#678 - Psych Med Withdrawal Expert Laura Delano

Laura Delano is the founder of the Inner Compass Initiative and author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.” Laura joins Theo to talk about how her own journey with psychiatric treatment led her to investigate big pharma, what the process of safely tapering off medication looks like, and the deeper social issues that could be fueling a mental health crisis. Laura Delano: https://x.com/LauraDelano ------------------------------------------------- Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Modiphy: Get 50% off the last website you’ll ever need at https://modiphy.com/THEO Valor Recovery: To learn more about Valor Recovery please visit them at https://valorrecoverycoaching.com/ or email them at [email protected] Perplexity AI: Ask anything at https://pplx.ai/theo ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn Bishop Gunn - Shine ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [email protected] Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Mail stuff to: ATTN: TPW PO BOX 40137 Nashville TN 37204 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend X: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Trevyn https://www.instagram.com/trevyn.s/ Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Andrew https://www.instagram.com/bleachmediaofficial/ Producer: Halston https://www.instagram.com/halstonrays/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome back, frickin' frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Tonight.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Abbott is back. It's gonna be the best year yet. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Anything can happen in the jungle, right, guys?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Season premiere tonight on ABC and stream next day on Hulu.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Today's guest is an author and founder of the Inner Compass Initiative. She wrote Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. We talk about mental health, getting on to medicines, and then how to get off of them if you want to or need to. I had a fascinating conversation and I'm thankful for her time. Today's guest is Ms. Laura Delano.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Laura Delano.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Am I saying that correctly?

• 1:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Delano, yep.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Thank you for joining us today. You wrote a book called Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. I want to talk about that today. I want to talk about my own journey with antidepressants and with trying to get off of the medications and what that's been like for me, or I want to discuss that with you. I also want to iterate that one in six Americans right now are taking mental health drugs.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  And that's even higher amongst college students. And I want to talk about how to properly get off medication, what that's like for people in that journey. But first, I want to hear about your story. You've had kind of a, like, so far lifelong journey with mental health and medication. Is that fair to say?

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, going back to childhood.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Okay, and is it okay if we start there? Just so our listeners are like kind of clued in on how you got here.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah. So, so I grew up in Connecticut in an affluent town. I was born to a family who had a lot of resources. So, you know, private school, all my material needs met. Like, on paper, I just had this really wonderful life. And, and I was always quote-unquote "good" at school. Like, I could just sit down and do rote tasks like well. It never bothered me or I never got bored with it. And so, I just, I kind of was one of these girls who had it all together. Good student, I was a good athlete.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  What sport did you play?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Well, squash was my main sport through college. But, you know, when I was younger, like tennis, field hockey, basically all the like textbook prepster.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Oh, rich sports.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Waspy. Yeah, like, picture the most stereotypical New England waspy prepster and like, that's right here. Literally, down to like all whites on the tennis court, that's me. So, yeah, so I just like had it all together. And then, when I was 13, you know, there I was. I was president of the middle school, I had straight A's, I was a nationally ranked squash player, I had it all together. And I was looking in the mirror one night, brushing my teeth, and I just started looking deeper and deeper into my eyes. And then I, just slowly, everything around me started to go black. And I left space and time and I was just like floating in like what felt like outer space, looking at this girl in the mirror. And I was like, who is she? Who is she?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Who is she? And then I realized, this is a stranger. And I, when I came to, I was like terrified by this out-of-body experience. I didn't know what to make of it. And the only conclusion I could draw was like, I must not have a real self. I must be a robot programmed to perform well. But like, who am I? What do I care about? What really matters to me? And I realized I didn't know the answer. And I felt immediately like my whole life had changed and I was just aware suddenly that I was imprisoned by these adults around me. And, and I just freaked out and didn't know what to do. Knew I couldn't tell anyone about this experience. And so, I just pretended it hadn't happened. And I just tried to like continue on being the good girl.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  But that, you know, compartmentalization like wasn't sustainable. And so, I eventually began spinning out. I started cutting myself, I was like fantasizing about death. I started acting out at home, like hitting my mom and screaming and cursing. And my parents were just like, what has happened?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Did you think you were realizing something like?

• 4:44Speaker 03

  So, I'm, I love that you're asking that because in retrospect, I'm like, holy cow, I was having an ego death. Like, what could have been this profoundly liberating, like, I'm so much more than the self, you know? Like, it could have gone that way. But I think because I grew up in this, in this particular environment, like, no one was reading philosophy and like into psychedelics. I had no frame of reference to head that way. So, instead, I concluded, I don't have a real self. And so, I just, I couldn't bear that, what felt like my reality, for very long, and I did end up like really spinning out at home. I kept everything together outside of the home, but at home, I would fall apart. And my poor parents just didn't know what to do.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  They were terrified, they were exhausted. And so, they eventually, you know, realized like we need to take her to a professional. And this was in the mid-'90s. I was born in '83, so I'm an elder millennial. So, then in the mid-'90s, not, the whole mental health thing wasn't a part of the cultural zeitgeist in the way that it is now, especially for young people. So, it was this very private thing. We weren't meant to talk about it, you know, that I was going to this therapist.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it was such taboo then.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and, you know, my parents, you know, God bless them, like, because they didn't see anyone else having problems around them. They're like, oh, my gosh, we're the only people in our town who has a daughter who's going through this. Of course, in retrospect, I'm like, we were all pretty messed up in this intense town that we were all in, but it felt like...

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds like kind of a microcosm over there.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was a very like Stepford Wives kind of place.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  And so, they sent me to a therapist. The therapist sent me to a psychiatrist. I was 14 by that time. And in one hour, the psychiatrist told me, you know, all this anger and these outbursts and this irritability you're having, these are symptoms of mania. And the fact that you're cutting yourself and you're depressed, these are symptoms of depression. You have a lifelong brain illness called bipolar disorder. But don't worry, there are medications you can take, you can live a good life. She'd see me for one hour. I was 14 years old. And she put me on Depakote and Prozac.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  How did they diagnose that, just so I know?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Good question. It's literally through just observation. So, you just describe how you're feeling, you describe what you're doing, and then the psychiatrist, in their subjective opinion, you know, runs through the kind of checklist that they've been trained to go through, you know, with the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So, it's like, oh, five out of seven is this, for, you know, and...

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Said the DSM, what is it?

• 7:23Speaker 03

  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's copyrighted by the American Psychiatric Association. There's a lot of industry influence behind it. You know, they get a lot of funding from drug companies. And it's literally, it's called like the Bible of psychiatry. And it's what, you know, these diagnoses from the DSM are what open doors for people to get treatment, you know, for billing. It's a very powerful book.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  But it's completely subjective. Like, this is not a scientific text. It's literally the opinions of psychiatrists. Like, that's what these diagnoses were made on the basis of.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Does that make it somewhat scientific, though, that it's at least, it's not like just a random person guessing?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, for the DSM to be scientific, it would need to be both reliable and valid. So, basically, the categories themselves would need to be real, meaningful, like measurable categories. And the same person would need to be getting the same diagnosis from multiple clinicians. Like, if those two factors were in place, like, you could say that this was a scientifically valid and reliable text. But it's not, they don't. Like, if you look at, you know, clinicians will give all kinds of different diagnoses to the same person. You know, bipolar disorder, as an example, like, there's no measurable pathology in your brain.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  There's no abnormal blood test, there's no, it's just based purely on observation.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Were there like any like biological tests or medical tests that they ran to determine if you had bipolar disorder?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  And there aren't any for any of these diagnoses.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  No, there weren't?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  No.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  To this day, there aren't. Even for something like schizophrenia. Like, none of these diagnoses have any valid, replicable, you know, like, there's nothing, there's no test of any kind, medical test of any kind.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it says right here, bipolar disorder cannot be measured with a single physical test, like a blood test or an MRI. Instead, doctors and mental health professionals measure and diagnose it through a comprehensive clinical evaluation. And you're saying after only one hour, they had determined this?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a lot of people get a diagnosis in 15 minutes. And what's amazing about it is that because we have all come to believe in these diagnoses as these lifelong incurable things, like you can manage them, but once you have this diagnosis, you have it forever. Like if you pause and think about that for a minute, like to tell a 14 year old girl who you just met an hour ago, you have a lifelong incurable disease in your brain. Like it's a pretty potent thing to say to someone.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially at 14. She's got enough going on.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  See, and it isn't, I mean, in retrospect, I see like adolescence is literally when we, we have a crisis of self, like who the fuck am I? Like, how do I fit into this world? Like, how do I socialize? What do I care about?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. What do I listen to? Who am I? How do I dress? Like, how do I find out what's going on inside of me? All of that stuff.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think because the crisis I was going through was this deep existential, spiritual crisis of self, I was especially susceptible to being told who I was.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Understood.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Because I was, and I think a lot of us are, I don't know if you, if you relate to this too, but when I first, when I first got the bipolar diagnosis, I rejected it. As that 14 year old girl, like I knew intuitively, this is, makes no sense. Like I'm having a healthy response to this like really intense social environment I'm in. But a few years later, because, because I was put on those meds, but Depakote and Prozac, so the so-called mood stabilizer, Depakote's actually an anticonvulsant, that's not even to this day approved for psychiatric use in kids, but I was put on it back then. And, and it's a very widely prescribed psych med in kids today. And then Prozac at the time was not

• 11:25Speaker 03

  approved for use in kids. So I just put right on it. And for the following years, I managed to like not really take them regularly. I went away to boarding school. I kind of ran away from, I tried to run away from what that psychiatrist told me. But by 18, I, you know, was still playing the game, the performance game. And I'd gotten into Harvard and I was gonna play squash at Harvard. Like literally, it's almost like cringe worthy, like how just this, you know, type A perfectionist, New England girl. Like I just was like, I was so trapped in this. Like I knew it was all bullshit, but I didn't know how to get out. And so there I was at Harvard and hoping like by then I maybe I'd have figured it

• 12:08Speaker 03

  all out and I'd be okay. And of course I wasn't. And so it was at that point that I was just so desperate for relief because I was like doing tons of coke and ecstasy and I wasn't sleeping and I was like so spun out freshman fall of college. I was a total mess. And I was like, what is wrong with me? Like I can't, I want to die. I can't live this way anymore.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  So something was wrong.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. I mean, I was really struggling. Like this wasn't like, oh, she was just having a little bump in the, I was like completely a mess.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  And were you still taking the medicines, the Depakote and the?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  No, when I spun out that first fall of college, I was not on any meds.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  But I was definitely like drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs, just overall like not taking care of myself.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  What things were showing up in your life that were like, okay, now this is, things are getting too, too rough? I mean?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I think a lot of it was just I wasn't sleeping. I was really reckless in my behaviors. Just like, you know, I'd be like super coked up and I'd like climb to the top of a building and I'd be like stuck on a roof and I'd be like, what? And it'd be three in the morning, you know, like just these ridiculous things. And I'd hang out, you know, with like the bums in the square where, you know, in Harvard Square and, and like smoke with them and just, I just like wasn't, I felt so far away from my peers. And I was, I couldn't stop thinking about dying. Like I, I just couldn't see

• 13:38Speaker 03

  a way through it. I just was so overwhelmed by this like deep sense that I was this fraud who would never fit in to the world around her. And my mind wouldn't shut off. And you know, just paranoid thoughts, like everyone hates you. They're just pretending to like you. Like you're a piece of shit. You just.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Sounds like a nightmare.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you'll get a kick out of this. My breaking point was I came out as a debutante the winter of my first year at Harvard. And I was like in a wedding dress on stage at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. And you know, the whole thing is so absurd. Like the tradition of it is like.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's tradition.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it's like a meat market. Like historically, it was like your daughter is now ready to be, you know, married off or whatever. And you know, you have to curtsy and do these like wild spins.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. I'll go to like, sometimes they'll have those in the South. They've had them over the years.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Have you been to them?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  I've been to, in Natchez, Mississippi, my little nephew was in one for a bit. And so I'd go over there and watch him.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Was he like an escort of one of the girls?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was like, he had a sword or whatever.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Whoa, you had swords down there? Oh, we didn't have swords. That's cool.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  We, they wield weapons at the ones in the South. So it gets a little bit different.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Of course you did. I love it.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Okay. So you're a debutante. You have all this going on in the outside. Looks one way, but you feel a total different way on the inside.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And like that was the icing on the cake. Like I'm literally on a stage doing curtsies. Like what? This is a practical joke. Like is it, how is this my life? And like, how do I get out of it? So suicide felt like the only way out.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Sounds like you had some psychosis going on.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  I probably could have been given a psycho, a diagnosis of like psychotic disorder, not otherwise specified or something. I mean, I definitely had, especially when I wasn't sleeping, I would have these very kind of expansive thoughts where I was like deconstructing reality. And you know, language is a social construction. So like the words I'm using to think these thoughts, it's all, I would just get totally swept up. And all the post-modern stuff, like I just got all swept up in that. And so I just, that winter of, as an 18 year old, I was just desperate for help. And to go back to this whole, you know, DSM diagnosis thing, that desperation drove me to just want to, of my own volition, go back to psychiatry

• 15:55Speaker 03

  and just be like, tell me what is wrong with me. I need your help. I need to understand why I feel this way and I need relief. And I, and I just, I always try to like pause on that whenever I'm talking about my story because there's, I don't know if you felt the same when you were first diagnosed with whatever your diagnosis is. I can't wait to dive in more into it, but I felt such relief. Like I'm not a bad person. I'm not a fuck up. I'm not lazy. I'm sick. And now I have a treatment that's going to help me get better. Like hallelujah. Like that's how it felt.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. I, yeah, I can relate to being like, okay, something is going to come and help me. Finally there's help is on the way.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  I can certainly relate to that. And we'll talk about some of my experience after, after a little bit, but I want to hear more. Okay. So you get this diagnosis and this feels helpful.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  It feels so helpful. I feel such relief, like immediate relief. Like, you know, I don't have to fight anymore. I don't have to keep desperately searching for answers and to figure myself out. Like this doctor knows what's wrong with me and he has the solution. Like I'm good to go. And so of course, the kind of perfectionist type A person that I was, I immediately applied that to being a patient. So I was just like so diligent about going to therapy and tracking my, how I was feeling and reporting symptoms. And I just, it became very quickly, like the void of, of meaning and purpose that my life had previously held was filled with a new purpose, like treatment. Like you're

• 17:27Speaker 03

  a patient and your purpose is to get treatment. And so I, you know, was put back on meds and then, you know, quickly two became three. And, you know, I would be going in every week, sometimes twice a week to do therapy. I was going to McLean Hospital, which is like a 20 minute bus ride from, from Harvard. And it's like one of the oldest, you know, most established institutions in the country. It's where Sylvia Plath went.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I can imagine. It's prestigious if it's there because the best doctors are right next door.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so I think that's with my, my background, coming from, you know, a family with socioeconomic means, I always had like the best of the best care. And which is an important part of my story that we'll, we'll come back to. So yeah, I just had this new sense of purpose and momentum. And I was like, you know, we're going to figure this out together. My psychiatrist and me. But with the, you know, with the passage of time, inevitably, you know, I'd like not, like I'd be on some med and then I'd have, you know, sleep problems or like panicky feelings. And then I'd get on another med or they'd up the dose or they'd switch. And just before I knew it, I was on a handful

• 18:40Speaker 03

  of meds. But at the time, this felt like a really good thing.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Like progress?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause like more meds is better. Like the more they're caring for me and the more they're giving me, like the better it's going to be. Like it's just, and so yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  If you're, if you're bleeding profusely, you would think that having more bandages would be helpful.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  That's such a good analogy. This is exactly it. And, and what was really, this, you know, what was insidious about that too. And, and now if you look at our culture of like how girls and young women, you know, in this kind of like therapeuticized culture that we're in, like at the time, what started to happen for me is I began to feel like the more meds I was on, like the more special I was. And like the more people would understand how much pain I was in.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Like the debutante of like diazepam or something.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Gosh, yes. Totally. I'm up on this stage. Look at me. I'm so sick. I have my baggie of five pill bottles. And now I don't only have bipolar disorder, I also have social anxiety disorder and eating disorder. That eventually came.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Can't you see on Elizabeth Taylor? Yes.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Like I am so important. I mean, and that's, I think now you're seeing with, because this was again, back in the mid, late 90s, early 2000s. Now it's like, this is how girls and young women grow up, finding a sense of self and belonging and purpose and meaning, like especially on TikTok.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Oh, it's like a character now.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Yes, totally. Here's my list of diagnoses. Here's my list of meds. It's like, oh, now I know how to slot in and where I belong and who my tribe is. And so that was really just taking off back in like the early 2000s. And I, I, it was very much a part of my kind of my journey through my, my teens and twenties with all, with all this stuff was like how much of a, an identity it gave me. Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're like Amelia Earhart out there. You're just out there flying through.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Flying through the psych wards.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  And landing who knows where. They still haven't found her.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so of course, like as I'm this good patient, doing everything my doctor's telling me, reporting my symptoms, you know, we're up, up in the meds, this, that. My life isn't actually getting better. It's actually falling more and more apart. And I did manage to graduate college, but by the time I did, I had to take a year off. I'd been hospitalized. I was like super suicidal.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  But because this like slow creep of meds and you know, this like prescription cascade is the term that a lot of people use, it's just this like slow unfolding of it, I didn't even really realize it was happening. And just because my journey with psychiatry started when I was a kid, like I had no reference point. I had no like baseline sense of who I was as a person prior to meds, because of course, like-

• 21:40Speaker 02

  You were just developing.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like I was having an identity crisis to begin with, got me on all of it. And so through my twenties, I just like kept falling more and more apart. And I like gained, you know, literally like 70 pounds over, over, but by the time I was in my mid twenties-

• 21:56Speaker 02

  And was that attributed to medication, you think?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Well, the first, I mean, certainly the antipsychotics that I was eventually on, I mean, those are well documented to cause all kind of, kinds of metabolic issues. Um, and you know, tons of people on long-term antipsychotics end up getting diabetes. But I think what the meds also did is they, and I didn't realize this at the time, but they disconnected me from my body's like signals. So-

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Your instincts.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I just, I didn't, am I hungry right now? Am I satiated? Like, I don't even know. Like this tastes good and I'm kind of numbed out. So I'm going to eat more of it. So I was definitely binge eating. It wasn't like the weight just came on and I wasn't changing, you know, what I was eating, but-

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Well, your sensory system gets kind of hijacked in a lot of ways, I find, by medication.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  You know, for years I couldn't tell sometimes how I felt about things, which is one of the main reasons I've tried to get off so many times is because I want to know how I feel. Like if I'm going to choose, like, you know, or if I'm going to get married or like, you know, I don't want to, you know, partner with my wife. And then one day I get off meds and I'm like, this, I don't even like this. But you know, it's like you get scared for, for, for me, I get scared of the choices I'm going to make because I don't know if they're fully mine.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh my God. I feel, I cry all the time, by the way. So if I get teary, you know, I had a feeling I would, because I've heard you speak about that.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't cry anymore on the internet or it's gonna, somebody's gonna come and get me. So I have to take it easy, but um, I'm here for you if you do.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, to me, crying is such an essential, I actually think that when I authentically feel this like urge to cry, I'm like, do it, sister. I like say it to myself because people are so uncomfortable with crying. And as, as you just said, like, people freak the fuck out. And they're like, what, can't compute? What is happening? And sometimes I'll be like giving a talk to a big room of, you know, psychiatrists and people. And if I feel myself getting teary, I'm like, oh yeah, let it rip. Because I know it's going to make them like so uncomfortable. And that's part of our problem. Like that is part of why we're in this crisis as a society is that we are so disconnected from like, what it means to be human, which is you emote and you cry sometimes.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I was crying this morning at a Bible study, you know?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Wow. So you were moved, moved to tears? Or was it, was it like, was it, yeah, what, what was-

• 24:13Speaker 02

  People were sharing, different people sharing different stuff, or me talking about something, just a mix of things. You know, and sometimes it like, it's not really crying. Sometimes it's sweat, I feel like, from the heavy shit I got in here. It's like, I'm, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm holding up some heavy shit in here. And sometimes you got a sweat out of your eyes.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, this isn't tears. This is sweat from like, just me, like, just from like, how heavy some of this shit is sometimes. And I'm not even complaining about it. Like, sometimes it's like, yes, part of it is like this feeling that you have to look away if you're tearing up or something. It's like, I don't know how some of that became such a shame thing, you know? Now, if you're just being a crybaby about something, that's kind of different. But I think if you're just like feeling something, you know, that seems pretty normal to me.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  And sometimes feelings are heavy. And so your eyes got a sweat.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, that's poetry. And I, I mean, it gets right to the heart of what I think the, the real crisis is that we're in here as a, as a culture, which is, we have forgotten what it means to be alive.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  And I think it's, a lot of this has been fueled by the mental health industry, but it's more broadly just like consumer culture where we're just bombarded all the time with, do you feel uncomfortable? Like, buy this, eat this, do this. You know, it's just, we've been so inculcated into thinking that discomfort and pain is a problem to fix. And, and we don't even realize that it's happened to us.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  And, and then when you have these, like, I do think crying is almost like a, a political, it's like a, it's like political activism, it feels to me, because when, it is such a powerful experience to feel a room of people like energetically unsettled when I'm crying with them, because they, they also feel me in my power. Like, I am, I am crying and like incredibly centered in myself and integrated. And they're almost like, I don't understand this. I don't understand. And I think more of us who are in touch with tears, the sweat, the sweat of grief and rage and all of it.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, confusion.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Totally. Oh, and alienation and loneliness and-

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Dude, I'm, if I saw my brain somewhere on the side of the road, it would be sitting there. It would probably be smoking. I'm going to be honest with you. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't chain smoke, but it would be having one.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  And it would be like slumped over.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  No, I, it would be still hopeful.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  But it would be, I think, and it would probably be eating some peanuts or something. It would have a little pocket full of peanuts.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  No seed oils on the peanuts, I hope.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all. These are ones that he just picked out of a-

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Dry roasted.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  They naturally grew dry roasted, those ones. God's, God's nuts. And then-

• 27:02Speaker 03

  God's nuts.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  And then he might be tearing up a little. That's fair.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  That makes me tear up to think about your little brain on the side of the road.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Hey, look, he's hitchhiking, he's headed somewhere.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Oh, and he is going to get picked up by a really cute old man in a pickup truck, who's like, I'm going 20 miles south. And he says, and your brain's going to say, that's my direction. And get on in, kid.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  That's romantic. I like that a little bit.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, here I am with the tears in my eyes. But, but I think, you know, I just, because I was put on meds as a, as a, as a teenager, and so many people are right now, like you said, at, at the, at the start, 30% of college kids have been on psych meds. We have 8% of two, 8.2% of kids collectively on some kind of psych med.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  That's unbelievable when you think about it.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  It's wild. It's, it's four, there are four million kids on psych meds. And this is like, age five and up, like tiny children.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Have we gotten lazy in how we try to solve psychiatric, uh, problems?

• 28:04Speaker 03

  I, I think, I wouldn't call it our laziness as much as I would say that modern society, like modern industrialized consumer society, this like overly individualistic, you know, it's you on your own, you're meant to succeed and perform. It's the, this evolution of our modern culture itself that has actually made it impossible for us to, to like really, um, deeply understand suffering in the way that, you know, in the grand scheme of human history, we used to understand it. And, and so I don't think it's about laziness as much as it is,

• 28:46Speaker 03

  like, there's been a collective forgetting of what it means to suffer and how to bear suffering and how to make sense of suffering. But, but the world we live in also makes it impossible for so many people who might actually want to, you know, explore what they're going through in, in a deeper way. It makes it impossible because like, you got to pay the bills, nine to five job. Like, you have mouths to feed, you have rent to pay.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Right. We've made this society that's so demanding-

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  -of you to do, that you don't even have time to be, or to self-reflect, or to have a relationship with yourself. Um, or sometimes with other people. You know what's hard? Dealing with a website. The amount of time and effort it takes to do it right is ridiculous. That's why I'm so grateful for Modify. Their team has handled my websites for over a decade now. They do it for us and they've done well. And they're the real deal. Louisiana-based, super easy to work with, and they just can't stop making websites. They've launched over

• 29:56Speaker 02

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• 30:41Speaker 02

  This was a video by James Lee the other day and he investigates a lot of this sort of thing, just what's going on in society. If you can't see this chart at home, it's just showing that since 1985, on average, rent prices have gone up 140%, whereas income has only gone up, it looks like about 38 to 40%.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and if, I'm so glad you pulled this up because this encapsulates the whole problem here. If you're struggling to make ends meet and like you have, there's significant, there's significant consequences to not being able to make ends meet, of course you're gonna feel depressed, of course you're gonna feel anxious, but what happens right now, the way our mental health industry has unfolded is, if you go sit down in front of a diagnosing mental health professional, you're gonna be told you have an illness in your brain that needs pills, when in fact you're actually having a healthy, logical,

• 31:45Speaker 03

  commonsensical, like, natural response to what is the actually sick situation, if you're gonna use that word.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, it's more like that our society is sick, or that our environment has an illness, that we then get diagnosed with by looking at our society.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yep, yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  And feeling how we feel within that society. And I'm not saying that some people do not have real diagnoses, I'm not saying that some people don't have real issues, and I'm not denouncing anybody that's on medication.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  We're just taking a look at things, that's all we're doing here, and we're using our own journeys to kind of, to do that, right?

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Of course, yeah, I think people often get confused, when you're critiquing the diagnostic paradigm, people sometimes think you're saying that people aren't really struggling, losing it, going crazy, having breakdowns, and it's actually the opposite. By challenging this idea that all suffering is just like faulty brain chemistry, you're actually validating the reality of the suffering and the madness and the breakdowns that people are going through, because you're saying, like, you're having a very real response that may be, you know, completely derailing your life, but it's a response, it's not pathology, it's

• 33:07Speaker 03

  not you that you need to fix, what needs to be fixed is the situation and the culture. And I'm so glad you brought up the medication thing too, because people often, you know, hear me share my story, or they read my book, or whatever, and they're like, "Oh, she's anti-medication, she's shaming people who take medications, she's telling people to stop." Like you just said, like, this is not about being against these medications. I know tons of people who've been greatly benefited by taking these drugs, but what I am trying to do in my work is get people to step back and question the information they've been given about the diagnoses and about the meds, and because I believe that this is a problem of informed choice, we haven't been given all the information we

• 33:52Speaker 03

  need, and for people to make true choices for themselves, they need that information, which also includes information about not just the medications, but also alternatives to them.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Like, a lot of people don't even have options, like, because they can't afford them, because they're trying to pay their crazy rent, you know, and they wish they had other options, but a lot of people don't have them, and like, I completely get why meds have become the first line choice for so many people, because they haven't been given anything else.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of functional medicine options out there these days, I'm not saying that those are as good or not, I'm just starting to experiment with some of those myself, but I know that there are functional medicine options out there. And also, I believe that there's bigger, darker entities at play that are happy if we are ill. It's easier to subjugate, what does subjugate mean, am I using it right?

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, to control, to dominate, to control, yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's easier to subjugate if we're a little bit passive.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  If you're chasing the carrot the whole time, you know, it's easier. And it's interesting because we've come across some very, like, huge things that have happened in society recently, and you don't see a lot of, a lot of people stand-

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Outrage?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Protest?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  You don't see much. You see some, but I think all of us are kind of shocked at, like, you know?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  With the Epstein files, with choices that our government's making, when do people, you know, when is there something that gets us to stand up, and has that thing inside of us that makes us want to stand up, has that been compromised at some level that we weren't even aware? It was such a lullaby that we've been within.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, everyone's taking their outrage to their therapist, instead of to the streets, instead of to their local, you know, politicians, to the voting, like, it's-

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Or everybody's putting a pill in their outrage.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  That's what I want, you know, it's like, sometimes it's like, "Yeah, I just didn't know how, how to, I just like, what am I, are these even some of my feelings that I'm feeling? Like, I just didn't know, I haven't known sometimes when I'm on medicine." And I didn't know how I felt about so many things in some ways, I didn't know what was being compromised inside of me at times, like, how I, if it was affecting how I felt about family, how I felt about myself, if I could feel about myself. I've questioned even if antidepressants affect my relationship with my higher power too. And it's all kind of, yeah, so then when you take on the ideas that these antidepressants are, could be

• 36:25Speaker 02

  doing that, that makes, that's scarier than, the reason why I got on them 20 years earlier was just because I was getting out of a relationship, and it was like, kind of heartbreaking kind of stuff. So, okay, let's get back into your story, you've gone through the debutante era, where do you go from there?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, once I, you know, as I was saying, like, after I had that total collapse, like, around that time, then I went back willingly to the mental health system, and I was basically just, "Tell me what's wrong with me, and give me whatever you think I need to fix it." And so, that was when I clicked into this, like I said, this new sense of purpose and meaning, like, this is what my life is about, just getting treatment so that I can finally, one day, feel okay in my skin. And so, I really internalized this medicalized sense of myself, by which I mean, this idea that I had a medical problem in my brain that had a medical solution, these prescriptions. And that just became

• 37:29Speaker 03

  like, the kind of organizing principle of my life, like, I have a medical condition that I'm treating, and that's my number one priority, everything else comes after it. And so, the more, kind of, I became this good patient, and the more treatment I sought, and the more therapy, more pills, my life is falling more and more apart. I'm getting physically sick, weight gain, you know, digestive issues, skin issues, my hair's falling out, sleep problems, I'm getting more and more dysfunctional in my social relationships, just like, really toxic situations with guys, I'm like, losing friendships because I just can't stay connected, and I can't feel bonded, and I don't feel, I can't feel intimacy,

• 38:14Speaker 03

  and my creativity's falling apart, like, everything's falling apart more and more as I move through my twenties, being the good psychiatric patient, on all these meds that are accumulating, and, you know, hospitalizations start, and I'm taking myself into the hospital, I'm just like, so desperate to lock me away from myself, because I just feel, like, I can't live anymore, it gets to those points.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  So, it was feeling like that?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, totally, so like, you know, multiple hospitalizations, and by the time I was 25, I, you know, I'd managed to graduate from college years earlier, but ever since, like, hadn't been able to hold down a job, had been dependent on my family, and like, because I was born into a family who could take care of me, like, thank goodness, like, they kind of insulated me from what would have otherwise been, I don't even know what, like, a group home, like, long-term institution, I don't even know what. And by age 25, there I was, like, totally disabled, almost 200 pounds, no friends, I'm like, constantly like, achy and getting sick all the time, I'm constantly thinking about, like, how

• 39:20Speaker 03

  meaningless this life is, and my psychiatrist says, like, you know, "Unfortunately, Laura, your bipolar disorder has progressed, and you now have treatment-resistant bipolar disorder." Which was, to me, the most hopeless message I could possibly receive, because I had literally spent all of those years leading up to it focused on treatment, because I believed it would one day help me, and I'd been told, like, "You have this brain disease, like, this is the only thing you, that's really gonna help you, and now you're telling me it's not gonna fucking help me?" Like, what? And it was at that point that I overdosed, like, I, you know, it was not, it was, I'd been suicidal for years, but in many ways,

• 40:03Speaker 03

  thinking about killing myself, like, similar to booze, when I was a total booze bag, thinking about killing myself ironically kept me going longer, like, whether it was like, at least I could get-

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Like, why?

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Between alcohol and suicide, it was like, at least I can get shitfaced tonight, so that I don't care about what a mess my life is. And with suicide, it was, I always have that power to end it, so I can go another day. So, it was like, these two dark companions on my shoulders that had ironically, like, kept me going, and, you know, eventually, it flipped, and I was like, "It's time." I have poured my heart into getting help, like, all these meds, all these hospitals, all these professionals, look what I've put my family through, I'm a total mess, I can't work, I can't support myself, and I, if all, this is all that's in store for me for the rest of my life, because I have this

• 40:58Speaker 03

  incurable brain disease, like, this isn't a life worth living. And when I, you know, I like, you know, flatlined, and medevac, and-

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Really?

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, my parents were told, like, "Sign of do not resuscitate, should be a vegetable." It was like, God, I mean, this was a God thing.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  And had you taken a lot of medicine that day?

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  On purpose?

• 41:17Speaker 03

  I took a month's supply with a bottle of wine.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  What kind of wine was it, do you remember?

• 41:23Speaker 03

  It was red wine, I don't know what kind, it was just like-

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Probably something nice if y'all were rich, I bet.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  No, but weirdly, my-

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Like, something that came off a pirate ship or whatever?

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Oh, that would be cool, no, it was like, you know, probably Barefoot, you know that one?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Oh, those were good for a while.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  That was, that was the era, because this is 2008, when I tried to kill myself.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, Barefoot was poppin'.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  And here you were, barefoot, probably taking pills too.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, oh my gosh.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  You were down to shoeless, dude. I don't even think they let you keep your shoes because they have shoe strings in them.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, yeah, if you're locked up in a psych ward, that's like, definitely, they take any laces that you have.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Did you go to a psych ward?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Four times.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  No way?

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Can you take me into just what that's like a little bit?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  I just laugh because people have this, if you haven't spent time yourself on a psych ward or visiting someone on a psych ward, you have this like, oh, it's like the spa, like go away, you get some rest, people are gonna take care of you. You're literally all, you know, any possession you have that could be, you know, that they perceive as a potential weapon is gone. You're on this thin, plastic mattress. And by the way, I should clarify, all my psych ward experiences were in fancy, private hospitals.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  So I'm not, I've been on in state, public institutions, visiting people. I can talk about those in a minute, but my experience was the spa, the-

• 42:45Speaker 02

  The nicer so, the nicer style.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  The top of the line. And, you know, just the thin-

• 42:50Speaker 02

  It sounds nice.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Okay, well, if you wa, let me walk you through the day. So you, you wake up in the morning on your like stiff plasticky mattress.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  And do you have a celli or not?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Um, is a celli, uh-

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Roommate.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  A roommate, a celli. Like C E L L Y.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Basically, yeah. So it, it, sometimes you'll have a private room. Like I had a, one hospital I was in, you had your own private room. But at McLean, I had a roommate. And, you know, glaring fluorescent lights overhead. When you first get in, they check on you every 15 minutes. Like through the whole night, they shine a flashlight in your face to make sure you're still alive. And you're like, really dude, I was just in here 15 minutes ago. Um, but you wake up in the morning and, you know, you kind of like stumble down to the nurse's station to get your morning meds, go into the dining room, and you get, like even at a fancy place like McLean, like it's not nice food. It's uh, like, you know, dried out French toast and cereal boxes and that kind of thing. And then you basically just

• 43:52Speaker 03

  spend your day being coerced into going to these like, super cheesy groups, like emotion regulation and anxiety management and, you know, family skills. And you're sitting there with like 22 year old, like very bubbly, young women for the most part, who were like, here's the mood chart, can you point Theo to which one you resonate with most this morning? And then you pick the like sad face, or the anxiety face.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the vape face, that's one I would pick.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I wonder if they have vape faces on, because I haven't been locked up in so long.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I do now.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Like vapes didn't even exist. A vape face, what would it look like?

• 44:31Speaker 02

  It'd just be a regular face, just kind of nonchalant, or mildly chalant, just hitting a vape.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Oh no.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I think, anyway. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud, but that's the one I'd probably pick most of the time. But I'd be aiming probably for the, for the joyful face. Um, okay, so you have, so you're in there, and is any of it like you're doing like family of origin work? Like is there some more depth like in there about it?

• 44:54Speaker 03

  There is no depth happening there. It's all these like, you know, it's, it's all very superficial, like, you know, my, you know, my, my mom and I are getting into fights. Because there's a whole group of patients with you. And, and it's like a, you know, 30 minute. So there's no deep work, there's no meaningful, like exploratory-

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And is anybody chained up or anything like that in there?

• 45:16Speaker 03

  People do get restrained if they are naughty. Um, I-

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Who's naughty in there? Was anybody?

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Well, one-

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Any pervs in there?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Oh, I, thank goodness. There were definitely some, some perv, I mean, I crossed paths with some strange guys in some of my psych ward experiences. But, but one, one restraint story, I talk about it in my book, is she was this young woman who was a student at MIT. Um, I can't remember what part of Asia she was from, but she was from somewhere in Asia. She was really quiet. She'd gotten admitted, because she was, I didn't even know why she'd gotten admitted at the time, but she was admitted and we all, she didn't talk to anyone. She was just very quiet. And then one day, someone delivered her flowers. And the nurse, you know, they obviously will like check to make sure there's no, you know, there's nothing-

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Paraphernalia.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Bad in there. Yeah, paraphernalia, that was the word I was looking for. They gave her the flowers, and she read the card, and then she just threw them across the hallway and started screaming. Blood curdling screams, and she wouldn't stop. And the staff tried to get her to stop, and just screaming, screaming, screaming. And then eventually, staff literally like physically picked her up and carried her and put her in the quiet room. And she got quiet.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Which probably means she was injected with a tranquilizer.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Dang, you hit her with that dart, huh?

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the-

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Were you able to find out what was in the card? Like what, what was so upsetting?

• 46:46Speaker 03

  No, I never, because she never talked to any of us afterwards. And it, and it was, you know, and I, I have tons of friends who I wasn't locked up with, but who I know from my work, who've been restrained, put in four point restraints specifically. So, you know, I'm thinking of one guy I know, this big, hulking guy. He'd been put on meds in college because one of his best friends died of an overdose, like an accidental overdose. And he was super spun out about it, as anyone would be. And so he wasn't able to focus, and he started taking stimulants, and then he stopped sleeping. And any human being who stops sleeping is eventually gonna get psychotic, because that's literally what happens to

• 47:28Speaker 03

  any human brain. So he ended up getting sucked into the mental health system that way, and got a bipolar diagnosis, and eventually a schizophrenia diagnosis. Um, and he was just put on all these meds, and he would take them for long periods of time. And then he'd stop them abruptly, because he didn't know about withdrawal, and we're gonna come back to that, I'm sure. And so he'd get all messed up, and then he, police would get involved, and then he'd be put in, what will happen sometimes to patients on wards, is they'll get put in four point restraints. So your, your wrists are restrained, and your ankles are restrained, and they pin you down on your stomach. And they pull your pants down, and they inject you with a so-called medicine in your butt cheek.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  And just like knock you out. And they'd leave him, he would tell me, like, they'd leave me for hours, I'd piss myself, like, that's, that kind of thing happens.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  So, so sometimes if things got severe, they would medicate people right on the spot?

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, against their will. Yeah. And that never happened to me, because I was always so compliant. I always did what I was told. And, and so, you know, after my overdose,

• 48:32Speaker 03

  uh, when I, I was like in a coma, it was like a wild thing.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Really?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  I was like intubated. Yeah, it was crazy catheter, everything. And I woke up, I go into all of it in my, in my, my book. I really want you to read my book, Theo, because I feel like we have, just from hearing what you've shared online about, I just, yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  It's, it's, I love my book. I'm so proud of my book. And I wrote it to help people. And, but-

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Check back in with me in two months. Give me two months to read it. Will you?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Is that a fair amount of time?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  I also did the audible recording. It's my voice. So if you like to listen to stuff when you're working out. But it's, it's heavy and dark. And, and I go into this-

• 49:08Speaker 02

  I've dated some heavy, dark women.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  What, we heavy, dark women? We're the way to, we're the way to go, I think. You know, we're intense, we're a little, you know, it takes a lot of energy to, to be with us. Like, if my husband was here, he'd be like, um, but we-

• 49:25Speaker 02

  No, and I didn't mean it like that. I meant I've dated some heavier, darker women. That's what I meant. But I've also dated some women who have, uh, who kind of like, yeah, are a little bit, have a lot more Eeyore in them than, you know, than, than Tigger. I guess you would say, so. Um, but anyway, we gotta move on.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Anyway, back to the-

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I wasn't trying to be like flirtatious.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Back to the psych ward. No, but, but so, so, so, you know, there I was on the psych ward after my overdose, like waking up from a coma, and death, that choice I made to kill myself, I, I hold it-

• 50:01Speaker 02

  So it was an active choice to take your life?

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And to this day, I have deep respect for that choice I made, because given the story I had been taught to believe about myself, that I had this treatment-resistant, incurable brain disease, that I would never be able to manage. Like, it was the logical choice to me.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Right. So that's something that I think as, as listeners, that we, we gotta understand a little bit more, is that, or I'm not telling anybody to understand it, but this is something I would suggest, because I'm realizing this more now, is that you're in this idea that there's no way out.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  So you're just kind of managing something, and it's getting worse. So you, at a certain point, you've kind of medicated yourself into a corner. And it's like, what do you do then, if there is no solution as far as you've known?

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Well, you're being, yeah, exactly. You've been told there's no other solution. And that's, that's the thing, is that I didn't realize at the time, that that was a story I had been told that wasn't actually true. And I think too, the urge to die, because I was suicidal for years. It was like, like I was saying, it was like a companion. It was part of my life. And I realize now, my urge to die was always actually a profound urge to live, just in an entirely different way from everything I knew. And so death felt like, I thought that meant death, but it actually meant really like a more symbolic death of the life that I was living, not literal death.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  So you're saying, I want this, this, this version of life that I'm living, I don't want to live anymore?

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so you think like, that means I have to kill myself. But I see now, like, I just didn't know how else, what else it could mean. And, and of course, all these years later, like, this is another place where I'll get teary eyed. You know, this, that was 18 years ago.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I can't even imagine.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And I, had you told me in that, and that at age 27, after my overdose, like, my life would look the way it looks now, never would have believed you, like, no way, like, no way in hell is it, it's not possible. And so I, I, you know, it took another two years after my overdose for my turning point to happen, for, for me to actually kind of wake up from, from all of this. And, oh yeah, sorry, my suicide attempt was 25, 27 was when I woke up. Uh, so yeah, I was 27, my, the, the previous two years after my overdose were like more of the same. I was still a mess, living with family, like, totally disabled.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Did you try and get any pets, or what modalities did you get?

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I couldn't have handled a pet. I wouldn't have been able to.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Really?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  But not even a little gerbil or something like that?

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Oh, gerbil, was it, wait, do you say gerbil down here? We say gerbil up there.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Nah-uh.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Gerbil.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  I like gerbil way better.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, gerbil.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Gerbil, it doesn't sound as nice as gerbil.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, gerbil sounds like it's from the streets or something. It sounds like it's, like he's from Memphis. You know what I'm saying?

• 52:51Speaker 03

  No, but I picture him with little spectacles on and like a cup of tea.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Mr. Gerbil.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  But anyways, no, I couldn't have had a gerbil, I couldn't have had a plant. I was like, taking a shower once a week was a really big deal. And, yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I've been that depressed before, a long time ago. But I've been that depressed where at the, every moment feels so heavy.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it's like a war, you are, you are literally fighting a battle every day. And when you put your head on the pillow and you haven't died, you're like, I did it. I, I, I won the battle today. It's, and it's, it's not sustainable. And I, that, you know, of course, brings me back to just how some, you know, there, it's not a coincidence that we have 65 million Americans on these meds, because you can only bear suffering for so long before you need relief. And, and, you know, that kind of like, that sound of those pills in that capsule, like, can really just, it brings so much promise until, until it doesn't. You know, and, and, and so for me, that turning point happened in 2010, I was 27.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  I was just gotten out of my last hospitalization, my second to last hospitalization. I'd quit drinking because by then, like I'd said earlier, booze became like a, you know, my go-to way of not killing myself was like getting drunk every night.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  So you were on all these meds and drinking?

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Five meds, including three milligrams of Klonopin. I was on two mood stabilizers, an antipsychotic and an antidepressant, plus, plus the benzo. Drinking, like, for some reason, I loved Harpoon IPA. Do you guys even have that down here? It's like a New England IPA beer. This was like before the whole microbrewery thing happened. I'd either drink, you know, like, a six pack.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  I love how you're on all these pills and then you're like, and also, I'm gonna have a Harpoon IPA.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Six of them. Like, I, I mean, I, it was, I was a, I don't know if you, if, with, with antidepressants, if your tolerance for alcohol increased.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Bro, you're like Ric Flair, dude.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  I don't know who that is, but...

• 54:54Speaker 02

  You're like Sick Flair.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Wait, tell me who he is.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Ric Flair was like, is, is, that's what I'm saying, was, Ric Flair is this famous, um, uh, wrestler. He's actually never, I've interviewed him and he's actually a...

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Oh, him?

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Uh, he's actually a great guy. And he's also actually never taken drugs, but he just likes to drink.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  But he has a robust body, yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  He has, yeah, he's a blonde. He's a blonde and he likes to drink.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  That's an amazing outfit.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  And he loves, he loves alcohol being a part of his lifestyle and stuff. It's always been a part of his lifestyle. That's why I'm saying that.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  I love you, Ric.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of, a lot of people who've been on long-term psych meds end up becoming total booze bags, like, like I did. And they, they're told, oh, you have alcoholism. But when they eventually come off their meds, and this is, was my experience too, like, I, I eventually realized, like, actually, um, the combination was like, kind of leading me to, to act in these crazy ways. Like, now that I've been off these meds for so long and I'm like in my body and I am in touch with my body's signals and needs, like, I couldn't imagine ever drinking the way that I did back then. Like, sometimes I would drink like two bottles of wine in a night and I'd be totally blacked out.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  But apparently I, no one ever could tell. I would like act normal until the very end. And then like crazy shit would happen and ambulances would get called on me and I'd wake up with like charcoal on my shirt in the emergency room. My stomach would be pumped, like...

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You're like John Daly, it sounds like, at a barbecue.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Darn it, I don't know who he is either.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Oh, he's a famous golfer who likes to party. There he is.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, he's cute.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, he is cute.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Look at that outfit.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he is handsome, I mean, but he has a bar, he has a bar down, he has a bar here in town. But he likes to, he likes to party.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Oh, he looks awesome.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  He used to live at a Hooters. But yeah, he likes to party, dude.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that, I would have been like with them, like, out all night. People, and, but I, I think the combination of all the meds and the alcohol was like def, definitely, it, it, I don't know how it interfered with metabolism, but it ma, it made me able to drink a lot more and blackout.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  As you say that, I remember when I first got prescribed antidepressants, I got them to Zoloft and, um, I could drink. Suddenly I could go out to drink. I didn't ever even really liked drinking. But I was living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time, um, with some people I'd met in the ocean or whatever. And...

• 57:21Speaker 03

  In the ocean?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I met some folks in the ocean and they let me stay over with them. And then, um, but anyway, suddenly I could drink and I was drinking gin and tonics or whatever. Dude, like, yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  It's interesting.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Like I was like Jimmy Buffett's god nephew or whatever, something.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  I don't know what is happening in the body to enable that, but I think this, this ends up happening for a lot of people. But so, so in 2010, like, I, I eventually did make the decision to stop drinking, thinking that if I remove alcohol, maybe this treatment-resistant bipolar won't be treatment-resistant anymore and my meds will finally help me. And, cause I've been self-medicating with alcohol and that's why the meds haven't helped. So like, that was the headspace I was in. So I, I quit drinking. And within a month or two, and I'd have, I'd had enough, I'd gotten enough clarity of mind from not being like blackout every night, to, to realize like, holy cow, I've been on these meds since I was a kid, like, I don't know who I am.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Like, everything you talk about so powerfully, like, what do I really care about? Like, what does my bo, what would my body actually look like? Would I actually be in this like 200-pound body? Would I actually feel connected to people? I just started asking these questions because I felt such a difference from just not drinking anymore.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  And that was when I began to bring it up with my doctor, like, maybe, maybe I could come off some of these five meds I'm on. Like, I was literally on five meds prescribed by one doctor at literally the top psychiatric hospital in the country, like, the best of the best care. And the doctor didn't want to do it, you know, like, we don't want to rock the boat, ba, ba, ba.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  The boat is shipwreck, the boat is the Andrea Gale. Like, what are we even fucking talking about? The boat just started in a perfect storm with Mark Wahlberg. The boat ain't doing well.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  And best, but what's so tragic about it is that because the boat was like me showering more often and like not being in the psych ward, it felt like the Queen Elizabeth on her first voyage, you know, like...

• 59:28Speaker 02

  So we feel like the boat's doing better?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  It felt like I am rocketed, like, I'm not in the psych ward, I'm alive, I showered twice this week.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  And I didn't like binge eat two boxes of cereal.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, with your hand.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  I'm doing great, yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. When you hand finish a box of cereal, dude?

• 59:44Speaker 03

  The hand, and you got your elbow up and you're just, and then you even get the powder.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Is a rich thing. That's like having pinkies up when you drink like a martini or whatever. Like, if you eat a box of cereal, elbow up with your hand?

• 59:55Speaker 03

  How else do you get to the bottom?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Huh? You just get in there, you put your dang head in there like a man, like a woman.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. You're going like this.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Well, you just do whatever. No, I don't know if you even cut it open from the side and eat it from the side, whatever you have to do, but you get in there.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary.

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• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Um, so wait, you get diagnosed with treatment-resistant bipolar? But they keep you on, on medicines?

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Well, for me they did, but what is so wild about the whole treatment-resistant thing, and it's why it's in the subtitle of my book, because to me this is like a, the, kind of one of the core problems is that there's a whole industry of treating treatment resistance. So for a lot of people, especially people who have a treatment-resistant depression diagnosis, that's when you start getting told about electroconvulsive therapy, electroshock, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS. Like, that's when you get into the medical device realm. And they're like, oh, all these pills didn't work, so now let's put this giant magnet on your head and shoot powerful current, powerful magnetic pulses through your brain,

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  or like, let's put electrodes on your skull and shoot electric currents through you.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've investigated those, those, uh, those things before.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I go into ECT in my book and some of the other, like, medical devices in it, um, because it is, it's a treatment for treatment resistance. I never, no one ever suggested those to me, and it just speaks to the, like, kind of illogical, illogical nature of a lot of this. But yeah, and had they offered ECT to me, I probably would have said yes. But, but actually, um, like, the conventional, kind of, like, uh, protocol for people with a bipolar diagnosis is that ECT can induce mania. I doubt there's any, like, actual evidence base for that, but that's probably why they didn't.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Okay, got it. Um, how do you start to put the medicine in the rearview mirror?

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Hmm, so I began bringing it up with my doctor, like, I wanna see what my baseline would be off of these meds I've been on since I was a kid. And he said no for a few months. And then, and then, this was May 2010, then I stumbled upon a book that had this old phrenology head on the cover, so you know, like, those old, like, early 20th century drawings where there are, like, different compartments in the skull? And, and it had in each different compartment, a different psychiatric drug name. And so the cover pulled me in, I was like, whoa, I've been on that, I've been on that, I'm on that now. And I was like, what's this book? And it was called Anatomy of an Epidemic. And I just felt compelled to buy it. So I bought it and I started reading it, and it blew my mind.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And so basically, yeah, there it is. So, um, in a nutshell, this journalist sets out to answer the question of, like, why, why, when you look at long-term outcomes of psychiatric medication use for schizophrenia, do people in developing countries, quote unquote, where they don't have all these, you know, medications, do better than in the US and other developed countries, quote unquote? And he ends up discovering, like, if you actually look at the, what evidence base does exist for long-term medication use, it makes a pretty compelling case that, on the whole, these drugs, long-term, are making us sicker, physically, more disabled.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  And so there I was, on long-term meds, five of them, through, you know, all these years, my life falling apart, and it all clicked. And I was like, oh my God, what if it's not treatment-resistant mental illness? Like, what if it's the treatment?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it, and then, once that was removed, like, I couldn't unsee that realization. And it, like, haunted me. And of course, I first went through this state of, like, shock. It can't be true. Like, it, it can't be true that all this medicine maybe has been hurting me. Cause I just had never, it had never occurred to me. And so that was the, what gave me the confidence to go back to my doctor and be like, I don't really care if you don't want me to do this, I'm gonna do it. Wait, are you gonna help me or not? And he was totally unsupportive and basically, you know, made me feel like this was the biggest mistake, but he was like, I'll, I'll, you know, I'll allow it. Like, he just, you know, he, he was willing to bring me off.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  And was this the same doctor that had put you on them?

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I saw so many doctors over the years, but it was the one I was seeing with the five med regimen.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Um, and this gets us to, you know, the topic that I, I'm like, so excited to connect with you more about here is, when I made the decision to come off my meds, I had no idea how hard it would be to get off them.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  No one told me, my doctor certainly had no idea. Um, I had no idea that using these medications, which are psychoactive chemicals, that work by altering how your central nervous system works. Like, if you use them for months, especially years, your whole body is going to adapt to them.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Is that true, that some of them alter how your central nervous system works?

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  All of them. All antidepressants, mood stabilizers, benzos, they, they cause, it's, it's basically, they create physical dependence, which is different from addiction in that when you're addicted to something, you have cravings for it, you, like, seek it out, even though you know it's causing problems. Physical dependence is a purely physiological state where your body changes itself to accommodate the presence of this drug, such that when you remove it, it's destabilized.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  And so no one told me, no one told you either, I'm assuming.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just shocked that, like, I'm shocked that there was never an exit strategy, like, when you get on the drugs. Like, I'd been hitchhiking or whatever to see this girl that I was in love with or whatever, but she didn't like me and, like, I was, like, kinda heartbroken or whatever. And then, um, so I went to a doctor in town, cause I wasn't doing that good. Like, I was sneaking in people's yards at night and petting their animals and shit. I wasn't doing great. And so this, so anyway, the doctor put me on this medication, cause I was, like, pretty heartbroken. I think a lot of it was other childhood stuff that I'd attached to this relationship, unknowingly. And so I was pretty heartbroken. Um, but I was heartbroken in a bigger realm, kind of, than just this specific thing, but

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  this was the epicenter of it. Sort of, this had, like, launched it. This was the match, really. And so I get, uh, I get on these meds, and then everything's kinda fine, but there was never, like, a checkup later. I ended up leaving South Carolina, like, a few months after that. And, um, and there was never, like, a check-in back, really, to, like, figure out if you stay on them. And so I was just on them for a long time.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Was it a psychiatrist who prescribed them, or a general, like, your primary care doctor? Do you remember?

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  I can't remember. I can't remember if, I, I, I think it was a psychiatrist. So I think I'd went to someone who could actually prescribe medicine. So it was someone that at least knew what the medicines were. Uh, but then I got on it and, uh, and then I've just been on it for years. And there's times where I've gotten off to try and, um, like, I tried plant medicine a few times, got off to, like, do plant medicine experiences. Um, and some of that helped a lot, like, uh, doing ayahuasca helped a lot. But, uh, the thing that I didn't realize was I wasn't getting off of them correctly.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  And that's the thing that I, most recently, when I tried to get off, I didn't get off of them correctly. And I was talking with this guy, uh, Dr. Mark Horowitz is his name?

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  You've talked, yeah, Mark's a close friend and I was just talking with him earlier today.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Oh, were you really?

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're very close. We work together on a lot of this.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  And he's, like, out of the blue, um, uh, one of my friends recommended him to come on podcast sometime, and so I've kinda just been emailing with him, but I've been emailing with him, um, in some mild consultation about medicine.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  And he, and I, I got off, and I thought I'd titrated down well, cause I went from, like, 10 milligrams to five, and then to nothing.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Oh, Theo, oh my goodness. Which, and which, is this, was this Lexapro that you were on?

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  This was escitalopram, then, is a generic Lexapro, I think. And when I tell you I hit this thing, that was, like, I didn't care about really anything, and I started sleeping in, and I started, um, things that I cared about became, like, I didn't even, I didn't know if I cared about them. And so I just kinda didn't care about them. I started envisioning futures for myself that were kind of, um... Careless sort of or mundane, maybe. Um, not even like peaceful when just like nonchalant about everything. And that gave, that got a little bit spooky. Uh, because I, I knew that that wasn't real. Or how I really felt it and it was too much.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  And just the sleeping in, I hadn't slept in since I was like, really in my twenties, really. I was like, so what am I doing? And so he said that the titration has to be different. So I'm still in consultation with him, but I recently had to get back on. I've been off for about six months and I really had tried my best.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  And had, was 10 the, the dose that you had been at for a while? Or had you been at a higher dose?

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  I've been at 20 before that for a while.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Um, and then at 10 for probably a year or two.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  But in the end, it's like 25 years, something, but you know, 20 something years. So it's like, anyway, there's a lot more to it and I still, I'm going to try again at some point, but not without better consultation. But, um, let's get back. So that's what's been going on with me about it.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  But let's get back into your story. So, um, what was the toughest parts about getting off of these, uh, for you?

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, because my doctor had no idea what he was doing and I didn't know anything about physical dependence and withdrawal.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  And what year was this?

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  This was 2010. I was 27.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Nobody knew.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  No, yeah. And so I came off five drugs in six months, which is cold turkey. Like.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  You're like the Jesse Owens of getting off drugs, like a triathlete.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  Well, and, and this again, bring, like, I can't not mention class here. Like the fact that I had the socioeconomic resources to be completely disabled for years, like years, the coming off five meds in six months blew up my life for years. And, but I had a family who could take care of me and, and so many people don't have that. And, and so it was just to describe a little bit about what it was like. I mean, things were bad on the meds, like I had all kinds of health problems and like super, you know, emotional instability and cognitive issues and all of that. But that all went on overdrive. Like I couldn't talk.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  I'd, I'd, I'd, you know, we'd be sitting down, wanting to have a conversation and I'd have an idea in my head that I'd want to speak out to you. But the words wouldn't come out or they'd come out and they'd sound really weird. I just like, I couldn't translate thought to speaking. I couldn't absorb words.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  And then you quit cold turkey?

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Five, in six months, five meds, but five meds. So it's basically cold turkey. Like that's so fast. I just want to.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe warm turkey.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  I go back in like just to paint a picture. And you know, Mark, Mark's work, you referenced, like he, we've worked close closely. He's a close colleague of mine. And so I come from the layperson world, like the ex-patient world. And he comes from both that world because he himself was on this stuff and he's also a psychiatrist. The protocols that he, um, you know, writes about and, and uses like came from the layperson community because it was.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  What does a layperson mean?

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  Layperson means a non-doctor, a non-medical expert, patients, like.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Just a blue collar pill taker.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Totally. Just like, you know, bottom of the social hierarchy, of the medical hierarchy, like the patient, we patients ourselves who basically had to, and I didn't, I didn't do it the right, I did it the wrong way because I didn't know. But it's been over decades that patients have had to figure out how to do it the right way, just through trial and error and figuring it out. And, and Mark's tapering guidelines and the very, very few number of other, um, practitioners who know how to taper safely all come from the ex-patient community. Because what we realized is to get off these meds successfully. If you go to your average doctor, they'll, they'll say, A, they'll say, oh yeah, you can do this in two weeks or four weeks or eight weeks.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  And B, they'll say, and you just cut it, you know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again, and then stop. And then they'll, they'll just like do a kind of linear thing where you're on a hundred, now drop to 90, 80, 70, 60. But what people figured out just through what it felt like is my gosh, you know, at this higher dose, I can come down like that. But the lower the dose gets, the harder this feels. I've got to, I've got to make smaller reductions in my dose and maybe space it out a little longer. So it ends up looking like this hyperbolic curve for anyone listening.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Like a ramp, almost like a skater's ramp.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's, or like a bowl, you know, inside of a nice salad bowl, just so you're not making a straight line, a straight, you know, diagonal line.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Or like a staircase.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not like that. It's more of a gentle curve. And the lower that you get in the overall dose, the smaller the reductions you make. And this is literally the opposite of what most doctors tell their patients. They're like, oh, you're on a low dose. You can just pop off. And the reason why this is the case is now research is verifying what patients figured out through experience is that the, the, the effect that these drugs have on the central nervous system is not, um, directly correlated with the dosage size. So like, if you go from 10 to 20 of Lexapro, you're not, you're not doubling the effect that the, the drug is having on your brain.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  Going from zero to 10 is, has a significant, a significant effect on your central nervous system. It disrupts your central nervous system in a much more significant way than, you know, going from 10 to 20 or 20 to 40 or, so the higher the dose, the, the less disruption is happening to your central nervous system.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  I see, but that last 10 or whatever, that's a severe.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the lower the dose you get when you're coming off, the more of an effect the changes are having, which is why like you, you experienced going from 10 to five to zero, like, like blue, blue, you know.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Just melancholy. Everything was a melancholy thing and it was very bizarre. I almost cannot even explain it. And I tried to fight through it and like, I was taking different, um, doing different things in the morning, trying different modalities. It was just too much and it just became too much. And so I just said, you know, I'm going to live to fight another day. So I'm going to get back on my meds.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  How long did it take for you to make that choice? Like, how long were you off for?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Well, for the first like six weeks, everything was kind of okay. It felt like, and then it got like, it was just manageable, a little bit of like depression here and there, but it was stuff that I'd done before that felt manageable. And then, um, and then it just got too bizarre, just the melancholy was a little too much.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  But you knew it what, like you said earlier, like this doesn't feel, this feels like otherworldly, this feels like, this is not me.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Right. It's right. I knew it wasn't me.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  I knew it was something, I knew it was me experiencing something because of something that was going on.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Medicinally. And so I thought it would go away and, uh, and I was emailing with Dr. Horowitz and he's like, no, it, it, it could stay around for a long time.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  And at a certain point I said, I just can't battle this anymore. It was having, it was causing me some troubles even with my like sobriety, sobriety, like just being able to like with my, um, just being in recovery and stuff like that. It was causing me just a lot of confusion.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  So anyway, um, so I'm back on, but, uh, okay, let's get back into where you were talking about.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  So yeah, I knew none of what we just talked about when I came off. So I came off really fast and then, you know, just intense magnification of all these cognitive problems and emotional upheaval and digestive issues and like weird, you know, boils on my skin, weird smells coming out of my body. Like it was just, it was crazy. And like, back then I couldn't have been under these lights. These, these bright lights would have set off like a panic attack. So I, I remember, you know, going to the grocery store, which was a big deal to go to the grocery store. And, you know, all the sounds and the movement and the colors.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  I'd be like, I'm, uh, uh, it would, my body, it was like, my body thought I was being eaten by a tiger, just, just like being in a grocery store. So my whole, my fight or flight response was just completely on, on overload.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  And, and of course, you know, most people who come off their meds fast because there's no, you know, until Bobby Kennedy, you know, our country hasn't really paid much attention to this. So like most people, when they feel that way off their meds, think they're having a relapse, quote unquote. They think like, oh my gosh, my illness is coming back.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Like this is, this is a sign I need my meds. And, and everyone's telling them that too. The doctor's telling them that, their loved ones are telling them that, like you feel horrible off your med. This means you need it, go back on it. And then they go back on it and they feel better, quote unquote, because they're not like having a panic attack in the grocery store anymore. So then they think, oh wow, this medication is really helping me.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I didn't feel, it's so funny you say that because I didn't think exactly. I didn't feel like, oh man, that girl broke up with me again. It's not like I went back to that feeling. It was just, I just feel like I'm off this thing that I can't, that I need to have now. So I just felt addicted.

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  It's amazing that you had that, that you had that sense so strongly. I think some, some people definitely do. They, they know like this is not me. This is these, these drugs. A lot of people don't have that. Like they, I think they, they are so disconnected from their instincts, like, and this was definitely the case for me too. I just was so disconnected from my own, you know, intuition about stuff that I just like couldn't, like it's, when you describe how you felt those six weeks in, when you were like, something's wrong, like this is not, this is not me. This is not my like usual down, down stuff. Like that's was your, that was your instinct, like, you know, ringing the bell.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  A lot of people don't have that. And so then they go back on and they stay on for another 10, 20, whatever years. Cause they're like, I don't want to feel that way again. Cause they just don't know, if you did it slower, it might look very different.

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's what I'm hopeful for in the future. Um, what about, were you able to maintain a relationship during any of this? What was that like for you?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  All those, I mean, I basically dated guys who were as lost and destabilized as I was. So like, not a pretty picture. And, you know, very, we were all just seeking relief. Not all, it wasn't like multiple of them at a time, but in each, each of those dark relationships, we were basically just like running away from pain together.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  And did medicines cause like intimacy issues, kind of? Did you have like, cause I know a lot of like, a lot of guys, there's fear with guys, if I get on antidepressants, it's like, it can affect my like, it can call, it can, maybe it'll cause an intimacy disorder. Can you look, look that up, Trevon?

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it definitely causes sexual.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  Oh, this says right here, it says, um, yes, mental health medications can absolutely cause intimacy and sexual issues. This is a very common side effect, particularly with antidepressants and antipsychotics. It often happens because these drugs affect the brain chemicals that control mood, desire, and physical arousal. Does, does this similar stuff happen with women, kind of? And if it's too personal, we can take it out.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Oh, no, oh my, if, I, I will bear it all, like, I took, cause to me, the more, you know, vulnerable we are, in the stories, you know, in our stories, it's the more, it's the more helpful it is. So, no, yeah, I, I had my first orgasm at the age of 27. I had zero sexual function on psych drugs, and I didn't even realize what I was missing because I'd been put on them so young. So I, I just assumed and was being told that my like inability to feel bonded to guy, you know, bonded intimate, you know, aroused, all those things was my illness, my quote unquote, my mental illness. So I never put it together. And thank God, when I got off, I regained my sexual function.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  And I, and I talk about it in my book, like, of all the betrayals, of all the loss, of all the, you know, the, the disconnection that I experienced is from being on long, long-term psych meds, it was the, the taking of my sexuality, especially in my teenage, in 20 something years, that was the hardest to make peace with. Because sexuality is about so much more than just sex. It's, you know, like, how you are in the world, your vibrancy, your vitality, it's like how you create art, it's how you appreciate beauty and music, it's like all tied into sexuality. And that does get suppressed and disconnected for a lot of people. And I just want to name too, that for a certain percentage of people, and we need more research

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  to better understand this, when they come off antidepressants, they lose sexual function. So they don't even necessarily have sexual problems on meds. When they stop, it goes away. And it's called PSSD, post SSRI sexual dysfunction. And it's devastating, and there are a lot of, like, actually, can I, can I call out a clip to look up?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  Google PSSD Lauren Friedman.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  PSSD is a condition where sexual side effects such as genital numbness, low sex drive, and weak orgasms persist for months, years, or even decades after completely stopping selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or related antidepressant medications. I will say this, I did notice that, um, my orgasms was different. They was different, man. They was just, I mean, it just, they was different, man. They was not, they was, they was just different. You know, they were just like, like the PSI on them was low. That's, I just felt like the PSI on them was low.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  And when you were off for those months, did it change?

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Oh, when I was, when I got off them, that's what I'm talking about.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, oh, oh.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I got off the antidepressants.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  That was when it, yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  There was just like, it was just like, yeah, it was just, it wasn't, it was just not, it was just barely just, it was not much. It was just, it was low. It was low, man.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Is there time, it's a short clip, is there time, yeah, there, that Lauren Friedman, this, just to contextualize this, so, so I, we, my organization, Intercompass Initiative, we helped organize, um, a summit on mental health and over-medicalization in DC on May 4th that Bobby Kennedy came and spoke at, and he made these big policy announcements about de-prescribing at the event. And this panel was.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  About de-prescribing?

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  De-prescribing, yep, about helping, all these guidelines that don't exist, that, you know, Mark Horowitz's work and our work, that don't exist in the, in the government, in the public health system, um, under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, you know, they want to focus on that and actually get good guidelines in and, and train doctors and all that. So this was a panel of young people and her clip, well, I'm gonna talk about it another time, I'm gonna cry, but you gotta listen to this.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's watch this. And I remember Joe Rogan sent me this one night. He, he sends me this stuff to kind of keep me updated on, um, some of the awareness about this stuff. Let's go ahead and watch it.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  PSSD is not just a loss of sexual function, but a loss, for some people, of emotional function as well. That has been the case for me. Before this, I was a super emotional, empathetic, loving, caring, like Sylvia Plath, reading and resonating girl. And the day I woke up with this injury, I quite literally felt my soul leave my body, like I'm so serious. It was the most unbelievable, inorganic thing I've ever experienced, and it's a common symptom of people who have this condition. To this day, it's been years for me, I'm 23 now, I can't feel love for my own mother, which is the hardest thing on earth.

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  I can't feel connection or love for my friends, or even pleasure in music, which was the bane of my existence. I was a songwriter since I was a child, it was my outlet.

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  And it's been completely neurologically severed from these medications.

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  And I'd just like to say, there's a reason that, you know, every song on the radio, every movie on your television, every piece of art since the beginning of humanity centers on sex and love. And not just romantic love, but platonic, familial love. And that is because these are the most central, intoxicating, worthwhile, and fulfilling parts of the human experience. These aren't luxuries. And to remove someone's ability to participate, not just physically through sex, which is completely horrific on its own, but to remove someone's ability to emotionally connect with another human being is a crime against humanity. And I say crime against humanity because there is evidence that Eli Lilly, who created the first SSRI Prozac, knew their drugs could cause permanent sexual dysfunction and emotional

• 1:27:38Speaker 04

  numbness in children especially. And they withheld this from the public because they knew it would be a threat to the bottom line. I mean, I'm hope I'm not the only one who believes that there's nothing more criminal or dystopian to withhold from patients and parents of patients, that your medication can permanently chemically castrate and emotionally numb its user for the rest of their life.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Wow. Is that true that Eli Lilly was hiding information?

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  I didn't know that until she's, she's shared that, but it would not surprise me because drug companies have known all along as well about withdrawal. And they suppress that. So they, they, it would not surprise me. I mean, we, we know, especially in the last six years, that pharmaceutical companies are happy to not give us the full story.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  I don't believe that any of these, uh, drug companies can be trusted anymore. I don't know how you could, I don't know how any of us can trust them. I think it does, why there's so much, um, outside medicine and internal work, like outside medicine, like functional medicine, natural choices, um, homeopathic or homeopathic, and then, um, and just internal work that people are trying to do now to steer clear of, of drug companies.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and I think just one thing that I didn't know when I started my journey on these meds, nor did my parents, is that if you, if you actually read the drug labels themselves that are right on, you know, .gov website, like, it's called the Orange Book. If you Google FDA Orange Book, you can look up any FDA-approved drug and look at the drug approval package, I mean, they redact a lot of stuff, but even looking at the complete drug label, if you actually read the whole thing, which is not easy, some of these are 50 pages, this is not like the little pamphlet you get at the drugstore, but the actual comprehensive drug label, you're, you'll be shocked by what you read.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  Like, as an example, if you were gonna guess how long a psychiatric drug is studied for in, in humans, like in, in the drug trials that get them approved as safe and effective, how long would you guess?

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  That a psychiatric drug is studied for?

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  Is studied for.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  I would guess 10 years.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Six to eight weeks. Sometimes 10, sometimes 12 weeks.

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  Wow. That's heartbreaking. It's brave of her to just like speak exactly what she's feeling.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Like, that it's so rare that we're hearing sort of this voice, I guess. That's what's kind of surprising to me.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  I think until recently, it was rare to hear someone like this speaking out. But I've been doing this work for 16 years and. I feel something profound shifting in our culture. People are waking up, especially young people like Lauren, who are waking up and realizing the betrayal. And, and I want to be clear, like, this isn't about bad doctors, or mean doctors, or evil doctors. This is about a massive information problem that is affecting us patients, and our families, and the doctors themselves. This is about prescribers who have not been given comprehensive information either.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Like, I bet if you asked your average psychiatrist how long they thought the evidence base was for the safety and effectiveness of your average antidepressant, and they wouldn't even realize it's six to eight weeks, or 12 weeks, like-

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  We have an information crisis that has made it impossible to be properly informed on the patient's side and on the doctor's side. And I think it's a big part of why we are now in a situation where we have more suffering than ever before. Rates of suicide are sky- have shot up, especially in young people. In veterans, suicide crisis. We have, you know, 23.1% of Americans have a psychiatric diagnosis of some kind. And so we have this mental health crisis. And everyone concludes, like, oh, my gosh, people must not be getting enough treatment. They're not getting treatment. But if you actually look at the numbers, more people are getting more treatment than ever before.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Than ever. So what is the real problem, do you think? Do you feel like it's like, that there's compromised institutions that are flooding us with pills, that are trying to get us all hooked? Do you feel like it's a big pharma pressure from the top, and like, compromised, like, studies and documentation? Do you feel like it's, ah, that we've all been convinced that there's something wrong with us? What do you kind of, what have you learned from looking at this? Like, what is the real crisis? And it, I guess, the crisis is that we're on the medication. The crisis isn't that there's a crisis.

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  I think the, the list you gave is a great starting point. I mean, it's so, I wouldn't pretend to have all the answers, like, at all. It's such a big, there's so many reasons why people are suffering right now. So, you know, certainly socioeconomic reasons, political reasons, of course, like, reasons about, tied into the food we're eating, the screens we're sitting in front of, the, you know, rigid, kind of, conventional schooling systems that young children are sent into every day through the most critical years of their lives. They're just being, you know, sat in seats, under fluorescent lights, expected to-

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  Oh, you think about it, all that's crazy. I was even thinking about this the other day. I was at, we're on a road trip, and we stopped at a gas station. A lot of the things in the gas station, like, especially the candies, they're more like plastic than they are like a food. Well, like, say if you were to take, like, real food, and then you were to take, like, a piece of plastic, something that was made with plastic, if you put, like, some candy in between them, the candy is way more like the plastic. And just the fact that we haven't even really thought about, like, we've just thought that all of this is okay. Like, if you had a handful of plastic, would you just eat that?

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  Well, we are eating microplastics all day, every day.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  I know, but it's just, it's almost shocking to me that visually, some of the stuff even looks the same. And we're still, like, like, people would buy gummy worms, right? And I like gummy worms sometimes. But it's also the same thing I'm using to fish with, pretty much, when I'm fishing, which is a, a plastic lure, right?

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  But when you think that that's how, it's like, I don't know, some of it's just baffling to me when I think about it.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and, and that your average kid, you, you know, give them the choice between this, like, glaring shiny plasticky piece of candy, and like, a beautiful apple grown on a neighbor's tree. Like, which kid is gonna pick the apple? I think it, it speaks to how, I mean, this has been unfolding for, for all of modernity, really, through, for all of industrialized society. This isn't like, oh, a few years ago, things got bad. I mean, we've been slowly, and slowly, and slowly, over decades, losing connection with our bodies, with each other, with neighborhoods, with communities, with meaning, with purpose, with spirituality, with God, as our culture becomes increasingly individualized, mechanized,

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  systematized, you know, industrialized, institutionalized. And it's been this, like, frog in slow boiling water, where we, we haven't even realized what's been happening to us, because it's unfolded over so much time. And so I think the reason we're in this so-called mental health crisis is vast. And I'm, and I'm not gonna pretend to have an answer to that. But when it comes to the role that the mental health industry plays in it, there are three, there are three critical misunderstandings that our whole culture right now is, is having. One is, we are medicalizing problems that aren't medical. Like, that heartbreak you felt, like, I'm gonna get teary-eyed. The heartbreak you felt, it's like a young 20-something guy, you were in love, I don't

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  even know the details, I don't even need to know. To have your heart broken, to feel that pain, that grief, that, you know, terror of, like, what is my future gonna hold? To call that a medical problem? No, it's, it's a social problem, a relational-

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's half a chapter of Romeo and Juliet.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, imagine if, like, people in Shakespeare's-

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Not the end chapter, not the end chapter.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  But, you know, imagine if people in Shakespearean times were, like, going to doctors to-

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  We wouldn't even have Shakespeare if they had medicine. If they had antidepressants, we would not even have Shakespeare.

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  That is it, right there. We wouldn't have Van Gogh, Shakespeare, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have beautiful art, music, we, we, we wouldn't have creative human expression.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, he'd have been like, give me liberty, or give me, ah-

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Lithium.

• 1:36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I was on lithium, that, that, out of all the drugs, that was, oh, yeah. So, it totally messed up my thyroid. I reversed it when I got off everything, but, but to, so, we're medicalizing, so, this, this three-part misunderstanding that our culture is having. And this is what Bobby Kennedy is addressing in HHS right now, and, which is really exciting to me. And this is what I think our culture is waking up to. We're medicalizing problems that aren't medical. We are-

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  When we say "we," who do you mean, though?

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  Your average teenage girl who's, like, convinced she has an incurable brain disease, you know, because she's, feels insecure, and she's, you know, ner-

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Right, just because you're having adolescent feelings, or things that are part of just adolescence, and of being human? We've, we've taken just things that are part of being human, and made them into, ah-

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Quote-unquote, symptoms to treat.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  Symptoms to be treated, okay.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  And don't get me wrong, there can be, like, you could have, you could have a brain tumor that's making you hallucinate. And like, you can have an actual physiological problem, but you would go to a neurologist and get the tumor treated. You wouldn't be told you have an incurable mental illness.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Right, and some people may have some severe mental illnesses. I'm not talking about that. You know what I'm saying? If you're out there fucking eating radio parts and shit, like, you might have something going on, or if something really traumatic has happened, you could have some PTSD. I mean, I'm not a doctor, I'm not saying any of that. We're just saying that there's been an overabundance, even if you look at the numbers, there's been an overabundance of things that are normal, human feelings, that have now been medicinalized.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  I want to, to what you just said, though, I, even in those cases that you think of as the most extreme, like, the guy who's talking to himself on the subway with his pants falling off, like, I'm, I'm thinking about a guy I knew, he lived in a group home that I used to work in years ago. You know, he'd been living in group homes for decades. He was on tons of psych meds, he'd talk to himself all the time, he heard voices, he was, if you had him, you know, he couldn't live independently. He was what any average person would call, like, a chronic mental patient. Like, he wasn't allowed to be around knives, all that stuff. One day, I was sitting with him on this, like, stinky old fake leather sofa in this,

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  like, ratty group home he lived in, and I was like, I don't wanna say his name, I'll make up a name. I was like, hey, Bill, I was like, what, how did you ever start medications? Like, what was happening at the very beginning, when you first went to a doctor? And he was like, oh, I was, I was 15, 16, and I'd smoked some grass that got me really scared. He was in his 50s when I was talking to him. And, and I, I saw ants coming out of the television, and I told my parents, and they took me to Waltham State, and Waltham State Hospital, it was a state hospital in Massachusetts. They admitted this teenager on an adult ward, loaded him up on antipsychotics, and the

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  rest is history. Decades later, he looks to, you know, if you saw him on the street, he had crazy hair everywhere, he was disheveled. And I can't help but wonder, if you actually go back to the beginning, for every person you see on the subway, on the street corner, who you think in your mind, like, this person has severe mental illness, quote-unquote, if you go back to the beginning of their story, something happened to them at the very beginning, and they either didn't get their needs met, or they were given something that they shouldn't have had, and then just systemic, year after year after year of not getting what they actually needed, and getting a lot of what they didn't need. Who wouldn't be that scary guy on the street corner, you know?

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd be out there pleading, in whatever words you have left inside of you, and whatever organizational abilities you have left, you'd be out there, trying to show people something is wrong here.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  And it, it's like, ah-

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think we have this, this, this view we have, that seriously suffering people are sick, quote-unquote, is a deeply ingrained story, that it's just one story. There are multiple ways to see people who are in deep crisis.

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that kid could have just have been high, and was telling his parents something that he thought when he was really high.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  He literally was. And the rest is history. Forty years later, he's a chronic mental patient, who, like, talks to himself. He wasn't talking to himself prior to smoking the bad grass. And, you know, you might have a doctor say, oh, that triggered an underlying mental illness, like, or it was a bad reaction to pot.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which, we've been there, yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And so, as a-

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Oh, I locked my coworker in the freezer and called the police on him once.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  You did? What did you think he was gonna do? Like, what, what, what was happening in your head that made you do that?

• 1:40:58Speaker 02

  I thought, ah, well, we had smoked some weed together, and we was working at a gas station together, and I thought that he had, ah, set me up, and was gonna do something bad to me.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  I always got paranoid when I smoked pot, too.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  So I tricked him to go in there, and then I called the police on him.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Was he, was he so cold when they came?

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was cold, but whatever. He was fine, he was a little thick, but he'd be all right. He's still all right. Shout out Andrew, shout out Andrew, all right. My bad, bro. My bad, still, still my bad.

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  But, but, so, so we have this crisis where we're medicalizing problems that aren't medical.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Okay, that's number one.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  Number two.

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  I think what's also creating this massive misunderstanding is that long-term use of these medications is not actually evidence-based. If you actually look at what evidence does exist and you factor in how corrupt the evidence base is. So, we are oftentimes confusing adverse effects of medications for a worsening of the condition. So, the very thing that happened to me, I kept getting worse and worse and worse. And everyone saw that as your illness is progressing. Now you have treatment-resistant mental illness. No one ever said, "Maybe these five meds you're on are fucking you up a bit." Like, no one ever said that. So, that's number two.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  We are oftentimes misunderstanding that the worsening that people have on meds might actually be the meds, not an illness. And then number three,

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  we are mistaking what happens when you stop your meds for relapse when it's actually withdrawal. Like, we were talking about before. So, you get off your med, you feel horrible. You are told, "You need to get back on. See how horrible you feel." You get back on, you feel better. You think, "Oh, wow, my medication is helping me. I'm gonna stay on it forever." You don't realize, "No, actually, I was in withdrawal." And then I got out of withdrawal when I went back on it. So, I think that part of this crisis that we're in, I truly think, is tied into these three misunderstandings. But that's changing. Like, I really think we're waking up to the realization that this isn't working here. This mental health industry isn't helping us in the way that we want it to and it wants to.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  And maybe it's because we're looking at this in a distorted, misunderstood way. So, yeah, and the work of InterCompass Initiative, which is a nonprofit I started a number of years back, is all about, we're not anti-medication, we're not telling people to stop their meds, we're not shaming people for whom meds are helpful. What we provide is comprehensive information and resources so that people can make true choices for themselves. Especially around tapering off safely if that's what they decide to do.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's got, you have to have some support in it. You know, I thought even that I had a good strategy, a good plan. I was taking good medicines along with it, like some functional health choices. But I just wasn't, I didn't do, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't do it well enough.

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  Well, you did the best you could with the information you had, just like I did. Just like millions and millions of people who try to get off their meds do. Because you, you didn't have, of course, you made the choice that you made to come off in the way that you did. Because no one gave you information otherwise. And that's what we're, we're working hard to change. And I think it is changing. And what's beautiful about tapering is that it's open source. Like, we have a free step-by-step tapering manual on our website.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  You do?

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that I, we published it eight years ago. Been sitting for free on the internet. We don't market it well, which is not great. But it's basically the protocol that psychiatrists like Mark Horowitz are now incredibly, like, getting into the cult, into the clinical world.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  What is the practice for tapering off of antidepressants or off of psychiatric meds?

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so the number one most important, you know, piece of it is that-

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  And this is not doctor's advice, also want you to know.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  We're not, and we're not telling people to do this. But the key, the key thing is that it should be based on how you're feeling. So, everyone's different. There's not like, "Oh, this is the protocol. Go follow it. Good luck." Depending on each person's individual physiology and all of that, it's gonna look different for everyone. But the, the basic underlying philosophy is what we've, we've found in the layperson withdrawal community is that tapering between 5% to 10% per month of your dose. So, let's say you're on 100mg of Seracel and you wanna taper 10%. You wanna see how that goes for you. You cut, so you would cut 10% of 100 in month one, which is 10mg. So, you cut to 90 for the first month.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  Then in month two, you cut 10% of 90. So, you cut 9mg. So, now you're down to 81. In month three, you cut 8.1mg. And you might be wondering, like, "How the heck do you do 8.1?" And that's where it gets tricky because drug companies aren't required by law to manufacture psych drugs in taper-friendly forms and formulations.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  They're not?

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  No. And I, and I, that may change under Secretary Kennedy. I hope it does. But it, right now, people have no choice but to, like, make their own liquid mixtures and use slip-tip syringes and do this wacky stuff at home because they can't, unless you go to a compounding pharmacy, which is expensive and you need a psychiatrist who agrees to do it. It's, there's no way to make, make 8.1.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'm, I'm even splitting my pill just like this, like any layperson-

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, Theo, I have to-

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Just splitting it with my thumbs, putting my thumbs in the middle of the pill, both thumbs, the thumbnails.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, Theo, I wanna, like, nerd out with you on this because that's, that's not a reliable way to make.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  I know it isn't, trust me.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  So, so you're on, you're on a 10, is that right?

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  I'm on a 10mg of-

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  And it's that little white-

• 1:46:50Speaker 02

  Escitalan.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  Round tablet. I remember it well. I was on it for a long time. So, someone in your situation has a few options. You could either go to a compounding pharmacy and have them, um, you know, make a, if, if you were gonna cut 1mg, make you a 9mg tablet. Which you could do, but, you know, then you have to keep getting new prescriptions all the time each month. But you could do that. You could get the liquid from the manufacturer, which does come as a liquid.

• 1:47:18Speaker 02

  Okay, and let me, let me just say really quick that I wasn't aware that when you're getting off antidepressants, that some of them, uh, you can get them in a liquid form so that when you're titrating off, um, you have the access to, uh, be able to measure kind of smaller and smaller amounts. Okay, just wanted to say that.

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's not, um, some people have a hard time switching and there are all kinds of weird fillers and preservatives. What a lot of people in a situation like yours do is they, and this is not me telling people to do this, this is just describing the reality of what people do. Like, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are doing this. They have no choice but to do this. They put their tablet in a measured glass of water. So, you kind of figure out the ratio of, I'm putting 10mg of my tablet into X number of milliliters of water. They break it down in the water. They stir it up and make it a suspension. And then they remove 10% of the water and then they drink it.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Ah, and that's how they start to titrate down?

• 1:48:26Speaker 03

  That's, and, and it shouldn't have to be this way. But that's how it has had to be for, for decades.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  Right, because the medical industry is not offering a solution.

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're not incentivized to get you off their products.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is kind of crazy. And sometimes it's like, I put like, sometimes I think I've just kind of put these feelings that I had 20 years ago that I just kept kicking them down the road 20 years, you know?

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  So, that's one of the craziest things, too. It's sometimes I'm like, "Why do I still have these old feelings?" It's just because I keep just duct taping them down with these antidepressants. Now, that's not scientific, that's just me sharing how I feel. And we're not off, we're not saying that, we're just, we're stating that that's what the state of medicine is right now. Is that people are having to figure shit out for themselves because, uh, it's gotten so confusing out there and so unhelpful out there for people that want to, um, be away from some of these, which feels a lot of times like a sentence.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  It totally does. It's the perfect way to put it. And I think what you just said is so powerful. And like, it doesn't need to be scientific for it to be valid and true and, and meaningful. Like, this idea, this gets back to the medicalization crisis that we're in. We live in this world where if it isn't scientific and medical, it's not legitimate. If it isn't, you know, clinical research, it's useless data. I can tell you right now that there are tens upon tens, if not hundreds of thousands of data points out there in the layperson, i.e. the patient and ex-patient community online, of data points of like very valid information about how to safely taper. We are, it's all out there for free on the internet.

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  And until now, the medical industry hasn't considered it legitimate because it's not research. But I think returning to, there's so many other, not, knowledge comes from all kinds of sources and it, and can be valid from all kinds of sources. This idea that anecdotal information is invalid is preposterous to me. Like, your experience is, is, is the most important thing for you. Like, my, what I went through, no one knows me better than I know myself. No one, I don't care how many degrees they have after their name. No one could possibly understand what's happening inside of me better than me.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a fucking researcher, dude.

• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  People are like, "Oh, well, you're not a scientist," whatever. But it's so much of science is so compromised, so many things are so compromised. There's, it's like the last, it's like, you need somebody just to wander in the woods and come out and tell you what they saw, right? And I'm not saying I'm that guy, I'm saying we're all that person for ourselves, for sure. And then, and then individually, we all have to be that person, um, more than ever these days as information gets owned and compromised and, um-

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  Surveiled.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  And surveilled and-

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  Censored and-

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Altered, oh, totally.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  It's like the last thing we have is our voice, is the voice of someone who's had an experience. And then you trust for yourself, do you believe their experience, do you not? And that's like, that's what we have, that's all we've really ever had in a lot of ways. But yeah, I think that, I think a lot of people are like, uh, a lot of people that wanna get off medication, they don't know what to do. And a lot of, a lot of times, we just say, we throw our hands up at it. I've tried like four times.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, well, I, if I can, if I can be like a buddy to you in this because you need, you need friends who've, who've, and fellows who've walked the path.

• 1:52:00Speaker 02

  That's what I was gonna ask you.

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  It's like the 12-step world, like, having mutual aid, having, so, part of our nonprofit, besides providing all kinds of information and resources, we have a community too. Where people who've been through it themselves are all, they're supporting one another, they're

• 1:52:14Speaker 02

  There is a community there?

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, totally, because what

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  Where are you finding that community, just online?

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  Our nonprofit has one, but they're all over Facebook, especially now, I mean, back in 2010, I was like one of three people on the internet who was talking about getting off psych drugs. Like, no one was talking about this back then. But in forums, like kind of weird Reddit-y kinds of secret forums, tons of people were messaging each other, but it wasn't like visible on the internet. Now, there are hundreds of Facebook groups, people helping each other for each specific drug. Like, you could totally Google escitalopram withdrawal support, and you would probably find like five groups with 10,000 people each in them.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think part of me, I tried a little bit too much to just do it myself, I think.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need that, you need, but you definitely, because having friends who've been through it, not only helps you like get information that maybe you didn't have before, but it also helps you stay connected to hope. Like, when you're in a really bad patch, if that ends up happening in the withdrawal process, it's like having someone who's been there, done that, they're five years down the road than you, be like, I see you, you've got this, like, you will, there is a through here, like, just keep putting one foot in front of the next. Like, you need that hope, and you also need the validation of, like, oh gosh, I wish, you know, I'd been able to be there for you, like, in that, when you were in six weeks in, and suddenly things got really weird and wacky, and you're like, what's happening to me?

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  To have people who are like, I've seen that 1,500 times, what you're describing is not unusual, this is totally six weeks in.

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  It changes the way you, changes your perspective, it helps your perspective.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  So what suggestion would you give somebody who right now is thinking that I would like to try to get off of antidepressants? And again, we're not doctors, so, I'm not a doctor.

• 1:54:05Speaker 03

  I'm not a doctor, I'm an ex-patient, that's my resume.

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  I'm a, I'm a, someone who's tried to get off antidepressants a lot, or five times, but hasn't been successful yet.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, totally, and if you're, I mean, what I would say is, this is, only, each person, him or herself, is the only person who should make this decision. Like, I, sometimes people really think I'm telling them to come off because I'm talking about withdrawal, I'm like, I have no idea what's best for you, you're the only person who knows what's best for you. But if you are someone who, in your heart of hearts, your instinct is telling you, I need to give, to see what life is like off this stuff, like, I don't like this adverse effect, or I want to have a baby in a few years, or whatever it is, it starts with getting informed. Check out our website, theintercompass.org, there's tons of information all over the internet on physical dependence, like, understanding how these drugs change our brains and bodies,

• 1:55:01Speaker 03

  how to taper slowly and safely, understanding the evidence base that these drug, your drug was approved on the basis of, like, you need all this information to help you think clearly about what the next right step is. So get informed, once you're informed, take a look at your life circumstances, is this the right time? Or do I have too much stress going on? Am I in a divorce? Am I about to move? Do I have a lot of work stress going on? Like, if you can, find a time where as many stressors as possible are removed. Number three, communicate with your doctor, ideally, if you can get them on board, that's great. A lot of people don't have the support of their doctors, unfortunately.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  I hope that changes, but if you can help your doctor feel confident in supporting you by showing them you're prepared, and you know what you're talking about here with how to taper safely, having, having their support and partnership, you know, as your, especially because you need your prescriptions written differently when you're tapering, that's really important. Building out a support system, family, friends, fellow withdrawal people, mutual aid, as much support as you can build.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Or you're withdrawers, some people call them withdrawers.

• 1:56:11Speaker 03

  I love that, that's so great, yeah.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  I just made that up, I don't know if it's great or not, it seems, it's a little cringy, but it's also, carry on.

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  You need, you are, like, every single person who's, is a warrior, who's

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  This shit was wild, bro, I'll say the last time I'd done it, it was, it was, I was surprised.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Well, I remember, I remember, can I ask you about that?

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Speaker 03

  I know, I remember, I don't know if it's, I remember, it was last, was it last fall, you had, and you talked about how hard it was, and how you went back on.

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  That was probably the previous time that I went back on, so this was just recent, I just got back on like two weeks ago.

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  Oh, it was that recently, okay. And, and since you've gone back on, does it feel, do you feel?

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  I feel safer.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  I just feel like, you know, like you're playing freeze tag or whatever, and you're off a base, you can get tagged?

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Speaker 02

  But it's like, I feel like I got back on base. So it's like, I feel like I have my foot on like a base, you know?

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02Speaker 02

  So it's like, but I'll get back out there, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  Oh, you totally will, you'll know when the time is right, and yeah, all those things I said are important, and then also just the lifestyle piece, like, it's, it's, you know, it sounds obvious, but just the food you're putting in your body is gonna shape how this experience goes for you, and ensuring you're eating, you know, healthy fat and gut-friendly food, because maybe you already knew this, but 95% of our serotonin receptors are in the gut. So like, we have this idea that, you know, Lexapro's like, just targeting serotonin receptors in our brain, no, it's like, it's influencing the entire body, especially the gut.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had started buying, they got a little deal over here on the corner where they're selling, you know, previously used cabbage or whatever it's called, what is it called?

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Oh, you, sauerkraut?

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  Sauerkraut, that's what I'm talking about, or whatever it is.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  Fermented cabbage, yeah. Nice, I love sauerkraut.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  I like to call it somebody else's cabbage, that's what it seems like. But yeah, I was eating that, I had a, I had a good basket, you know, a couple of good jars of that. So I had like a strategy, but it just, I didn't have the right strategy, so next time I'll get a different one.

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  Well, the taper speed really is everything, like, how you're actually making the reductions is everything. And that's the beautiful thing, is that that's all for free online right now. You don't need some special medical expert to tell you how to do it, you can figure it out for yourself online.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  Amen. Laura, thanks so much for joining us today and chatting.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so happy to be here.

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  I really appreciate it. I, I've heard you mention a few times RFK Jr. during this chat, and I know that you were working with the Maha Institute, right? And that was this past May? What were you guys doing together? Take me through that, and take me through, what is he doing, or what is his movement doing right now for mental health?

• 1:58:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, Secretary Kennedy has long been aware of and engaged with this crisis we've been talking about here. He, he's long seen that we have so many millions of people on long-term meds with no off-ramps and all of that. So when he was confirmed as HHS secretary, and, you know, my husband Cooper and I, who we worked together at Intercompass Initiative, we saw him talking about it, you know, at his confirmation hearing, and around that time, we realized, in this like very, it was, it felt very surreal, because we'd been operating under the assumption, for, for me, like, for 15 years at the time, the government's never gonna be a partner in this, like, we

• 1:59:44Speaker 03

  just have to work on building stuff outside, and like

• 1:59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're all realizing that on every facet, it feels like.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Totally, so I've just been solely in that headspace through my career, and I still think that's like the most essential work to do, is like building new things outside of the system, so to speak. But when, when Bobby came in, you know, we realized like, wow, this is actually a surreal opportunity to, to partner with the federal government, to support them, to assist their efforts, to actually try to get policy changes around this over-medicalization crisis, as they're calling it, and like how to help people who have decided for themselves that they want to taper off, how to help them do it safely.

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  What policy changes would actually help?

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  Well, what Kennedy announced on May 4th at this event that we organized with the Maha Institute, yeah, here it is, right here, so he, he laid out this plan.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  The US Department of Health and Human Services on the May 4th, 2026, announced efforts to curb psychiatric over-prescribing at a Maha summit on mental health and over-medicalization. As the closing speaker, Secretary Kennedy Jr. laid out a new action plan to promote appropriate psychiatric prescribing and drive de-prescribing when clinically indicated. Today, we take clear and a decisive action to confront our nation's mental health crisis by addressing the overuse of psychiatric medications, especially among children. What is actually happening here, do you find?

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  Or is this just like, is this just talk? Is this just rhetoric?

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  No, well, he announced a few specific next steps that HHS has set out to undertake.

• 2:01:21Speaker 02

  Okay, we will support patient autonomy, require informed consent and shared decision-making, and shift the standard of care toward prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health.

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  There should be more, I don't know if it's on another page, but there should be more, like, an actual breakdown of, I mean, the announcements he made were around

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Developing guidelines for, for SSRIs tapering, training clinicians in how to do it safely, enabling through insurance that the, the coverage of de-prescribing so that doctors, prescribers can get paid to de-prescribe through billing codes and all that.

• 2:02:04Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  And I think, you know, getting federally funded health centers equipped to support people in de-prescribing. So he, there are tangible policy next steps that HHS is, is

• 2:02:19Speaker 02

  aiming towards.

• 2:02:20Speaker 03

  Has committed to work, work towards. And I think that, which really is surreal. Like, I, I never thought this would be a possibility. That, I think, in combination with this cultural awakening, I think, leaves me feeling really hopeful that substantive change can happen. And of course, his announcements led to all kinds of media headlines, you know, Kennedy's gonna ban SSRIs and they're gonna deny access and remove from the market and yada, yada, yada. None of that is true. None of what HHS has set out to do is about removing, banning, denying access. It's literally about creating more options.

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  I mean, 90% of the media is owned by the same groups. So I'm not surprised, probably, I'm probably, I'm not surprised that Bear, Bear Monsanto doesn't own half of the media. Or, you know, it's all, it's all a shell game. Right here it says, "The changes: new training, reimbursement mechanisms, and clinical guidelines nudge clinicians to help patients getting off medications and to consider non-pharmaceutical interventions like therapy, nutrition, and exercise. Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default. We will treat them as one option to be used when appropriate, with full transparency and with a clear path off when they're no longer needed." Amen to that, man. I've known Bobby for a while. I've always believed that his heart is in the best spot.

• 2:03:44Speaker 02

  And I don't know what it's like when you take your heart into a fucking den of spiders. But I, but I love this idea because, oh, it says, "Let me be clear. If you're taking psychiatric medication, we are not telling you to stop," Mr. Kennedy said. "We are making sure you and your clinician have the information and support to make the right decision for you."

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  Agreed. Because here's the thing. Imagine you get onto a, on an on-ramp, on a, on a highway, and you can never get off of it.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  And here's the option you do have. You can pull your car over and park and get out and walk. You're still on the fucking highway, though, and now you just don't have the vehicle you were in. That's what it feels like a lot of times.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's even worse. It's, the only option people have now is to open their door and jump out while their car's going 80 miles an hour. AKA cold turkey withdrawal.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Like... I mean, but that's a, but, so yes, there should be a way to get off of these. I, I, I mean, I applaud that, um, you guys are doing this work. And the fact that it has to come from just a layperson trying to figure it out, you know? That it's come from like, it's a conspiracy theory almost to trying to get off of your medicine.

• 2:04:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:51Speaker 02

  Um, what is your life like now? Uh, what is your medical regimen like now? And, um, how do you, how are you feeling these days?

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  Um, well, I don't have a medical regimen.

• 2:05:03Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. I mean, I haven't, it's been a while since I've been to a doctor. And, and for me, and when it comes...

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  I don't blame you, first of all.

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  I just find, for, for me, you know, God bless the emergency room if I break a bone or I have some kind of, you know, horrible medical crisis of some kind. But I, you know, I grew up just thinking that the best way to care for myself was to see doctors. Like, and I think a lot of, especially the generations above us. Like, I'm elder millennial, you're like a young, a young and Gen Xer, right? So I think we, you're at the tip.

• 2:05:39Speaker 02

  We're semi-neighbors, remember?

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. So the generation above us especially, you know, this idea that I'm taking good care of myself. I'm going to all my checkups and wellness visits, this, that. And people just have this idea that, like, that's how you take care of yourself. There, for some people, sure, that may be true. But there's so many other ways to care for oneself. And for me, my own philosophy for how I care for my body is, how did my hunter-gatherer ancestors live? And how can I get as close to that as possible in this modern, industrial era that I'm in? Because we haven't evolved for, we haven't evolved for all this bright lights, all these screens, all this factory food. Like, our bodies have not evolved for this. And so...

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And the timeline of history, if you were to look at history as like a 24-hour clock, um, human beings, I guess, have been here for like, since 11:59 PM.

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. I'm...

• 2:06:35Speaker 02

  Is that right? Look that up for me.

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  I'm sure it's something like that.

• 2:06:37Speaker 02

  If, if the 13.8 billion year age of the universe were condensed into a single 24-hour day, humanity has been around for less than the final two seconds before midnight.

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  And then, I wonder, if, can you, is there a way to calc, to calculate, in the scale of human, as long as humans have existed, how much on the clock would, like, industrial, the kind of industrial era be?

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  If the entire existence of modern humans were condensed into a single 24-hour day, the industrial era would be less than two minutes at the very end of the night. Wow.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  Which, which is profound when you think about it. Like, we have not evolved for the, the world that we live in. It has escalated so rapidly.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. We were so quickly ago, we were basically raccoons.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  Totally. Totally. Ma, women were birthing at rivers, riversides and in bushes and...

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  And now it's gonna happen again just because our healthcare system's so bad. So oddly enough, we are making our way back because of corporate greed. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

• 2:07:36Speaker 03

  Full circle, full circle. But I think, I keep that in my mind, like, and, and...

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  You know, people often ask me, like, so now everything's great? Is that, is that right? Like, so you, you don't have, you never had, you don't have bipolar? You never have, everything's happy? You're good now? And I always have to say, like, no, no, no. I'm still the same me. I'm still the same dark, comp, you know, kind of complex, slightly paranoid me that I've always been, just because of the, you know, the way I grew up. And I'm not happy and balanced and hype, put together and high-functioning all the time. The main difference is that I'm not afraid of my emotional pain anymore. I don't view it as a problem to fix. I view it as a signal and a message to listen to. Like, what is my anxiety telling me about my life? What is my despair telling me about my life?

• 2:08:23Speaker 03

  And sometimes it's as obvious as, like, I literally haven't been outside today. I've been on my computer. I, like, need sunlight and to get off this screen that's messing up my body. But sometimes, like, there isn't a clear reason. It's just, like, thinking about how many potentially millions of people out there have stories like yours and mine, where we were sensitive, like, alive, vital, young people who had things happen in our lives that left us hurting. And here we are, here you are 20-plus years later, you know, here I am, dig, after digging myself out of this, like, near-death, like, experience.

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you fucking went through it.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  How many millions of people are having a similar experience and don't even realize it, you know?

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I, I, I mean, I also, I noticed this for sure about myself. I was hypersensitive, for sure. So being hypersensitive and hyper-aware.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:09:25Speaker 02

  I mean, you're basically, you know, you're a mouse. I'm a rat. But you're a mouse, you know? I'm not like a rat, like, in prison, like a snitch or whatever, but I'm just a rat.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  Rats are very smart and cute. When I lived in, in Boston, I used to go in the back alley and save the baby blind rats that were wandering around.

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  But that's because you were doing, you were on dope. So, let's be honest with each other.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  I was on a lot of meds, but I actually still would do the same thing. I love animals.

• 2:09:48Speaker 02

  Oh, the blessings.

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  But, but no, I think...

• 2:09:49Speaker 02

  But we're all ma, well, yeah. Our whole group is, we're all rats.

• 2:09:52Speaker 03

  And I think all human beings are born this way. Like, I think we are born a sensitive, like, can I, can I read you, and then maybe this is a way to tie it all together. Can I read you the la, this is, it's like a paragraph.

• 2:10:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:10:06Speaker 03

  Two paragraphs. Um, I have to see if I can...

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  Sure thing.

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  Find it in my book here. Um, it just, it ties in, so this is towards the end of my book. It's just a paragraph.

• 2:10:16Speaker 02

  Okay, take your time with it.

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  "What will it take for our society to begin questioning the collective assumption that the industries that have made trillions off our worsening pain, among them health, hospital, pharmaceutical, biotech, and tech, are the very ones we should trust to provide us resolution? Two things are undeniably true about our society today. We're growing ever more unwell in mind, body, and spirit, and the business of health is thriving. Industry has subjugated the natural world around us through commodification and profitization. What's left for it to conquer is the space between our ears. It is now a radical act

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  in our medicalized, professionalized world to look in the mirror for answers and to turn to your neighbor in times of difficulty and to open your door to them in return. Or, if you don't yet know the person who's living life next to you, to bring a pot of homemade soup over and introduce yourself. For thousands of years, we wrote poems and plays and made music and comedy and art out of our suffering that we shared with one another in community. Today, we take it to a doctor and the pharmacy under the false premise that it can and must be obliterated."

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah, I think one day a smile will be in like a museum somewhere.

• 2:11:42Speaker 02

  You know, and people are like, can you believe that people's used

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  The edges of their mouths used to turn up when they used to feel something?

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  That was all the people cared about?

• 2:11:51Speaker 02

  Blasphemy. Uh, thank you, Laura. That's beautiful. And thank you for, um, yeah, thanks for caring. Thanks for sharing what your journey has been like. Um, thank you.

• 2:12:01Speaker 03

  Well, thank, thank you also for sharing your journey with so like, the more we share our own stories, especially like the vulnerable parts of what we go through, I think the more it helps other people realize that the struggles they've had are not meaningless or wasted, or, you know, that they have value. Like, I, I often say, to me, the suffering that I went through, when I realized it was actually medicine for someone else. And like, this gets to the 12 step, you know, the whole ethos of the 12 step world, like you take your own pain and you get out of yourself and you use it in service to other people.

• 2:12:40Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 2:12:41Speaker 03

  I think we've, so many people don't grow up with that opportunity. And it's free and it's available to all of us at all times. It's not easy to be with your pain and to share it with, with people.

• 2:12:54Speaker 03

  But it's medicine. It really is.

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, my friend James Bouchere always says, we are the keys to each other's locks. That's what he says.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  That's beautiful.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  It's a nice statement.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  That's beautiful.

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  And he, he's like a damn janitor, man. He is like, he's a keychain of keys, that guy. He really is.

• 2:13:09Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  For a suggestion for parents who have a child that was like you, right? Like, what suggestion do you give to parents who have a child that is going through some things that seem like, uh, mental, that seem emotional, um, that they're, that they're saying, okay, let's take them to talk with someone. What, uh, with a therapist or with a psychiatrist or with a, um, L.

• 2:13:34Speaker 03

  LMHC, Licensed Mental Health Counselor?

• 2:13:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  Or someone like that. What, uh, what suggestions do you offer to them?

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I think the most important one is never let someone with letters after their name convince you they know your kid better than you. Like, as a parent, no one knows your child better than you. Your parental instincts cannot and should not be violated. And I think that, I think it's what happened to my, my parents and to so many parents. When you're, when your kid is struggling and you're terrified and you're in so much pain, watching them in pain, and you're confused, you're at a very susceptible moment in, you know, in, in, in your life as, as a parent and,

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  and well-meaning, because I want to be clear, these aren't like bad people. Doc, mental health professionals are not bad people. They came to this work because they want to help. So I want to be clear about that. But I think parents often end up disconnecting from their instincts about their kids because they believe that expertise comes from the institution. Like, I'm, I'm not a trained professional. I don't know what to do here. As a parent, you have deep, deep wisdom. Um, that doesn't mean you can just figure it out alone. Of course, support is, is necessary, but I think just keeping that in mind and not, never losing touch with that through whatever lies ahead is, is really important. I think another thing that parents often get,

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  have trained to, to do is to see their kid from this perspective of like, something is wrong with my kid. Like, my kid has a problem to fix. As opposed to seeing their kid as, from the question, from the place of, what is happening to my kid? Or what is happening around my kid in their environment? Or what is happening, you know, in my kid's body, what they're eating, or like what they're watching, like the screen exposure, whatever it might be. So if parents can kind of stay connected to a kind of curiosity of like some, there's a reason why my kid is having a hard time, and it isn't because their brain is broken.

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  It's, it, it might not be clear what the reason is, but to just be curious and to remember that they're having a response to the life they're in.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  I think that's really critical. And then I think getting support from other parents, I think in the same spirit that we were talking about before, the 12 step world, the mutual aid world of withdrawal, parents finding one another in their own communities and supporting one another and like mentoring one another, I think is a really, it used to be how it was. We all lived in little villages together and.

• 2:16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was community.

• 2:16:19Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  Community is so important. It's like if your grandmother's around watching your children, or if your families live close to each other, then other family members are involved.

• 2:16:27Speaker 03

  Like, human beings evolved that way. Like, we said until two minutes ago in the Homo sapiens history, like, that was how we lived. And so just keeping.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  And here we are in this outlier. We're, we are like an astronaut right now.

• 2:16:39Speaker 03

  Seriously.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  So far away from, uh, what we're supposed to be like. The umbilical cord is stretched, yo.

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  Do you know that I, when I gave birth at home, uh, we, my husband and I, we waited hours before we separated the umbilical cord from my placenta. I'm going to go there with you right now. And we burned it. We didn't cut it.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  Did y'all smoke it?

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  No, but we did freeze my placenta. But my husband, I asked him to chop it up into pieces, because this is like a whole in the kind of home birth world.

• 2:17:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  A lot of women will be like, because mammals, female mammals will often eat their own placenta after they give birth. There's a lot of nutrition.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  Some of them are also perverts as well.

• 2:17:19Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 2:17:20Speaker 02

  Dolphins are.

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 2:17:21Speaker 02

  But go on.

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  But yeah, Cooper chopped up my placenta for me because I was thinking, maybe if I want to do this down the line, I'll put it in a smoothie or something. But then he put all the pieces in a big mass in our freezer. It's almost six years later, it's still in there.

• 2:17:35Speaker 02

  No, it's still in there?

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  And then when we tried to.

• 2:17:37Speaker 02

  Dude, I'll buy a couple grams of it.

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  When we tried to burn the umbilical cord, like our son was, you know, breastfeeding, like, the placenta's in a stainless steel bowl that Cooper's holding. We have this candle, we're trying to burn it, and we didn't think about, we would know that it's smoky. It got smoky and we were like, oh, please, fire alarm, don't go off.

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you're like, it's like grilling kind of a meat, sort of. It's tripe kind of or something.

• 2:17:59Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what it is.

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  Dude, people, we have, people.

• 2:18:03Speaker 03

  It's like pig intestine.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  It's what?

• 2:18:05Speaker 03

  Pig intestine, kind of.

• 2:18:06Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, yeah, people act like it's kind of like a magical deal. Now, I think if you chop it up and smoke a little bowl of it with your husband or with your stepdad or whatever, that shit's kind of, that shit's wild.

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  I bet you've never talked about this on your pod before.

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  No, I haven't, dude. That's, it's fucking bizarre. I'm just trying to pretend like it's normal shit.

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  But this is what life is about, just being your authentic, full self.

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  Oh, dude, if I had like seven pounds of placenta right now, I would definitely dry one out and smoke it with my boys or whatever. I don't think that counts as a relapse either.

• 2:18:37Speaker 03

  Sell it for something.

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  Oh, you could trade it right now to one of our politicians for something good. Probably for a favor.

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  What, uh, I did want to ask.

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  Anywho.

• 2:18:52Speaker 02

  Anywho.

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so that is the first one. Um, did you have any other, uh, suggestions for parents?

• 2:19:01Speaker 03

  I think, you know, just taking all the time you can to get informed. You know, if you are taking your kid to a mental health professional of some kind and your kid is being given a diagnosis and or, you know, being put on a medication of some kind, just knowing that you have, it's your right to take whatever time you need to look into what's being offered to you. Like, the, the, just because the doctor is saying something and telling you to do something, you know, doesn't mean you shouldn't take whatever time you need to first get educated, you know? My parents were never told, we're giving your daughter this bipolar diagnosis despite the fact that

• 2:19:43Speaker 03

  this is totally, you know, subjective. It's just my opinion based on looking at her. It doesn't mean she has anything wrong in her brain. I'm going to put her on these meds, but just so you know, we've only studied them for a few weeks. They weren't told that. So, and the chances are, your doctor isn't going to tell you those things. So take whatever time you need to inform yourself. Our, our website has a lot, but there's plenty of other resources out there too. Um, and you can find more resources at our website too.

• 2:20:11Speaker 02

  And the website is?

• 2:20:12Speaker 03

  Theinnercompass.org.

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Theinnercompass.org. Um, do you, do you hold, uh, did you hold a resentment against your parents?

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, no. I mean, if I was in their shoes, I would have done the same thing. They were, they were terrified. Like, I was slicing my arms up and, you know, screaming and freaking out. And they saw no other option. They saw no other option. I, I completely understand why they made the choices that I made. I mean, I wouldn't change a minute of anything that happened to me. I don't know if you feel the same way, but I feel like every.

• 2:20:46Speaker 03

  Every painful experience I went through brought me to my purpose in life, which is my, this work, my writing and this nonprofit and just doing what I can to help inform policy. Um, life, what I've realized is that the objective to living isn't the absence of pain, it's purpose. It's finding meaning, it's connection to yourself, to your body and your instincts, to people around you, to nature, to God, to, to art. Like, I mean, I can't, I can, I find, I'm, stand-up comedy to me is such, uh, I can't imagine the courage it takes, but I can,

• 2:21:30Speaker 03

  I can imagine like if you're tapped into your flow, like the gift that you have in this world to like take your life experiences and turn them into art for people and, and to use your art to draw attention to the world around us. Like, what a fucking gift. And I imagine if you hadn't had that horrible relationship and whatever other painful experiences you've been through in your life, like you wouldn't be the comedian that you are. Like, I feel the way about my, that way about my writing. Pain is what makes us fully human.

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  I agree with that. I think it's like, yeah, having some fuel. It's kind of so dark to, to like, think that those types of things are fuel, but it's also a blessing to know that they're, um, that they can turn around and be a fuel like that, you know?

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  That a worm can turn into a, um, bird or whatever. No, what is it? Butterfly?

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  Uh, caterpillar? Caterpillar?

• 2:22:28Speaker 02

  Caterpillar.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  Maybe there are some worms that turn into stuff, though. I don't know, but yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 02

  I doubt it, but thanks for trying to help me.

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  And the, and the whole analogy of like the phoenix and the lotus, like the lotus, these symbols that have these ancient meanings in cultures around the world. It's the, it's the, the burning of the bird and they, it rises out of the ash. It's the mud and the muck that this beautiful flower grows out of. Like, this is not me being romantic and like Pollyanna-ish or, or being like, everything happens for a reason. It's all great. It's, it's just naming what it is to be alive in this like crazy fucked up world where fucked up things happen all the time.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  And we've gotten so used to them. And this isn't how it's supposed to be. And this is, this is not how it's supposed to be. We all feel that this is not how it's supposed to be. And we're all mildly kind of pretending like this is how it's supposed to be. But I think we're just sick of pretending.

• 2:23:26Speaker 03

  Yep. And yeah, the pain that we think is a symptom of illness, so much of it is, it's like we're the canaries and those of us who get labeled mentally ill often are the canaries in the coal mine. Like, we're feeling, we're sensed, we are sensing like, this is not okay, people.

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're an astronaut. You're like, if you were in 2010, if you were thinking about this stuff, like and talking about it, you were like an astronaut, you were like Phil Armstrong. You were out there like, just like an emotional person, like out in outer space, trying to like have some idea of what's going on, like, you know? And we need the, we need people to be out there to be like the Paul Revere's of something. Um, and I think more than ever in our world, we need Paul Revere's and Paulette Revere's, you know? Um, but I want to say thank you so much. Unshrunk, that's the book. You gave me, you gave me two months to read it. I love this very Sense and Sensibility type of cover on it. Pride and Prejudice, energy up front. I like that a lot.

• 2:24:26Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you.

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  Or what is that book called? Little Women? It has a very Little Women energy on the front. I like that. Um, Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment and Resistance. Uh, can I keep this copy?

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want to write you a message.

• 2:24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you. That's very sweet of you, Laura Delano.

• 2:24:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  Yep. And Cooper Delano, that's your husband?

• 2:24:47Speaker 03

  Davis.

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  Cooper Davis, he changed his name?

• 2:24:53Speaker 03

  He's, he's untraditional. He kept his name.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  He kept his name. Okay, type shit. Cool. Um, tell him we said what's up.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I will, for sure.

• 2:25:02Speaker 02

  The Inner Compass Initiative. Uh, you can find them out at theinnercompass.org, uh, helping you make more informed choices about all things mental health, diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. Um, do you remember the day that you felt you were free from medicine? Was there one day or one thing that happened that made you be like?

• 2:25:22Speaker 03

  I, I wouldn't say it was when I felt free from medicine, but it was when I felt free. I was, I was probably two years off meds, still really struggling. And I remember sitting on my couch, just so overwhelmed by like physical and mental agitation. Um, it felt excruciating and I just wanted to like rip my skin off or like binge eat or just do something to get relief, to, to fix the problem. And something came over me as I was sitting there and I realized, they still own me. This, this industry of mental health that, you know, trains us to think that discomfort is a problem to fix. It still owns me, even though I've been

• 2:26:03Speaker 03

  off the meds for a couple of years now. And I said, I said, freedom is, is in, this is where freedom is. It's not in getting off the meds. It's in how am I with this pain? So I just decided to sit there. And I just sat there for like, at first it was just 10 minutes and I just sat. I guess you could call it meditation. At the time, I wasn't like, I'm gonna meditate. I was just like out of, almost outraged, like, I need to be with this because I've spent my entire life thinking I can't and shouldn't be with it. And I just sat there and I did it. And 10 minutes later, I felt more centered in myself. The pain wasn't gone, but I was like, I fucking did it. I'm powerful. And I just kept doing it more and more until eventually I was sitting

• 2:26:48Speaker 03

  for like an hour and I would just sit and my mind's going to all kinds of crazy places, paranoid stuff. I'm, it's not like this is, this isn't like peaceful, relaxing time. That was when I realized I'm free.

• 2:27:00Speaker 02

  Amen. Yeah, we, we, we were one of the most powerful things that, you know, like that God created and we outsource our power all the time. I do it all the time. I outsource my power.

• 2:27:12Speaker 03

  It's why we, I named the nonprofit Inner Compass Initiative because to me it's about taking that back, reclaiming it. The, the orientation you need to get you through your life is in here.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  And who is Unshrunk for? Who would, is someone who's thinking about getting off of medicine? Someone who's just curious about your experience?

• 2:27:29Speaker 03

  Anyone who is, who is themselves engaged with the mental health system in some way, like in therapy, on meds, or if, if you have someone you love who is. And so it's a big number, but really, I mean.

• 2:27:44Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's, that's not that huge. That's specific.

• 2:27:47Speaker 03

  But it's like 60 to 75 million people. Anyone, if your life has been touched by, you know, mental health, mental illness, it's a story to read. Yeah.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  Laura Delano, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  Oh, Theo, it's so meaningful to be here. I'm so glad to, to do this.

• 2:28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's nice. I, um, yeah, I'm hopeful that I'll get off of, off of antidepressants at some point. I just have to, it's almost like you went out on the battlefield and you came back.

• 2:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  And so you gotta just.

• 2:28:20Speaker 03

  You're restocking your supplies, replenishing your reserves. And I'm here, if I can help you, I really mean it. Like, I nerd out on this stuff. Like, I, anytime.

• 2:28:31Speaker 02

  I'm glad that I met you. I'm glad that, uh, I'm gonna just continue to just kind of share whatever's going on as I kind of navigate this. And I'll see if I can do even a better job of it for listeners that are curious about it or other people that are curious about it, even my friends, you know? Um, and yeah, I, I, I'm like, yeah, I'm just happy that we got to speak today and thank you so much for spending time with us.

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  Me too. Thanks, thanks for having me.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  You bet.