Laura Delano is the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a charitable organization that helps people make more informed choices about psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and drug withdrawal. She works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking support for a life post-psychiatry.
What’s the big idea?
After surrendering herself to mental health professionals throughout her teens and twenties, Laura Delano came to realize that what truly warped her wasn’t “illness,” but rather a system that gave her the wrong guidance. In leaving the formal mental health system and learning to trust herself again, she discovered the most important recovery lessons of all.
Below, Laura shares five key insights from her new book, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. Listen to the audio version—read by Laura herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Personal struggle doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with you—in fact, it may well be the very opposite.
The words we use to make sense of our inner experiences shape the way we understand ourselves: who we are, what our thoughts and emotions mean, how we fit (or don’t fit) into the world around us. I spent the most formative years of my life thinking about myself through the medicalized framework of “mental illness” and “mental health.” I translated my intense anger and despair and angst and loneliness and paranoia and self-doubt into the language of symptoms, disease, and psychopathology.
I grew convinced that my biochemistry needed fixing. I eventually learned that the opposite was true—that my struggle was a sign of my aliveness, sensitivity, and attunement to the world. My book invites a question: What if your struggles are not indicative of personal illness or malfunction but of the fact that something is out of alignment in your relationship with society—or perhaps out of alignment with society itself? Emotional pain does not have to mean proof of pathology. It can also mean that we are fully here and in touch with what’s happening to and around us.
2. No one knows you better than you know yourself.
During my time in the mental health system, I came to believe that I couldn’t trust my mind, that my thoughts and emotions were something to fear and manage, rather than tune into for guidance. My faithful identification with doctor-imposed diagnostic categories arrested my own process of individual meaning-making. What was the sense in cultivating curiosity about why I felt the way I did when it was simply the result of biological malfunction? I believed that my doctors, with all their qualifications and years of training, were experts on my suffering; having lost faith in the soundness of my own opinions, I accepted their delineation of my limits and what I would be able to “manage” as a “sick” person. I learned to quell the voice inside me that voiced confusion, discomfort, or protest because, as a faithful patient, I had internalized the belief that this was all “for my own good.”
“What was the sense in cultivating curiosity about why I felt the way I did when it was simply the result of biological malfunction?”
When I left the mental health system, I had to undergo a process of “recovery”—not in the sense of becoming mentally “healthy,” but in the sense of retrieval, or finding what I lost. That lost thing was trust in myself. Faith in my ability to navigate and interpret the world on my terms, knowing that I had all the answers I needed within me.
3. Expertise doesn’t always come from having letters after your name.
We are trained to believe that expertise comes from formal education– from accreditations and positions of prestige in respected institutions. But the word expertise comes from the Latin experitus, meaning “tried, proved, known through experience.” When I decided to come off psychiatric drugs in 2010, I did so with minimal help from my prescriber. Neither of us knew how to taper off medications safely, and I ended up discontinuing five drugs in the space of about six months (which is essentially going cold turkey and very dangerous).
At the time, online communities of people withdrawing from psychiatric drugs were still in their infancy, and so I muddled through withdrawal without knowing what was happening. Since then, online withdrawal communities have increased exponentially—a telling indicator of the lack of understanding and support from medical professionals about psychiatric drug withdrawal. It has been laypeople—not scientists, not clinicians—who have developed extensive knowledge about safe tapering methods, all based on their failed and successful attempts to come off their medications.
“Online withdrawal communities have increased exponentially—a telling indicator of the lack of understanding and support from medical professionals about psychiatric drug withdrawal.”
However, since this type of knowledge doesn’t come from those with letters after their names or from academic institutions, layperson expertise is typically considered invalid. And yet, in the case of psychiatric drug tapering, science is finally catching up with what laypeople have known all along. This is just one example of a service that we regularly outsource to professionals that is freely available in our own communities.
4. Don’t wait until you heal to start living.
I spent my twenties in active pursuit of “mental health recovery.” I felt sure I couldn’t focus on living until I reached this endpoint where I’d feel emotional balance, put-togetherness, and personal arrival. Achieving this state became my north star. Eventually, in the wake of coming off my meds far too quickly and in the throes of psychiatric drug withdrawal, I realized I had to stop sitting in the waiting room of my life. It was only by showing up with my mind on fire that I would heal. It was by insisting on putting myself out there in the world and opening up to all the possible moments of feeling connected that I would recover—not despite feeling unready, but because of it.
5. The objective of living isn’t happiness and balance; it’s meaning and authenticity.
I grew up in a wealthy New England town where the air itself seemed infused with happiness and perfection. This created an alienating, suffocating illusion that everyone else had their act together. The underlying assumption that I was the only one who hadn’t cracked the happiness code was a large part of what drove me to surrender myself to mental health professionals through my teens and twenties. Since I’d failed at feeling good, I concluded that I must need help getting there: the right meds, the right therapist, the right behavior modification technique.
It wasn’t until after I’d come off my meds and abandoned my diagnoses that I began to understand how backward this thinking was. Books like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and the writings and poems of Jiddu Krishnamurti, David Whyte, and Mary Oliver, ignited a profound revelation in me: Life isn’t about happiness, it’s about how connected you feel to yourself and to the world around you. It’s about moving through the world with a sense of meaning and purpose. The consumerist, hyper-individualist nature of society teaches us otherwise: if one feels discomfort (be it boredom, sadness, self-doubt, anger, loneliness, grief, fear, the list goes on), there is a prescription available, a product or service or drug we can call on to help alleviate the symptoms.
But what if the prison isn’t pain itself but the belief that we need to be free of it? Being human is about living in shadows and light. It took me a long time to learn that, and I came out stronger as a result.
To listen to the audio version read by author Laura Delano, download the Next Big Idea App today:
