You Might Also Like: No Magic Pill with Blake Mycoskie

Blake Mycoskie (0:02)

Lemonada.

Laura Delano (0:06)

23.5% of Americans are on a psych med of some kind. We have an epidemic of suffering at the same time as more people than ever before are on these meds. So something isn't working here. What if it's not treatment-resistant mental illness? What if it's the treatment?

Blake Mycoskie (0:20)

My guest today is Laura Delano. At 13, she was struggling with what in hindsight, looks a lot like the challenges that can come with adolescence. And she was put on Psychiatric Medication.

Laura Delano (0:32)

Within one hour, a psychiatrist told me that, you have an incurable illness in your brain, you need to manage with medications, but don't worry, the medications will help and you can lead a good life. That set me on a path that took me a long time to find my way off of.

Blake Mycoskie (0:47)

What followed was two decades of diagnosis, hospitalizations and pills that didn't help her get better. She wrote about all of it in her amazing book, Unshrunk. And since getting off medication herself, she has become one of the most important voices in the country on what we're getting wrong about how we treat mental illness.

Laura Delano (1:08)

One of the challenges with the medical model, suffering as a mental illness in your brain, is that the framing is something's wrong with you instead of like something's happened to you. This extreme polarity where it's either you're a bad person or you have a bad brain, you got to transcend that and find the nuance.

Blake Mycoskie (1:24)

She now councils hundreds of people a year through the process of carefully tapering off psychiatric drugs. This conversation is one that a lot of people really need to hear. Welcome to No Magic Pill.

Laura Delano (1:45)

Thanks Blake, it's great to be here.

Blake Mycoskie (1:46)

Okay, so let's talk about me for a second. I had been struggling with depression for about four years. It had gotten really bad and I think I started looking for a magic pill. I was desperate to feel better and I was explained to this to a psychiatrist that I met at a dinner party and my story of growing Toms and having this, all this rise in success and then selling the company and then getting very depressed. She was convinced that I was bipolar.

I was so desperate to have someone give me a diagnosis. To this point, I had just been feeling bad for four years. But now, I was actually excited that this psychiatrist who seemingly was a very professional person said, I think this is bipolar too. You had this crazy success, which probably was mania. Then you sold the company and then you had this manic depression.

I really think the problem is that you've never been diagnosed properly and I want to put you on these meds and you're going to feel great. To me, that was the best thing in the world. I literally went around telling all my friends, guess what, I'm bipolar too. I was excited. Do you find that sometimes with people?

Laura Delano (2:56)

Totally. I at some point had the same experience of relief.

This is what it is.

Blake Mycoskie (3:02)

Right. Sometimes getting a diagnosis when you're suffering actually does feel like relief. That's possibly why it can be so dangerous because then I thought there was a magic pill.

I went on the first med and then that didn't work. Then I went on the second med. Before I knew it, I was on four different psychiatric meds, which then I think took my depression so much worse to where I got suicidal. It went from bad to much, much worse and a complete loss of agency and numbness and these horrible things. Thankfully, I reached out for help.

I have talked about this that I went to my friends and my family, and then I found an incredible psychiatrist who both worked with Western medicine and plant medicine and he was able to really help me slow down and see how I got there. I later found out through a lot of testing and working with him that I was not bipolar, that I was just very depressed and I had a lot of things in my personal life that I needed to deal with to figure out what was the cause of these feelings I was having. He then helped me get off the meds, which we're going to talk about later, but is a very difficult and dangerous process. I want people to hear that right at the top of the show. If you're ever thinking about getting off psychiatric meds, it can be very dangerous unless you do it very carefully. Laura is an expert at that and will give us some great tips if you're thinking about that. But I spent about six months getting off four meds, and it was a very, very long and slow process. Once I was off, what's also interesting is I started to feel clear, I started to make some good decisions, started to get some momentum in my life, but I still was having trouble sleeping and I still was having problems in my mood, so I actually went on a different med. So sometimes it's not about just getting completely off meds, it's getting on the right meds. I wasn't bipolar, so I got off those meds, but I was still struggling with a lot of major changes in my life, a lot of stuff I was mourning still, a lot of having trouble sleeping. And so what's interesting about having you on the show today, I shared right before we got on, I did go on that med and that was a year and a half ago, and I was on it for about a year and it supported me in my sleep and my mood, and then I was feeling good. I was like, okay, it's time to get off. And so I've been spent the last four months kind of weaning myself off and I have two tiny little doses left.