This system I had been turning to for help through all of these years that I had been assuming existed to take care of me was actually a system of control.

And I just hadn't seen it for what it was because I had never said no to it before.

For 14 years, Laura Delano was a professional mental health patient, as she puts it, after

being diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was a teenager.

Now she believes the dominant, medicalized approach to mental illness is actually making us

sicker as a society.

65 million American adults and 6 million American children are currently on psychiatric drugs.

And there are zero off ramps for getting them off these drugs safely within the mental

health industry.

Zero.

She is the author of Unshrunk, a story of psychiatric treatment resistance.

This is not about being pro or anti.

This is about using straightforward, honest language to talk about what these drugs are and how they actually affect us.

And then to let people make their own decisions from there based on their own life circumstances.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick.

Laura Delano, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. leaders. And I'm Janja Kellogg.

Laura Delano, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

What is it that we get wrong about the mental health system in America?

I think at the heart of the problem is the fact that we've given a monopoly to this medicalized way of understanding ourselves, to this idea of having mental illness or of being mentally healthy.

This whole framework, this medicalized framework has taken on a monolithic

status in our culture such that all the other ways that we might make sense of the struggles

...