Music Good afternoon, Michael Malis here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, I have not booked a guest as fast as today's guest. We have Laura Delano with us. Her book is called Unshrunk Astoria Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. And for those who don't know about the book, when I heard about it, I'm, I got to get you on right away, because you, one of the things that's a big undercurrent in our culture is how over-medicated everyone is, how quick people are to put a psychiatrist, excuse me, in shrinks to put people on a mind-altering medication. And there's this like vague understanding that, you know, maybe we don't really know how all this stuff works. And instead of throwing a pill at something, let's look at the causes or things like that. You had a decades-long nightmare situation having to deal with being effectively a guinea pig. So I want to talk to you about, because again, there's something that I think a lot of people have vague feelings about, but they're not that informed. And I'm going to come at it from a personal perspective for, like you speak. In May, I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. And one of the symptoms I had was I was waking up every day with high anxiety, because if all night you're being choked, you're going to be in fight or flight, you're going to wake up anxious and how anxiety works is, the body feels the anxiety and the mind finds a rationalization for it. So I was getting all sorts of cognitive problems and so on and so forth. I was having problems breathing, which meant I was having problems speaking and then I was having problems thinking because I'm not getting enough sleep, right? So then I'm anxious about how am I going to work? If I'm not quick and if I can't talk, I

don't have a job. If I went to a shrink, I'm sure nine times out of 10, I would have been an anti-anxiety medication right now. So now I'm on an anti-anxiety, which is numbing me. I'm also not getting sleep still. I'm still going to have of those cognitive issues, I'm still going to have the physical issues of speaking, and

then there's going to be something else.

So instead of being like, okay, let's look at your diet.

You know, what are you eating?

That's maybe... to have those cognitive issues. I'm still going to have the physical issues of speaking. And then there's going to be something else. So instead of being like, okay, let's look

at your diet. You know, what are you eating? That's maybe inflammatory. Let's look at your sleep. You need sleep to think I'm going to be doped up and it's going to become the self-repetuating cycle. And it's very scared of me to think about those people like that who if I'd been another person,

I don't know where I'd be today,

and this is only five months, three months later, excuse me.

So I'm gonna stop talking. Can you please give the audience a little bit of background about how all this stuff happened to you? Sure. And thanks so much for having me. I responded just as fast to your invitation to come on. So yeah, so it's great to be here. And yeah, the way I describe it is that I had 14 year relationship with the American mental health industry and then realized it was nearly killing me and decided to break up with it. That's the kind of elevator, the elevator pitch of it. And it began when I was a kid. I was this 13 year old girl, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, so this affluent hometown. A lot of pressures, expectations, everything looked perfect on the outside. It's very much steppered wives vibe. And I happened to be a kid who was good at school, quote unquote, and sure I looked like I had it all together on paper and ended up having this profound experience in front of the bathroom mirror when I lost touch with my body, I lost touch with space and time. I was just staring at this girl in front of the mirror. It was a stranger, I didn't know who she was. And when I came back into myself after this terrifying disorienting experience, the only way I could make sense of what had just happened was that I must not have a real self. I must be this fake robot programmed to perform, go to a my and what do I care about. And so that experience really, you know, fucked me up internally. And I didn't tell anyone and I pretended it didn't happen. And I continued on the little good student and good athlete and all that. But internally, I was just falling more and more apart. And I began acting out at home and yelling and screaming and cursing and hitting. And my parents didn't know what to do with me. And got really scared. we talk about this? Because that's got to be,

I'm somewhat confusing to you,

because on one level you're a perfect at school,

on the other level you're acting out.

So like you're both the good girl

and the bad girl archetype.

Oh yeah.

Was that something that internally you were like,

what's going on, who am I?

Totally.

I mean, in retrospect, I see that my acting out was an attempt to feel like I had some power here. Because I felt so powerless. I realized there are all these, I'm in a broader social sources of power that are controlling me and how I behave and how I act. And so the only way I could think to kind of exert my own power was to be angry about it and to express that anger. And I only expressed it at home. I still kept it together outside of the home. So it was, I was totally compartmentalized and, and I think that compartmentalization ended up, you know, just not being sustainable. And, and so my, my poor parents eventually were just so confused and scared and, and probably, you know, drained and exhausted that they decided to send me to a mental health professional. And this was in the mid-90s. So I'm 42 now. So back then, mid-90s was just to pan to step back for a minute and think about what was happening here culturally.

So the 90s were the decade of the brain, our government officially made this declaration. We're going to discover all the uncharted territories of the brain and conquer it and blah, blah, blah. And so it was within that context that very well orchestrated efforts by drug companies in large part. We're underway to kind of infiltrate the cultural milieu with ideas about mental illness and mental health awareness and fighting the stigma of mental illness and just making this medicalized language of illness and health and symptom very much a normal ubiquitous even part of life. And so that was happening, I was really taking off in the 90s as I was having this crisis. And what was also taking off in the 90s was a very small number of key opinion leader psychiatrists, mostly in, affiliated with Harvard Medical School and very esteemed doctors who were getting drug company money to basically expand market share into children, specifically juvenile bipolar diagnosis. This was the big fat at the time. And what they said was, we have this epidemic of undiagnosed bipolar disorder in children. And the reason we haven't recognized it until now is because Mania looks different in kids than it does in adults. In adults, you think you're Jesus Christ, you have delusions of grandeur, you're you know racing shots, all of that. Wait, did you just diagnose me? Michael, I have no doubt you meet the criteria for numerous diagnoses. You know, I thought that, I thought until I visited an actual sociopath in jail, Michael Alec Domerderer, and then you realized that the line between, oh, I read this in my BND, this sounds like me and somebody who actually has, so in these conditions, is not thin at all. It's like, oh, this is not just, oh, I've got a lot of energy sometimes. This is all that thing. Oh, yeah. We all have the capacity to go mad for sure. Oh, sure. For sure. Yeah. So what these powerful doctors basically said was unlike, you know, those grandiose, you you know, delusions, delusions that adults have, manic children are irritable, angry, they're having outbursts. They're teenagers. That's mania and children. Yeah. And so hello there I was like, fuck you mom. I fucking hate you and fuck you family and fuck you, Grandage Connecticut. I was just like acting out. I was cutting myself. I was, you know, just a maniac. And so of course I was gonna get that label. And that's what I got in the span of one session with a psychiatrist. I was eventually sent from a therapist to a psychiatrist. One session I was told I had this incurable illness called bipolar disorder, but don't worry their medications that will help you manage it. I was fucking 14 at that time. It's just kind of chilling to hear this because there's a couple of things that come to mind. I've said recently and I've had very little pushback that it's far more likely we're moving toward Brave New World than 1984. And the mechanism of control in Brave New World is everyone's just always dope to the gills and lives on this moment's moment pleasure principle. And I'm sure whatever there are plenty of pills, I'm just sure I don't even know what the names are, but if someone is acting up and you kinda give them this, they'll be numb. So in a way, it will work, air quotes, But what does that mean for the, in this case, teen, who's getting that medication? I love that you're bringing this up. And, and I completely, I completely agree. And I think this question of work is such an important one because the, the conventional assumption in our culture is that if you are, you know, feeling really depressed, unmotivated, you can't get out of bed, blah, blah, blah. You have something wrong with your brain, you have a chemical imbalance, you have faulty biomarkers, something's arrived biochemically, and this, this drug is a so-called treatment, like a medicine, a medication that's treating this illness in your brain. So that medicalized framework creates this illusion really that it's just about tinkering with your chemistry and that's going to help you feel better. But in truth, these are psychoactive chemicals that aren't really any different than alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, other than their legal status, and the fact that we call them medication. And so when you are thinking about them in this medicalized way, it really prevents you from having an informed understanding of how these drugs work. But when like you're explaining, you know, when you're taking a tranquilizer, it's going to suppress your emotions. It's going to slow you down. That might feel helpful given what you're going through, but it's not treating an illness. So I think for me, that's where the nuance comes in, because just to be clear for your audience, like, I'm not anti these drugs. What I'm against is is preventing people from making informed choices about them. And to make an informed choice, you have to have language that's common sense straightforward, that's not marketing spin, like the word antidepressant is. But no, this is a serotonergic drug that's interfering with your serotonin system among other systems. And that interference might create results that feel helpful at least in the short term, but it's not treating an illness. I think that's where the key shift needs to be. I'm going to distribute it slightly because alcohol and some of these other things have been around for thousands of years across hundreds of cultures, whereas a lot of these pills are novelties and have only been around for a few minutes. If you ask people anyone, even professionals, do we have a thorough going understanding of how the brain works in causing cognition? And once, of course, not this is a very new science, so on and so forth. But they're acting as if it's basically like, okay, I have a wound. I put a bandaid, then the cells stitch together, then you get a scab in the scab falls off. It's not this ABC situation at all. The brain is such a complex thing and such an individually complex thing. And it's also for people to help them understand how the good way to think about is if you take melatonin, you will be unconscious for eight hours, but you're not getting sleep. You'll just be unconscious. So you wake up all groggy. So yes, in a sense that if you have insomnia, you can take melatonin, but that's not solving the problem. still not getting your deep sleep. So like in these cases, like, okay, this one symptom is getting resolved, but you're not addressing the root cause. Totally. And everything's going to have a cost when you're dealing with the mind. Totally, totally. And I do think we have been so desensitized to to critical thinking about hills and you know one of two countries in the world that allows direct to consumer advertising. You know I think one in three it's probably even higher at this point but one three Americans take some kind of pharmaceutical drug one in four nearly takes a psychiatric drug. Is that true? Yep. One, almost one in four is 23%, something percent, according to 2022 CDC numbers are on at least one psychiatric drug. So it's probably even higher now. So it's just ubiquitous. And we are so desensitized to the soparific voice at the end of the drug commercial. Yeah, and, and I was one of the, I was that way myself. And for during the decade and a half that I was engaged with all of these drugs and diagnoses that all these well-meaning doctors prescribed me, I never once, until the very end, of course, as I go into in my book, I never once stepped back to ask any questions about any of it. I just took for granted that if a doctor is giving me this and telling me this, it must be helpful and it must be true because I'm not a doctor. Sure, right. Yeah, I think a lot of us are like that. But you said well meaning, and I don't think that doctors are my level interest or are in some level and large, but I do think there is often a sense of laziness that instead of like let's sitting down and work at things and like, OK, what's going on here? It's just like, let's just try this. And if that doesn't work, we'll try this, try this, try that. But these things are just, I think it would take a minute before you're going to put someone on something this powerful and so intense, you want would hope. Yeah, and I think the incentive structures are all aligned against that slower, longer exploratory kind of relationship that you might, you know, hope that someone would have with their psychiatrist, with their shrink. And, you know, I think early in the earlier days of modern psychiatry, and I go into this in the untrunk because I was fascinated by, you know, what led us here? What has happened in psychiatry over the past 100 years that's led us to this where where psychiatrists are for the most part,

you know, operating with like one tool in their in their toolbox here, which is the prescription pad,

...