career. But it never sat well with me and I always questioned it. And I think I was growing and changing and learning and
because I was willing to have that look myself in the mirror and look at my field and be critical of it. I feel like I protected people that otherwise might've been harmed. And I gave people more honest and transparent information to the point where I am now, where I think I'm, you know, much more open and transparent about that and believe so strongly in, in medical freedom. Here's a great example. So I, when I was in graduate school, my doctoral program, we took what's called the MMPI.
which is like basically a pretty thorough personality assessment computerized. I mean, it's using court systems. When there's child custody hearings, know, parents are gonna have to take these things. And it's considered to have like pretty strong validity. And I had this elevated score on psychopathic deviant, right? Now,
the word itself sounds like, shit, like what am I a psychopath? Like this is what we're talking about in popular culture. But the truth of the matter is that elevated score in its isolation just means challenges conventional social norms, right? So it's exactly who I am. I don't accept anything on its face value as absolute truth. And I feel like I have a responsibility to challenge authority. I think history informs me of that. And
know, that doesn't always work well in a system where if you challenge the hierarchy, you're viewed as like difficult or rebellious. And so we see this in the mental health system, that if a patient or client starts to challenge their care, now they are provided a new diagnosis, right? So you're, you're harmed by the treatment, you feel like shit, you're not getting better. And then you challenge the authority. And now it's a sign of some personality disorder you have.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:19:35.929)
or God forbid you just don't have insight into your mental illness. So basically, Laura, once you get in, you can't really get out, can you?
Laura Delano (01:19:46.986)
Ironically, the best way to get out is to pretend to accept your diagnosis and be compliant and then disappear yourself. I mean, that's the... When someone's literally locked up on a psych ward and they're like, help, my God, how do I get out of here? I don't want to take these drugs. I don't want to be here. Basically, you need to play the game and show everyone how much you think you need to be there and how much you think you need them. And then they'll get you out.
But it's, it is this, it's a very, yeah, that, that trap, that entrapment that happens. And it definitely happened to me. mean, in my book, I, when I am writing about the period of time when I was beginning to wake up and realize I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to be coming to see these people. I don't want to be taking these drugs. I started to speak out about it. That was in turn, you know, written into my records as, as me.
being a difficult patient as basically evidence of how borderline I was. And if you look at the actual, at the literature on that label, it's literally written in as a symptom. I can't remember the exact wording, but basically patients who question treatment, that itself is a symptom of borderline. I mean, it's a great, it keeps everyone trapped.
the on both on the side of the doctor or the therapist and the patient side. So then it really is about just when, you're the one being told your, your questioning is a sign of how sick you are. It's, it's about, you know, sinking into the deepest, most, most, kind of like primal part of yourself that, that insists on surviving.
and like staying there and just keeping your eye on the prize and forging ahead with what you know is true for you. Because I did hear plenty of not nice things from my treatment team, so-called treatment team as I was making my way out. But I was just so determined to leave all these old stories behind that I'd bought into for so many years that I just tried to block it out and...
Laura Delano (01:22:08.822)
forge ahead into this unknown that also was terrifying. I had no idea who I would be beyond being a mental patient because it was literally my job through my 20s. But I knew, I knew I had to trust myself and just keep going no matter what they were telling me about myself.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:22:29.305)
Yeah, this brings up a point where and you know this gentleman's name. I've asked after am I saying that correctly? That's after who's a psychiatrist. And he has a blog. Like he's like semi critical of his field. And he and he has this blog and I think he writes for like various outlets.
Laura Delano (01:22:37.516)
I think he pronounces it a-ves, I'm pretty sure.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:22:58.593)
And he did a review of your book. And it's a fascinating review because on one den, he begins to be critical of all your care, which is like McLean Hospital. It's the best of the best. mean, and at the time, this was considered the most innovative, effective care from professionals.
Laura Delano (01:23:13.698)
I had the best of the best. There's no...
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:23:26.897)
of the highest respect and order and so and they were influential in the field of psychiatry. You can go through your book. I mean, literally, the guy who kind of invented, you know, effective treatments for borderline personality disorder or really pushing pushing that condition into the lexicon of society was like your, you know, heading your treatment team. you know, so there's this, it's like almost like he read it and then didn't get it.
Right? So he's, he's crit, he, he's really, there's, it's a positive review of the book because the book is so well written, but he uses it to be critical of your treatment team. And then he slaps a diagnosis on you as if you were just missed. you, know, you have borderline personality disorder, Laura. And if you would have gotten help for your borderline personality disorder, it would have prevented all this harm. And there's a way to give you drugs. That just wasn't the right way.
And you see this all over again, like this is like constantly like people will see psychiatrist after psychiatrist after psychiatrist who's critical of the other drug regimen and the diagnosis. They just switch it, provide new drugs and you go deeper and deeper into hell. I wanted to get your kind of thoughts on Dr. Aftab's like review of your book and his, I don't think he's ever, have you met him personally?
Laura Delano (01:24:47.87)
we met once on, on zoom. had a nice chat. I haven't actually read the review. I've kind of decided out the gates to not really read reviews of my book for the most part. I, there, you know, for many reasons, but I've been given a summary of the review and that's what you, how you just described it is, is my sense of, of what it's about. And I think.
Laura Delano (01:25:18.91)
I feel for him, I feel for how hard it is to actually, I'll just speak generally about psychiatrists out there who are doing their best to think critically about their profession. I mean, the problems with the psychiatric paradigm go to the very heart of the legitimacy of the profession itself. And I think that's a terrifying, to truly hear my story.
and to truly understand what actually happened to me in so far as psychiatric iatrogenesis is concerned. mean, my story is a story of iatrogenesis where I, yes, I was struggling significantly before I met psychiatry, but between the diagnostic paradigm, the drug paradigm, the whole culture of being a patient, you know,
It's really hard to say that anything, it's impossible to make the case that any of the progressive dysfunction that I felt over the years was separate from any of that. I think it's all just enmeshed together. So to really step back and see that requires the ability to step back from your career, from what's paying your mortgage, from what's helping you pay for your kid's college education, from the very
belief that you're helping people. It requires you to step back from all of that and wonder in the very least if it's none of that's actually, if everything you've believed about yourself as a professional is actually not true. And having been in that place on the patient side of it, being forced up against this reality and having to step back and call into question my entire life up to that point, it was almost unsurvivable to truly face that.
And so I get why Aves ended his piece by saying I was borderline the whole time. I get why. My understanding is that part of that reasoning was that because of how borderline, quote unquote, I was, that led me to have this intense extreme relationship with psychiatry, this like black and white, you know, textbook borderline way of relating to other entities in the world.
Laura Delano (01:27:45.998)
If I hadn't been so borderline in how I related to psychiatry, I wouldn't have gotten so swept up by all of this. he needs, for him to not think that is inviting him to basically question his entire life. And I really appreciate what a big ask that is. So, you know, I of course have, he and I, as we said when we met,
We have a lot of differences of opinion. We do not see things the same way. I also love the fact that he was even willing to write a nice review of my book, encourages readers to read it. love that he, you know, I'm sure maybe he and I will do something together, a discussion or something. I mean, to me, this is about having compassion for all of these doctors who
are trying their hardest to question the very underpinnings of their entire professional career. It is not an easy ask. it's, don't, yeah, I think inevitably they're going to make concessions and have like, you know, justification feedback loops. And I'm like, let them, let them keep doing that if they need to do that to survive, because we're over here building our, our
you know, and of parallel space of ex-patients helping one another. So if psychiatry thinks I'm borderline, all the power to them. I find it hilarious. I'm over here in the non-medical, non-professional realm with all of my fellows and we're living really meaningful lives over here. It's kind of where I'm at with it all.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:29:39.737)
Yeah, if they had no power in American society, it'd be a lot easier for me just to kind of accept that idea. And you are protected, right? Like, first of all, he's assigning you a diagnosis without really knowing you, certainly not knowing you now or any aspect of your life. And that in itself should bring up red flags for most people about the institution. We see this all the time. know, Alan Francis wrote a book about Donald Trump and diagnosed him throughout.
you there's these things that they do that gives them this sense of power that they can categorize and identify and actually dehumanize another person, which can lead to taking away their rights. And that's another thing that's like very important about your story is how easy it is for your rights to be taken away from you based on someone's judgment of who you are or your behavior. It's the one area, you know, in life is like, we don't have to commit a crime, but if they
think that you possibly could, they now have legal justification for locking you up. And we need to be careful about this because you can look throughout history, know, countries, people in power have used psychiatry as a way of dehumanizing and illegitimizing, you know, political opponents, people who've scorned them in their past. It's a way for sociopaths to institute control over another group of people.
You mentioned earlier that this is kind of an anti-human agenda, and I really agree with you. And we're in this workings here now where we're more aware of the anti-human, transhumanist agenda, where all the aspects of us being human, you know, our collective pain, our empathy, our caring, our connection, which I see as superpowers and connections to the divine, in our medical system are...
you know, separated into like these pieces, like we're, you know, separate pieces, like we're robots or something like that. And we can drug them and we can change them, we can alter them and things that, you know, make us messy, but also fuel revolution. You know, these are the things that we somehow have to change about us. And so the viewpoint of human beings of being about a flawed species that's broken, that can be altered through technology is a real...
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:31:59.121)
You know, it's a dramatic shift in opinion. It's a dramatic shift in belief and value. And living in a free country or living in a free society is so, it's so important for us to protect our individual rights. And psychiatry is an infringement on that. And it's never been easier throughout history to enter into that system. In fact, it's pushed on us as healthcare. And when you see our government devoting, you know, billions of dollars into like
quote unquote school based mental health clinics. You know, that's just more opportunity for you to get labeled and drugged sometimes outside of the purview supervision or agreement of your parents or your guardians. So when you have laws on the books that says 14 year olds can obtain mental health treatment without parental consent, you know, understand what that means. That's our children.
That's a vulnerable person who is at a distinct period of time in their life. you're not giving permission for that child to tell their life story to a stranger who, because they have a certification or a license, somehow deems them appropriate now to medicalize your child. But this stuff is done. And so we have to be a bit aggressive, I think, at this point.
to really point out the lunacy of all this and for us to then wake up and say, hey, we have rights. We have to protect ourselves. We have to protect our bodies. We have to protect our medical autonomy. We have to protect our freedom of humanity. And psychiatry has too much power. So when someone can get on a blog and basically, these are, these are, these are words from him that it's part of the Whitaker Moncrief worldview that allowed
Delano to escape the clutches of her pathologized identity, and she finds it difficult to look at things from outside that framework. Well, that's not my experience of you at all. In fact, you're actually talking about your experience from inside the framework, and you just don't agree with it. But if you don't agree with it, you know, obviously you're pathologized, there's something, gotta be something wrong with you, and all that happened is there's another ideology.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:34:24.227)
know, one that just supports freedom, you know, that says, hey, the science doesn't support this, and there's better ways. All of a sudden, there's, you know, an ideology that opposes his science, and then that's a threat.
Laura Delano (01:34:39.086)
Yeah, I texted Bob and Joanna when I heard that phrase and I was like, wow, you guys, you have your own worldview. Pretty cool. And I think this idea that the human body, that nature, whether it's human nature or nature around us, that it is a resource to exploit. It's a product to
commercialize, it's something defective to be improved or it's not good enough, needs to be made better. I I think that, I think this assumption that progress, endless progress, whether it's new and more drugs or new and more tech products or whatever it is, does come from a core disembodiment. I mean, and having been
Having grown up totally disembodied, mean, it all kind of clicks now and makes sense. Never once did I question being put on 800 milligrams of ibuprofen after having a knee injury. And I was like in middle school. I was on oral contraception for 16 years. I was put on it in high school because I was starving myself and I wasn't getting, you know, I wasn't.
getting my period and I remember being told, this will nourish your body and getting on the pill. And I went with it because I had no understanding of my cycle. I had no understanding of the female body. I was totally disembodied. So of course it made sense to take this pill. so I think, and similarly with psychiatry too and all these drugs, because I was so kind of disintegrated in myself and made perfect sense to
tweak my chemicals or so I thought. And so I do think a lot of this comes down to the world that we live in from birth basically, disconnecting us from our true nature, which then makes us vulnerable to fall prey to these tantalizing quick fix technologies and interventions and all of that. And so I think a lot of the way forward is about helping people come back into their bodies in a literal sense. Like when I...
Laura Delano (01:37:08.416)
actually picked up, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, that book in the early 2010s, having been on the pill for so many years, and I realized, wait a minute, I can't get pregnant at any time? I'm like, how the fuck did no one ever tell me that? What do you mean? Cervical fluid changes depending on where you're at in your cycle and that you can actually learn how to...
know exactly how fertile or not fertile you are by following this. Like I thought it was gross. I thought it was sign there's something wrong with me. It blew my mind that I had never learned any of this and I had no fucking idea how my body worked. And of course, once I learned how my body worked and I'm like, why the fuck would I take a pill to shut down my whole body? And and I actually taught myself how to read my cycle and take my basal body temp and like really understand.
how my body worked. I, I think in all these ways, whether it's the food we're putting in our bodies and how it disconnects us from our true nature or the pharmaceutical chemicals we're taking or the devices we're using, whatever it is, it's about giving, creating space and time and the chance to actually feel embodied in yourself and actually feel what it's like to be fully human. Cause once you have that experience,
It's like illogical and makes no sense whatsoever to then go back to trying to, know, hijack yourself and intervene upon the innate wisdom and intelligence of our bodies, which have evolved over millions and millions of years. And I do think in evolutionary, for me, if there was like one kind of framework, quote unquote, that has felt the most helpful to me in understanding suffering and the mind and all...
you know, day to day life, it is the evolutionary framework of, seeing how much of my day to day life is, is out of sync with what my body has actually evolved for. And of course I can't just change it overnight and be like, I'm not going to live in modern industrialized society anymore. Of course I can't, but just understanding that and then doing my best each day to make different choices when I can.
Laura Delano (01:39:30.348)
Like for example, when I decided, when I felt ready to conceive, which my body did not feel ready for years post-psych drug, for years post-oral contraception, like I could just feel in this deep, deep, deep way, like this is not a home yet to grow life. When I eventually did feel ready, I chose to have a non-medicalized pregnancy.
gave birth at home. I, and I was so in my power because I had spent all these years coming back into my body, learning about how women have been birthing since the dawn of time. There weren't hospitals for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Women gave birth pretty okay. So I think, and I think we have to be gentle and patient and compassionate with all the people who aren't necessarily embodied, re-embodying yet because
I wasn't, I was there too. And if I had been judged or shamed or, you know, tried coerced into re-embodying myself, it would have, it would have backfired. It's a long, complicated, scary road to come back into your body and your true nature. but once you do so many, just all common sense and, and like, it all just seems obvious.
out, but you're not going to do any more to yourself. Yeah.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:41:02.981)
So well said. I've kept you a long time. You know, we didn't get into today, you how you got off these drugs and, know, what you've learned in your career. I think that's another episode for us. And it's an important piece because people can recover from psychiatry and there are safe ways that, you know, that people have been proven to get off much, much slower than we could ever, you know, have thought when it comes to tapering.
but I know you're available out there and you put a lot of information out there in this. It's in the book too. By the time this becomes posted, which is soon, your book will be out there on the market. Just tell us about the book, where we can get it, and just a little bit about the work we're doing with Inner Compass and ways people can get connected to you.
Laura Delano (01:41:54.414)
Sure, yeah, to start with the topic of tapering off, it's, as you said, for many people, coming off of these drugs can be really difficult. I like to say it's risky to take and to come off a psychiatric drug. And so I do think for anyone out there who's thinking about coming off, make all the time you possibly can to educate yourself first about
what these drugs have, like how they've altered your brain and body about what slow tapering looks like, about how to prepare for a taper, how to optimize your nutrition, your support system, all of that. And Intercompass Initiative, which I founded in 2018, exists to provide all of that information for free and as accessible a way as possible to people out there because we believe it is a fundamental right to get good information about
all of these issues for free. You can find us at theinnercompass.org. We have a tapering manual that you can use to teach yourself about how to taper off. We have a community there of people at various stages of extricating themselves from the mental health industry. So you can, their community led discussion calls and ways to support one another or talk over there. You can learn about my book at unshrunkthebook.com.
And you can find out more about me at my website LauraDellano.com. And I'd love to come back on to do a deep dive with you, Roger, on the process of leaving behind one's psychiatrization. Because that's the real, that's the juicy stuff, really. How to get out of this mess and then figure out who the fuck you are beyond it.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:43:46.821)
Yeah, I really do recommend the book to everyone who's listening. It's an entertaining and informative read. You know, I tend sometimes to get stuck in rather dry, you know, books because I want to learn so much. And it's when you come across a real creative and intelligent author who's able to mix both of them through storytelling and context and throw in some research, but not in a dry way.
I mean, it was, it's so well written and it's, it's a quick read because of the way it's written and you just get through it fast and it's one of those page turners that's difficult to put down and when, and when you're done, feel moved by it. And so I want to thank you for that. Just first of all, so grateful for your, your work, your willingness to have this conversation, but your courage to put yourself out there to be vulnerable. I couldn't do it.
so I just much respect for what you've, what you're doing to put yourself, it's a sacrifice, and it's a sacrifice for the good of others. And it's, you know, I think a way of finding meaning in, in pain and being able to prevent suffering in the future for others. And then you're able to do it in, in, in such a, a beautiful and creative way that made it entertaining. And so, you know, congratulations on that and thank you for that.
Laura Delano (01:45:05.784)
Thank you, Roger. means a lot to hear. And yeah, to anyone out there who's in the thick of the darkness, just know that what you're in right now means something so important for the world. And if you just keep putting one foot in front of the next and keep staying open and curious about what this is here for, you will get through. And the story you have to tell about it is, like I like to say, is true medicine for other people.
Thanks for having me here.
Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:45:36.507)
Well said, Laura Delano, I wanna thank you for a radically genuine conversation.
Creators and Guests
