Transcript of Laura Delano’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

I started slicing up my arms. I started thinking about death because, you know, what was the point to this game that I had no agency in?

And my poor parents were just shocked and stunned at what had happened to their eldest daughter seemingly overnight. She was this maniac basically. And so they did what so many loving American parents are taught to do when their child is struggling. They took me to a professional because they internalized this story that they didn’t have what they needed to help me. They needed to pay someone who’d studied about kids like me to help. So they sent me to a therapist.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your parents are… I identify with the parent in this. You know, they love you. They think everything’s going great, you’re killing it in school, you’re staying within the boundaries. And then like, they don’t have any idea what to do. Basically.

LAURA DELANO: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: But they’re motivated by love.

LAURA DELANO: Very much so. They did what they thought would be the most helpful.

TUCKER CARLSON: For me, they’re the opposite of negligent. I guess that’s what I want to say. Like, they’re engaged.

The Psychiatric Diagnosis

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. They did the best they could with the information that they had at their disposal, which was, you know, really all they saw as a resource was the mental health system. There weren’t any visible support groups for parents of struggling teens. No one was talking about, my gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too? No one talked about this then. And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health professional.

And this woman was… The therapist was a very kind woman. She had the best of intentions. But when I was sent to see her each week, to me at the time, I experienced it as this profound violation of my very being. I interpreted this as a sign that everyone around me thought I was defective. I was the problem.

And I knew in my heart that the anger I felt and the despair I felt were actually really meaningful responses to the environment that I was growing up in. This, like, really high pressured, intense environment where, you know, it’s just in the air itself that if you want to feel good about yourself, you have to excel. And I knew that that was the problem, not me. But of course, I was 13. I didn’t have the language to articulate this. I didn’t have the sense of self yet to stand up for myself.

So I ended up doing what I… Being sent to therapy each week. I felt humiliated, I felt ashamed. My poor parents didn’t mean to cause that in me, but I just experienced therapy as basically a statement that I wasn’t good enough as I was. And so it wasn’t long before the therapist ended up recommending to my parents that they send me to a psychiatrist because I was pretty extreme. My difficulties were not… It wasn’t enough to just see a therapist.

And so my parents took me to psychiatrist. My mom took me to my first appointment. And in that first session, I was 14 by this time. In that first session, after sitting down with this woman, the stranger who I’d never met before, I think she’d been given some information about me by my parents and that therapist, but I’d never met her. I poured out all my pain to her.

And at the end of that session, she said, have you heard of something called bipolar disorder? And I was like, what? And she said, well, this anger that you feel, this irritability, these rages you’re getting into, these are symptoms of something we call mania. And the despair and the injuring you’re doing to yourself. These are symptoms of depression. And this is a condition that you’ll have for the rest of your life. But don’t worry, they’re medications that will help you manage this.

TUCKER CARLSON: 14. She told you she stuck with this for life.

LAURA DELANO: For life, for life. That’s how it always is. Anytime you’re given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, the baseline operating assumption is that this thing we call mental illness is an incurable condition that you treat and you manage. But that forms the premise of the entire business model of the psychiatric industry, is that these are incurable conditions that require treatment indefinitely. And there I was hearing this message as a 14 year old girl. I’m like, excuse my language, I’m like, who the fuck does this woman think she is telling me this?

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

LAURA DELANO: But that defiance that I felt, you know, I had no one, I knew I couldn’t resist, that if I resisted, that would be used against me. So I just kind of went along with it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Resisted, that would be… It’s like you’ve been taken in by the Bulgarian border police in 1975. Resistance is futile.

The System’s Response to Resistance

LAURA DELANO: Well, it totally is. And interestingly, just to like pan out for a moment to this whole broader mental health industry, you know, at scale that is when you… Many people who resist their diagnosis or who tell their doctors, I don’t think I’m sick, or that’s actually used literally to reinforce just how sick you are. You lack insight, quote unquote, into your condition.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Soviet, I mean, so like listening to the patient is… That’s been taken out of the process.

LAURA DELANO: It has. Well, in the sense that of course the psychiatrist is listening for signs of symptoms. You know, okay, I’m listening past what they’re saying. So I can determine if this person is entering a hypomanic episode or her depression is worsening, but they’re not listening to the patient.

I’ll speak for myself. My whole very well meaning therapists and doctors over the years were not actually listening to me from a premise of me having of me knowing myself better than them of me having wisdom of me have, you know, they lacked a respect for my own ability to kind of define for myself what my reality meant.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it sounds like they went into the sessions knowing what you were sick with and everything that you said was confirmation that they already knew.

LAURA DELANO: Exactly, exactly. It’s all filtered through this clinical lens of translating your deep human experiences into this clinicalized language of symptom, illness, disease. And so they’re trained to do that. And what ended up happening to me when I eventually bought into all of this by the time I was 18, is I learned how to do that to myself. And I just came to translate every single thought, emotion, behavior, decision through this medicalized lens of me having this sickness that was incurable and that these were all symptoms of it, basically.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so you’re 14. Can you imagine telling a 14 year old you have a lifelong illness from which you will never recover? That will define you going forward at 14, you’re telling somebody that on the basis of what evidence? Like, where did you catch this? Like in the ladies room in an airport. Like, where did they explain where you got this illness?

LAURA DELANO: It’s a very good question, Tucker, and it’s a question that we should be asking all the time about literally every single psychiatric diagnosis that is ever given to any human being. Because the entire model is built on subjectivity. It’s built on the subjective observations of the diagnosing clinician, which of course means it will be infused by their own personality. Like whether they had a bad night’s sleep, they just had a fight with their spouse an hour earlier, and they’re grumpy. You know, it’s going to infuse how they see their patients.

There are no objective biological tests, there are no brain scans, lab tests that you can do to say, oh, this is proof that you have this chemical imbalance in your brain or this faulty biomarker. There’s no objective measurable pathology of any kind in any of these conditions. Literally all of them, including the so called serious ones like bipolar and schizophrenia. It is completely based on observation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any explanation for… So if they’re telling you they’re looking forward into the next 70 years of your life and saying it’s going to be with you forever. Kind of incumbent on them to explain where you got this thing, its nature. Like, what exactly are they talking about? Did anybody ever explain any of that?

LAURA DELANO: No. And in large part because I never asked. I mean, of course I didn’t ask as a kid. I was just so flummoxed by the whole, and disoriented by this whole experience that it didn’t even occur to me to be like, can you prove that I have an incurable brain disease? It didn’t. But honestly, talk, sorry Lord, to say.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have terminal cancer, we can keep you alive for decades, but it’s terminal. I mean, that’s like so nuts to say that to a child on the basis of no evidence.

The Subjective Nature of Psychiatric Diagnosis

LAURA DELANO: Like, and, but the entire paradigm is that for every single person who has ever been given a psychiatric diagnosis, in the history of psychiatric diagnosis, it’s always that. It’s always just the opinion of the clinician based on his or her personal orientation. It’s the entire thing. And I did not realize this because it never occurred to me to step back and ask these questions.

And I think many people don’t either, because when I ended up eventually buying into all of this a few years after that first psychiatrist as an 18 year old, you know, I’d continued through high school playing the performance game, knowing it was bullshit but not knowing how to get out of it. So I ended up getting into Harvard and trying to tell myself, you know, maybe I’m wrong and I will actually feel okay in my skin once I get to Harvard. And I’ll just be able to say to myself, like, you were crazy, thinking this performance thing is bullshit. Harvard is amazing, and now you’re happy.

So, of course, I didn’t feel that way when I got there. And I instantly spun out. I started getting drunk and doing coke and ecstasy and just running away from the reality that I still had no idea who I was. I still didn’t feel like I had an authentic self. I still felt trapped in this performance game. So now what do I do? Because I’d been hoping Harvard would save me, and it hasn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that pain, you just won, like the number one merit badge in the world too. You get into. Plus, you’re playing at the highest level in sports.

The Emptiness of Achievement

LAURA DELANO: Yep. Yeah, I was playing on the squash team. I had, on paper, I had made it. I’d arrived, you know, the pinnacle of what you strive for as a young person within the kind of elite education industry, like, I won the jackpot, and yet I wanted to kill myself basically every day and saw no point to any of it.

And so as I spun out through the fall, week after week after week, and I really lost any footing I might have had. I just lost it all. And I was just a mess and getting myself into all kinds of dangerous, impulsive, really dark situations. I eventually, by wintertime, was just so desperate for relief from this pain that that little voice of that psychiatrist all those years earlier is saying, oh, you have this illness called bipolar disorder. I was like, maybe she’s right. Like, why do I feel this way? Why can’t I get my shit together? Why am I such a mess? Maybe I really am sick.

And so it was at that point that I willingly, voluntarily went back to psychiatry. I found a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, which of course is considered the golden psychiatric institution, one of the oldest in the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Most famous.

LAURA DELANO: Most famous, yep. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ray Charles, Robert Lowell. They all wrote poems and fiction about their experiences there. And so here I was now, so privileged and blessed to be entering this hallowed psychiatric ground. I was just so excited.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did it work for Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell?

LAURA DELANO: I mean, we all know what I mean.

TUCKER CARLSON: But like.

The Dark Side of Psychiatric Treatment

LAURA DELANO: And a lot of people say that, you know, from what I recall, and someone should confirm my facts. But from what I remember, years ago, reading about Sylvia, I guess she eventually ended up getting electroshock, which, by the way, is still alive and well. 100,000 people a year get electroshock in the U.S. McLean Hospital on its website a couple years ago was like bragging about how great its ECT center is. I think Sylvia, you know what ECT did to her brain and her creativity. I’ve heard that that played a part in why she eventually just couldn’t be alive anymore because of the adverse effects of psychiatric treatment.

So I knew none of this then. I was just desperate for relief. And I think that desperation is a really important piece of this broader conversation because as human beings, we can only withstand so much suffering before we need help. We need relief. And that desperation drives you to just accept whatever promises is offered to you because you’re too tired of trying anymore yourself. Just, someone take over here. Someone fix me. Someone take this pain away.

And that’s the place that I got to that freshman year. And I think because of that, it impaired any critical thinking capacities that I might have otherwise had to ask those questions of, like, how do you know I have an incurable brain disease? Or can you tell a little bit more about the evidence base for this drug you’re putting me on? None of those questions occurred to me because I didn’t care. I didn’t care about any of it. I just wanted the pain to stop.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it, yes.

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TUCKER CARLSON: So. But at the same time you’re going to class to Harvard, you’re playing on the squash team like you’re continuing to achieve kind of.

LAURA DELANO: I mean, I skipped a lot of classes freshman year. I was sick a lot, and so I missed a lot of practices that first year. I definitely fell off the upper echelons of performance that I’d been used to leading up to then, which I think also was part of why I was just so desperate.

TUCKER CARLSON: When did they start putting you on drugs at McLean?

The Beginning of Medication

LAURA DELANO: Right, right in that first appointment with my new doctor. And I was put… Well, I had actually been put on psych drugs a week or two prior to that meeting my new psychiatrist at McLean, because I had come out as a debutante in a couple of debutante balls around Christmas time, which the good WASP girl that I was like wasn’t an option to not do.

And I had actually on winter vacation in this literal wedding dress, this fancy white wedding dress. There I was up on stage, like, coked out of my mind, completely trashed because I had to be to survive doing such a thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: To be fair, everybody is at those things. Sorry, excuse me.

LAURA DELANO: And you know, in my long white gloves and I’m up on stage and I’m like, I am literally a robot performing. I just. That was my breaking point on Christmas vacation, where I just was like, I either need to kill myself right now or get help. And so I went to my parents, I said, please help me. I hadn’t asked for this kind of help from them in years because of how betrayed I had felt by them sending me to the therapist years earlier. But now I was at a breaking point.

And so that was. I was put on a couple meds on vacation and then when I went back to school and started seeing the psychiatrist at McLean, he continued me on those, and he began to add new ones. But. And that began what ended up being a decade of just the polypharmacy highway, you could say. And I became basically a professional psychiatric patient.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what did they put you on?

LAURA DELANO: So from the beginning, I was always on an antidepressant of some kind, a mood stabilizer. And then with the passage of time, antipsychotics were added in, benzos were added in. I was on Ambien for a long time, too. But it was the kind of typical bipolar regimen, as they call it, where it’s literally a handful of different prescriptions.

And the way it was explained to me, it almost felt like I had this impression that my psychiatrist was very skilled and sophisticated. Oh, this for a little, you know, a little bit of this for that issue. A little bit of this for that issue. The more meds I was on, the more cared for I felt, and it felt like the more serious my doctor was taking me, and it just steadily. Beginning that freshman year at Harvard on, you know, I just. My. The more treatment I got and the more compliant I was and the more deferential I was to psychiatric authority, the more my life fell apart.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said you got meds in your first appointment. Did anyone ever say to you, you know, you obviously feel deeply unsettled and unhappy at times, suicidal? Maybe you’re not living the right way. Maybe you shouldn’t be at Harvard. Maybe you shouldn’t be on the varsity squash team. Maybe you should be, I don’t know, tending to horses on a farm or painting or working in a bank or, I don’t know, doing something else. I don’t know. Like, it does seem just intuitive that if someone has pain, it’s worth thinking about the cause of the pain. If I put my hand on a stove and it hurts, I don’t take meds for that. I’m like, take my hand off the freaking stove. Did anyone ever address it in that way?

The Limitations of the Medical Model

LAURA DELANO: Well, they can’t, really, because this is the bind of this medical model that the mental health industry is built on. So you’re told you have a mental illness, quote, unquote, and that it’s in your brain, that there’s some kind of. Usually it’s the chemical imbalance story, which.

TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, I just want to ask you to stop chemical imbalance. So this is a phrase that I first heard maybe 30 years ago when the first person I knew started taking an SSRI. Prozac Nation. Elizabeth Wurtzel. It was this whole, like, Time magazine promoted idea that depression, mental illness of all kinds, was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. And the question I always had is, well, okay, if something’s an imbalance, what’s balance? Is there a baseline? Is there a way to measure various chemicals in your brain? Do we know what the right levels of those chemicals are? Is. I mean, I don’t under. Like, is there any science behind that at all?

LAURA DELANO: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a chemical imbalance in your brain. Okay, where should. So, like, if I’m low on oil, I throw the dipstick at the top of the engine. I’m like, oh, shit, it’s two inches down. I got to pour another cord in. Is there anything like that with psychiatric assessment? No. Okay.

The Chemical Imbalance Theory Debunked

LAURA DELANO: Nothing. And you are one of the lucky few who somehow miraculously saw right through it. Because most people to this day, despite the fact that the chemical imbalance theory has long been debunked and there was an umbrella review published in Molecular Psychiatry two years ago that just kind of put the final nail in the coffin. It has never been proven, and that’s been known all along. And yet, if you survey Americans, most people believe that mental illness, depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances to this day.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s like, utterly fake.

LAURA DELANO: Utterly fake.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because we can’t define balance, therefore we can’t define imbalance.

LAURA DELANO: Exactly. And this medicalized framework that we use to think about ourselves has such a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human now. Suffering, anxiety, madness of all kinds—most people view that as illness, quote, unquote. That medical framework is so ubiquitous.

To return to your question about whether anyone ever asked me about the circumstances of my life—you can’t. Because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry, and it’s too bad you had the bad genetic card and this chemical imbalance, or your struggle is a response to your life. It can’t be both. You can’t have this unfortunate disease and also be having a meaningful response to your circumstances. It’s one or the other.

And so the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient and the experiences of so many of the more than 60 million adults who are on these drugs right now and more than 6 million children is that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, there’s 60 million American adults and 66 million Americans total on these drugs?

LAURA DELANO: According to the CDC, in 2022. So those numbers could well be higher by now.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s craziness.

The Mental Health Treatment Paradox

LAURA DELANO: Yep. And we are told that we’re having a mental health crisis because rates of suicide are through the roof. Anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling. We’re told this is this terrible crisis. And most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment. But no, if you look at the numbers, basically everyone, this huge percentage of our population, more than ever before, is getting mental health treatment. So the problem isn’t not enough mental health treatment. The problem, perhaps is the mental health treatment.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I’m just fixated on this. And to continue the metaphor, want to beat it to death. If you come in with a burnt hand and I don’t ask you how you burned it, I’m not really treating it. I’m just giving a palliative. So I give you painkiller because you’ve got a burn on your hand. But if I never say, how’d you burn your hand? I put it on the stove. I do it every morning. So I think a clinician who cared about the patient would say, how about don’t put your hand on the stove? Like, there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life.

LAURA DELANO: In therapy, I would, of course, talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but the baseline operating assumption was that I had this brain disease that I was at the mercy of, that the only thing I could do to manage it was take pills. And so any conversations that I had with therapists about my life, to me, and I think to a lot of them, just felt kind of secondary.

Like, “Oh, you have a lot of stress or you’re in this dysfunctional relationship, or this kind of hard thing happened to you.” We would talk about those things, but not because we thought that working through those would be what helped me resolve my challenges. It was the meds that were going to do that.

That’s the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm—it basically teaches you to let go of any sense of responsibility or agency over your life because you’re just at the mercy of faulty brain chemistry. And so, what’s the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life? Because I’m still going to have this brain disease. So why does it really matter?

TUCKER CARLSON: A disease they can’t define, whose origin they don’t even ask about. A brain disease that’s like in no scientific sense a disease.

LAURA DELANO: Literally.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it contagious? Wow, that’s even crazier than I realized.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah.

Types of Psychiatric Medications

TUCKER CARLSON: So, okay, since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs, can you just go through in order what those drugs are generally and what the effects on a person are?

LAURA DELANO: So the different drug classes are antidepressants, of course. So you have Prozac, Effexor, Cymbalta, Celexa, Lexapro. Then the mood stabilizers, many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy. When they were studying them, they noticed that the animals became kind of apathetic during testing. They thought, “Oh, maybe we can use this on psychiatric patients.” So most mood stabilizers are actually anticonvulsants—Lamictal, Depakote.

Lithium is classed as a mood stabilizer. It’s literally a neurotoxin that was banned in the United States until the early 70s. It didn’t get approved until the early 70s for psychiatric uses. That’s considered the so-called gold standard mood stabilizer. I have a whole chapter on it in my book.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lithium salts, it used to be called, I think.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah, that’s one of the ways it’s been described.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s an old, old drug.

LAURA DELANO: It’s been around for a long time and it started to be used for psychiatric purposes first in Australia in the first half of the 20th century.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what I mean. Yeah, it’s been around a long time.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And if you actually—I do a deep dive in the chapter on it in my book because the story to this very day that most people are given about lithium is that it is the most reliable, it’s been around the longest, it has this really reliable evidence base because of how long it’s been in use. It’s the gold standard.

If you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, they are the most shoddy, unscientific, completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine. You’re just shocked. And this is the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market.

If you actually look at the drug label on the FDA website—don’t take my word for it—go to the FDA website, look up any psychiatric drug, go to the clinical studies section to see what trials the approval was based on. Usually it’s maybe two studies. And of course, they can do as many studies as they want and they just throw out the ones that they don’t like the outcomes of. Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts to determine safety and efficacy?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know, 10 years?

LAURA DELANO: Six to eight weeks. Some of them last a week, some of them last a day. Two, maybe two studies.

TUCKER CARLSON: So these are not longitudinal, as we say.

LAURA DELANO: There is zero evidence base for long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs. Zero. And there is also zero evidence base for polypharmacy. These drugs have never been studied in combination with each other. And yet most of us go on to take multiple of them for years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nor is the mechanism of their effectiveness understood. Right? So you said, for example, mood stabilizers were used on animals to stop convulsions and they noticed that the animals became compliant. But that doesn’t mean that they know how that drug acts on the brain. Correct?

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. Usually you’ll see a line like that in the drug label: “the mechanism of action is not yet understood” or something. It is such a reckless approach. We are all guinea pigs in a massive experiment here. And this, unfortunately, is the case outside of the psychiatric drug context.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m aware.

LAURA DELANO: When you think about the hubris—we know so little about the human brain already as it is. It’s so mysterious to us how it works. And to think that we’re going to put in this synthetic psychoactive chemical, it’s going to course through your bloodstream potentially for the rest of your life. To be so disregarding of what the long-term consequences of that might be, especially when you’re putting a kid on this—it’s one of the most horrible crises of our time, I think.

To return to your question, besides the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers, there are the antipsychotics—Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon. There are of course the anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazepines—Klonopin, Valium, Ativan—and there are the stimulants, the so-called ADHD drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, and then the sleep aids like Ambien and Lunesta. So that’s the psychiatric drug family.

Effects of Antidepressants

TUCKER CARLSON: Can we start at the beginning? So the antidepressants, that would include SSRIs.

LAURA DELANO: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so you were put on that immediately. What is the effect of that on you?

LAURA DELANO: Well, it’s such a complicated question to answer because in hindsight, I can see all the effects. But at the time when I was on them, I didn’t notice the effects. It was subtle, in some cases gradual.

When I look back now at how my life, the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down, I can see that they altered my body physically. And not just antidepressants—I couldn’t answer what antidepressants specifically did. For me, what the drugs did generally, whichever ones did what, I couldn’t say. But they interfered with my basic bodily functions. I pretty quickly began to have digestive issues. You don’t get told that it’s like 90 to 95% of your serotonin receptors are in your gut.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the point of these drugs is to regulate or affect or disrupt, but change your serotonin levels.

LAURA DELANO: That’s the crude way that we understand them so far. So they obviously act. So an SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It’s named as a serotonergic drug, so it primarily acts on the serotonin system. It acts on many other systems too, because it’s all interconnected. The human body cannot be compartmentalized.

But the serotonin system, besides being largely responsible for how your gut functions, also affects muscle function. I mean, they’re like basic primal functions. If I’m remembering correctly, I think it’s the serotonin system that regulates temperature, vomiting reflex. It’s really primal. This is not just about happy chemicals, right?

And so when you’re taking an SSRI or an SNRI, any of these serotonergic drugs, you’re not just… It’s not just acting on the brain, it’s acting on the whole body. And so a lot of people, myself included, will get diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome or have other kinds of digestive issues while they’re on these drugs. Sometimes it starts quickly, sometimes it takes a while. But it doesn’t occur to you because we’re not wired, we’re not programmed to question medical treatments generally. At least I wasn’t.

And so as my physical issues accumulated, I just assumed I was just, you know, because I’m so mentally ill, I’m not taking good care of myself, I’m eating shitty food, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s your fault.

LAURA DELANO: Exactly, exactly. And besides digestive issues, the antipsychotics and mood stabilizers cause serious weight gain. My weight fluctuated 70 pounds during my mental patient career. I mean, it’s just, I literally looked like a different person. I should have brought an old picture of me. I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized me during my peak psych patient era.

They caused chronic aches and pains, I had skin issues and my nails would flake off, my hair would fall out. All these subtle changes that happen that just grew over time. I never linked it to the drugs.

And then in terms of their effects on me emotionally and mentally, a lot of people talk about antidepressants, especially as having a numbing effect, which by the way, can be helpful. I mean, it’s important to make clear here my orientation to this is not anti-psych drug. I think, you know, we’ve been altering ourselves as human beings since the dawn of time with psychoactive substances.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

The Problem of Informed Consent

LAURA DELANO: You know, who am I to tell someone you shouldn’t take a psych drug? For me, it’s about the stories that we’re told about what they are and what they do. And if you’re being told, you know, you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, that’s why you feel down in the dumps, here’s some Prozac. It’s going to help adjust the chemicals which will help you feel happier. Like, that’s a lie. And you agreeing to take the pill is not a choice.

You are not making… You have been coerced into taking this drug through basically propaganda. But if you’re told, “Tucker, we really don’t know that much about what these drugs do. They’re approved on the basis of very short-term trials. Long-term outcomes are quite poor if you actually look at the data that does exist. Your serotonin system controls a lot of really important functions.”

You know, if you walk them through, if you are walked through all of that and then you still decide, “You know what, I kind of want to numb myself out right now. I don’t have a support system. I’m too stressed. I have too much on my plate. I am aware of the risks. I still want to take this. And I know it’s not fixing a pathology in me,” then I’m all for it. Good for you.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s informed consent is what you’re describing.

LAURA DELANO: Exactly. And that is not… If you are being told this is an antidepressant medication, you’re not making an informed choice because that is marketing language. This is not a drug that’s acting against depression, like targeting, “Oh, let’s get in there. And there’s where the depression lives. And now we’re going to target it.” That’s bullshit.

So the language itself makes or breaks whether you can make a true choice. And so until we change how we talk about these drugs, I don’t think anyone is making a truly informed choice.

TUCKER CARLSON: So my sense of SSRIs is that in some people they offer relief, which is not always good. I felt that way about vodka, you know, and it turns out it was causing a lot of problems that I thought it was solving. I think anyone who drank too much has a similar experience. But drugs are similar. But it does offer, at least in the short term, like, “Oh, I feel less crazy, like I’m calmer now.” Does it?

LAURA DELANO: I think it can, especially short-term use. I mean, for example, if you are someone who hates to fly in airplanes, you get panicky, you take advantage. That’s going to help you a lot or might help you a lot. And so when used in acute situations or for a short period of time, I do think they can feel really helpful to many people. I think a lot of this is around the long-term use of them, which they were never designed for.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, so, but that’s, I mean that’s a marker for addiction. Anything that, and that’s why smoking is… Cigarette smoking is so compelling. Crack smoking is so compelling because anything you pull into your lungs immediately goes to your bloodstream, has an immediate effect. And every study shows the faster the effect, the more profound the relief, the more addictive it is. And that’s one of the reasons benzos are so terrifying. But I guess my question is, does it… You get the feeling that people on some of the antidepressants, the SSRIs, like, seem kind of like dead inside. Did you feel that?

Feeling Dead Inside

LAURA DELANO: I totally did, but I attributed it to how sick I was. Oh, I felt dead. I felt disconnected. I felt like I was trapped in this kind of sludgy morass that was separating me from the world around me. And I really, truly believed that that was me and my own faulty biology. And so it’s so insidious.

A psychiatrist named Peter Breggin calls it medication spellbinding, which I think is a really compelling phrase because the very parts of you that are required to step back and think critically about what’s happening to you are impaired by the drugs. And so you’re in this, for me, like decade and a half, almost like intoxication state.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

LAURA DELANO: And then you’re getting all these messages from all these well-meaning therapists and psychiatrists saying, “Oh, you’re not feeling helped. Oh, you’re feeling worse. Well, your sickness is progressing. Let’s try this new drug, or let’s up your dose or let’s switch you to that.” It’s never like, “Let’s all just pause for a moment here and sit back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is wrong and you don’t need any of this.” No one is doing that, of course.

And so as I went deeper into psychiatric patienthood and those physical issues worsened, my cognitive function worsened. Oh my gosh, memory… I don’t know which drugs were the biggest culprits, probably the benzos and the antipsychotics. But my capacity to remember things, to read, to absorb information and actually comprehend information, just dissipated over the years.

Which was really hard for me as someone who had, you know, so much of my sense of self, however fake it felt, was rooted in my intellect. And so here I was just feeling like this mushy, totally incapacitated mind that couldn’t engage with the world anymore, let alone feel creative and curious. I was just like a zombie, basically.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was killing your life force.

LAURA DELANO: It totally was. And that idea of a life force, to me, this whole thing at the heart of this crisis that we are in, because it is a crisis, it’s just not a mental health crisis. It’s a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis is what I call it. The word iatrogenic means treatment-induced or doctor-induced harm.

I believe that these huge numbers of people who are in so much pain, a huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more suffering.

TUCKER CARLSON: And more violence.

LAURA DELANO: More violence, more disconnect, more polarization. When you’re under the influence of these drugs for years and years and years, like you said you do… I won’t speak for everyone. I’ll speak for myself and the thousands of fellows whom I have known over all these years. You lose touch with your human spirit, with your sense of aliveness in the world, your ability to feel connected to the sunlight on your cheek, to the sweet child on the sidewalk, to God, to serenity. You lose the ability to feel connected to any of that.

And you’re thinking the whole time it’s you, and you’re just getting sicker. And when you scale that out and think about the consequences on our society of that with so many, especially young people on these drugs without even realizing that this is happening to them because of this medication spellbinding phenomenon. I mean, to me, it’s like, no wonder our country is more polarized than it’s ever been. It’s obviously much more complicated. I’m not trying to say it’s all psych drugs, but I think there’s a big piece here of why we’re all so disconnected.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, the main takeaway just listening to this is that it changes something essential about people. This is not on the margins. This is like the deepest thing in you changes. So the measure… If you think the measure of happiness is your relationships, which I think is fair. How are your relationships?

Impact on Relationships

LAURA DELANO: Oh, my gosh. I mean, I chuckle because I’m like, first of all, I’m like, well, what relationships, really? But then, of course, I did have… I had boyfriends. I had people I would socialize with. But by the time I graduated, which, you know, I had to take a year off at Harvard because I was so suicidal. I had my first admission to a psych ward while I was at Harvard. The fact that I made it through, to this day, I don’t really remember anything I learned there. I just was so foggy from it all.

But by the time I left, I had no friends. I had a tendency to be in… I was a serial monogamist. You could say just relationship with a guy, and then we break up, and then I’d get right into another relationship with a guy. I dated guys who were as lost as I was. So suffice to say, didn’t look pretty.

When I would sometimes muster the energy to go out and socialize, I’d have to do drugs and get trash because that was the only way that I felt alive. And, of course, it was synthetic.

And my family, they hung in there with me through the whole thing. But of course, they didn’t have access to the real me because I was under the influence of all of these drugs. And so they were there for me, but I wasn’t connected to them emotionally. I would rely on them, and I would come home and they would take care of me and provide for me as I bumbled along through my 20s, like a total mess. I could barely walk.

TUCKER CARLSON: They sound like really kind people.

LAURA DELANO: The patience and the persistence that they all had, you know, my younger sisters and my parents, it was not easy for them. And it was not always pretty. In our family system, our whole family evolved around me as the designated problem. Me as a designated patient. So understandably that created all kinds of challenges, but they never gave up on me.

And I would just come home whenever I couldn’t function anymore, but I didn’t feel connected to them, to myself, to anything. And again, I believed it was me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow, that’s so… That’s like hell you’re describing. Hell. Disassociated from everybody, everything. And from God. Do you think it’s possible to have a relationship with God while on psych meds?

LAURA DELANO: It wasn’t for me. I mean, I wouldn’t say that in a sweeping generalization, but…

TUCKER CARLSON: It wasn’t for you.

The Impact of Psychiatric Drugs on Sexuality and Life Force

LAURA DELANO: It wasn’t for me. For sure. For sure. And I think the other piece of this that is so important, especially because of how many of us are psychiatrized as kids, is that I had no sexuality. I had no erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer, as a friend, as an appreciator of beauty. I had none of that. And I, of course, didn’t realize what I was missing because I’d been psychiatrized basically at the onset of puberty. And when you don’t have access to that facet of who you are, it makes for a very lonely, alienating existence.

And, you know, I’m so glad that when I got myself out of this mess, years later, I regained my sexuality because a lot of people, like, there’s a whole movement now. It’s called PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.

LAURA DELANO: There’s a whole movement. They’re incredibly well organized on X, doing really important public awareness work around how many people either never regain sexual function when they come off or some people lose it. Some people had it on, and then when they come off the antidepressant, they lose it. Some people haven’t regained it for years.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they’re just dead.

LAURA DELANO: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. Really? And no one’s gone to jail for this?

LAURA DELANO: No, because it’s the lack of accountability. And of course, this is the whole pharmaceutical industry, not just psychiatry. It’s designed in such a way that no one. The most that they’re held accountable is, you know, the occasional $3 billion fine for criminal activity.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I guess we could say, but at least the suicide rate’s going down and people are happier.

LAURA DELANO: I mean, you would think. But as of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes. I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves.

The Rising Suicide Rate Despite Increased Medication

TUCKER CARLSON: So, like, that’s kind of the bottom line. I don’t need to have a medical degree to say that if the number of people, the absolute number and the percentage of people taking these drugs rises and the suicide rate rises, you know, we can argue about cause and effect, but they’re not working. I mean, in what sense are they working if more people are killing themselves?

LAURA DELANO: And what’s wild, Tucker, am I missing something?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t want to be a philistine here. I want to be, like, sensitive to the science.

LAURA DELANO: You’re seeing it clear as day. And what’s wild is that in these drug labels, for many, many years in the adverse effects section, you will see antidepressants have been documented to increase rates or increased suicidal and homicidal ideation, even in some of the drug labels. So this isn’t like we’re just realizing that these drugs can actually make people worse. It’s been in the drug labels the whole time.

Psychiatric Medications and Mass Shootings

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I know from firsthand experience, so I knew nothing about this. I don’t take any of that crap. I’ve always hated shrinks my whole life. Never been. But no one I know who’s been to one has gotten better. So that’s why I don’t like them. But anyway, these mass shootings and the calls for gun control and to take my shotguns away and all this stuff got me involved in, like, what is causing all these shootings. Because there are a lot of shootings, right? And in every case you look at, the person’s just full of psychiatric meds. And so I brought this up a couple of times in public, and, whoa. You get attacked for even raising the question, like, is there a connection between SSRIs and mass shootings? Why is that a crazy question?

LAURA DELANO: Even the question. And people can’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that?

LAURA DELANO: It’s… You would think that people would, of course, want to have that question asked and answered. And if they had true faith in their products, they would be like, let’s look at it. Let’s be transparent about this. Let’s have open access to the data. Let’s do whatever we need to do to show you all that our products don’t cause violence. But of course, it’s the opposite. There’s… I know a friend of mine who’s a professor at one point tried to FOIA the medical records of various mass shooters and couldn’t get access.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not allowed to know.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And you know, I don’t, I can’t remember when Columbine. Was it like 98 or 90.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was 97, I think.

The Rise of Psychiatric Medication in American Culture

LAURA DELANO: And, and as you said, the 90s were… So Prozac came to market in the late 80s. The 90s were declared the Decade of the Brain by our U.S. government. And the 90s began the, basically the ubiquitization of psychiatric drugs, the normalization of them, the kind of infusion of them into every facet of our lives. And this of course was fueled by industry funding.

So all the kind of anti-stigma mental health awareness campaigns that you now see… Mental Health Awareness Month. We’re in May, actually, Tucker. We’re in May. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. These are all industry funded efforts to basically infuse the cultural discourse around emotional pain with this message that, with this actually very righteous message that you should never feel alone with your suffering. You should feel like you can talk about your troubles. That is a really important message.

But that has been exploited by powerful corporations to basically now mean there’s no shame in getting mental health treatment. And so they’ve taken this important message and perverted it to basically link anyone who is calling into question psychiatric drugs with someone who doesn’t care about suffering.

I mean, it’s amazing the number of times that I share my story and I’m literally just talking about my story. I’m not saying anything about anyone else. You know, the story of how I eventually left this all behind. People hear that as me denying the reality of suffering. This woman doesn’t think people are struggling out there. I’m like, where did I ever say that? It’s actually the opposite. I think there’s… I am, first of all, I struggle a lot in my life. You know, I’m by no means a happy, put together mentally healthy person all the time.

But how are you conflating me questioning the psychiatric drug paradigm with me questioning the reality of people suffering? If you think about it, it’s just these industries have been so effective in conflating care with treatment. So if you question treatment, people assume you’re questioning the need that people have for help. It’s like there are other ways to get help.

Finding Equilibrium Without Medication

TUCKER CARLSON: Did anyone doubt, I mean, just being honest, that if you get rid of all drugs, legal and illegal, listed and illicit, that the mental health crisis would basically disappear?

LAURA DELANO: I mean, I’m sure it’s, you know, it’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: People stayed sober. I haven’t had any serious mental health problems since I got sober 23 years ago. I could just speak for myself. Like, that’s just what I know, and I know a lot of people in that exact position. Once you just like stop addling yourself with crap, you return to equilibrium. I don’t know.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah, well, I think the way I would think about it, for myself at least, is that when I let go of this medicalized way of understanding myself, you know, translating all my struggles into symptoms to take to a doctor, and when I came off the drugs and when I also then began to educate myself about the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize the body in all these problematic ways and so I just kind of reconceptualized how I think about well-being and the things I put in my body or don’t put in my body.

To your point, I definitely have found my way to a kind of equilibrium that equips me to face life’s challenges, which are inevitable. I mean, I think it’s a part of the human condition to suffer, to struggle, to have dark nights of the soul. And I think historically these were episodic experiences. Something hard happened in your life or even something not visible, but you just are in a tough chapter. You kind of find your way through it. Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes a year, but you move through it.

I think that used to be prior to the rise of this medicalized mental health industry, that used to be the baseline operating assumption. And then since the rise of psychiatric drugs and since the rise of the chemical imbalance story and this incurable brain disease story, we’ve just forgotten that the struggles that emerge in life are responses to life and not permanent. If you orient yourself to them in that way and actually believe and tell yourself like, this is a hard chapter that I’m in, but it’s a chapter. It’s not my whole story. And that’s what I was taught by psychiatry, is that my whole story, the rest of the story of my life is that I’m just so-called mentally ill, needing treatment, and that’s all I have.

Moving Beyond Labels and External Solutions

TUCKER CARLSON: They do that with alcohol too. I could just speak from personal experience. Well, you’re not… I will always be an alcoholic. No, I’m not an alcoholic. I drank too much alcoholic, I guess. But I don’t drink anymore. So, like, it’s not the center of my life anymore.

LAURA DELANO: That’s so I, I have, I don’t…

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I think that’s fair. Look, I’m not judging anybody. I love AA. I don’t go, but I love it. I don’t want to be judgmental, but telling people they’re weak and pathetic and will always be dependent on you, it’s a red flag for me.

LAURA DELANO: I’m so with you. In my book, I talk about the chapter in my life when I quit drinking, which I did eventually do, because drinking one to two bottles of wine a night before you take your five med regimen, including horse tranquilizer doses of Klonopin, is not a recipe for functioning. And so I did eventually decide to quit drinking and was really active in the 12-step world for a few years. And I hold a soft spot for it in my heart.

But I came to the same conclusion for myself is, you know, I had spent the most formative years of my life letting psychiatry define who I was. And then I moved into the 12-step world and I took on a new label, alcoholic. And I began to defer my authority to, you know, a higher power. And I do believe in God and I am connected to this kind of broader oneness of life around me.

But I eventually realized that I have to stop turning it over. I have to stop seeking outside guidance, authority, expertise, answers. And I need to start looking within myself and actually take responsibility for my life and my decisions and my relationships. And I realized, like, I have to stop labeling myself as anything really, and kind of buying into any ideology of any kind that tells me I have a problem, it has the solution.

For now I’m like, you know, even in the wellness, alternative health world, there are a lot of problems that you get sold into thinking you have that their products can help you solve. And I’m at the point where I’m like, I don’t want to look out there anymore for answers to anything internal. That’s just me.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what was the experience of therapy like? So you’re on all these drugs. How many drugs were you on at the peak?

LAURA DELANO: 5.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s unbelievable. But concurrently, you’re sitting through therapy a lot. How often?

LAURA DELANO: Twice a week, usually.

TUCKER CARLSON: For how long?

The Therapy Trap: Years of Professional Help

LAURA DELANO: An hour each time?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but for over how many years?

LAURA DELANO: The whole time I was from 18 to 27 consistently in therapy. Sometimes I would enroll in programs too. I ended up going to the hospital four times during those years. And then afterwards, when you’re discharged from a psych ward, you’re enrolled in some kind of step down program – an intensive outpatient program where every day from nine to five for a few weeks you go to the psych hospital and then you go home. Then you downgrade to a lesser intensive program or you go to a few groups a week. So in my 20s, I was always in individual therapy and then very often in groups programs.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s a lot of therapy. Obviously. I guess I can skip to the end to the punchline. It didn’t work because you’re hospitalized four times. So it’s like not working. But that’s nine years of therapy, consistently full time, almost – what was that like? What do you talk about?

Therapy as a Substitute for Real Relationships

LAURA DELANO: I won’t speak for all therapists or the therapy industry as a whole. Some of my good friends are therapists, and they work with people in very different ways than how I was in therapy. But in my experience, and I do think in the experience of a lot of people – because our society has lost so many spaces where you can turn to other human beings, to neighbors, to friends, to colleagues to talk about how hard it is to be alive sometimes – therapy becomes like the one place you have to feel seen and heard and understood.

What happened for me is that because I had no other place where I felt like I could be open, I developed this dependence on my weekly therapy sessions. I came to see my therapists as really like my substitute friends, sometimes my substitute mother. They kind of replaced what would have been authentic relationships had I not grown up in therapy. And so, of course, if this is the only place you have to go to talk about your problems, you need to have a lot of problems to talk about, because otherwise you don’t need it anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just fascinating what you just said. So you’re basically paying people to be in relationship with you, but because you were doing that and you were steered there, I mean, this wasn’t like a choice that you initially made, obviously, but because you did that, you actually neglected your real relationships. Is that what-

LAURA DELANO: Exactly. And what’s so really nefarious about the whole thing is that you don’t only neglect what could have been authentic relationships. You actually, for me at least, I actually came to dismiss the idea of just a friendship. Like, “They don’t understand mental illness. I need doctors. How could a friend help me? I have a brain disease.”

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s so dark.

The Culture of Psychiatric Patienthood

LAURA DELANO: I don’t know what percentage of psych patients that happens to, but it happened to me. And I saw it in the culture of the psych ward, the culture of all these programs that I was in. We only hung out with fellow patients. You go to lunch together in the hospital cafeteria, and you’re at your little patient table in the corner and you’re looking at all the psychologists and social workers and doctors walking around with their badges. And you’re kind of over in the corner like, “We’re the crazy, messed up patients over here. We’re not like them.” There’s this whole twisted, almost romanticized culture of psych patienthood.

TUCKER CARLSON: Heroin addicts are like this too.

LAURA DELANO: I feel grief about it because we truly were like, “The real world out there, they wouldn’t get us. We’re so messed up. We don’t belong there. We belong here on the hospital grounds.” It’s like I used to feel really proud of how crazy I was.

TUCKER CARLSON: I believe that.

LAURA DELANO: I mean, I chuckle about it now, but of course I grieve too, that that was my source of pride – what a good, successful psych patient I was.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so deep and so sick. You see it with homeless drug addicts. There’s a kind of pride. Like there’s a tribe, we support each other, we’re sharing our misery. But there’s a kind of feeling like we’re in the elite, we’re junkies. And it’s the same kind of death worship.

The Loss of True Community

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And that word tribal – because it exploits this deep primal instinct that we have as tribal beings. It exploits that. Whereas once in our pre-modern, pre-industrialized age, your tribe would have been your village, your local community, and of course people in that community, individuals would have had crises and struggles, but you all banded together and you had multi-generations of families. Grandparents had important roles, grandchildren. And the home was a place where the man and the woman had a kind of symbiosis and mutual interdependence. I’m not trying to romanticize-

TUCKER CARLSON: I literally have a family like that. So that’s real. I mean, I live like that. And I think, not bragging, but I mean, that’s just the way you’re supposed to live.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And I think our modern world does make it really hard. This isn’t for me about individuals or particular families being weak or lazy or bad. I think we’re in this toxic stew of a culture in which, from the food so many of us put into our bodies to the screens that we’re in front of all day, to the just gross kind of consumerist messaging that’s buffeting us all day – it makes it really hard to stay in touch with yourself enough to actually have the capacity to grow, develop your own tribe, whether it’s your family or your neighborhood. This is not about individuals messing up. This is about our social order having evolved in such a way that it makes it feel impossible to have the family that you have for so many people.

TUCKER CARLSON: And economics play a role, too, I think.

LAURA DELANO: For sure. For sure.

Nine Years of Therapy and “Treatment Resistance”

TUCKER CARLSON: So I keep stepping on your story. Sorry. Because it’s an amazing story, but the question of, like, what do you talk about in therapy for nine years? I’m sorry, I didn’t let you answer.

LAURA DELANO: You know, I talked about whatever poor guy I was in a dysfunctional relationship with. I talked about my family and our conflicts. I talked about whatever job I was trying to hold down, which I never could, how hard it was. And I talked about how suicidal I was. Suicide was like a constant companion of mine through my twenties.

By the time I was 25, all I had was my relationship to the mental health professionals in my life, to the people being paid to be there for me, and the pills that I would pick up at the pharmacy every month – that was all I had. Life had deteriorated to such a degree that I couldn’t take care of myself. I couldn’t work, I had no friends. And I was told, “Unfortunately, your bipolar disorder has progressed to such a degree that you’re now treatment resistant.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: So spend millions of dollars on these people. Take all of their drugs, you get worse. And they’re like, “Unfortunately, Laura, you’re treatment resistant.”

The Next Frontier: Brain Devices for “Treatment Resistance”

LAURA DELANO: Literally. And this phrase, “treatment resistance” – it’s a brilliant business model because, of course, if you feel better after starting a psych drug, the credit goes to the drug. If you don’t feel better or if you feel worse, it’s never the drug. It’s you and just how extra defective you are.

For my book, I wove in a lot of research and went down this rabbit hole of looking at the current landscape of psychiatry and where it’s heading. Because obviously this drug-based paradigm is failing. So what’s next for them? The drug companies are not focusing relatively much at all on psych drugs anymore. They’ve recognized this isn’t where the big bucks are.

What this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this “treatment resistance” concept. It’s building a new chapter of medical devices – literally inserting electrodes into the brain that are wired to… It’s called deep brain stimulation where if you have treatment resistant depression because your meds haven’t helped you, don’t worry. Now you just go in for a simple procedure. We’re just going to open up your chest cavity, insert a pacemaker-like device there, then run some wires up into your brain, and then your doctor can press a remote control button to send electrical stimulation, which we believe is going to help target the particular areas of your brain that are involved.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is this you making this up or is this real?

LAURA DELANO: This is literally happening. Besides deep brain stimulation, there’s-

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think there’s anybody who would allow a doctor to implant something in his brain?

LAURA DELANO: Oh, it’s happening. DBS is not under widespread-

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s by remote control. So you’re giving somebody else the power to physically control your brain.

LAURA DELANO: Yep. With electricity.

More “Treatments” for the “Treatment Resistant”

LAURA DELANO: I have read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who’ve had these procedures. And then afterwards, the battery dies and you can’t get the device out because it’s too complicated to remove it. So there’s just like a dead matchbox-size thing that’s protruding from your chest under your skin.

DBS is probably the least common one right now. The big push right now is for what’s called TMS, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, which is also for treatment resistant depression. So there’s a wide array of options – people don’t despair. You basically sit under this device that shoots very powerful magnetic energy through your skull. And it’s being marketed as a non-drug, safe alternative because it’s “just magnets.” And don’t forget ECT, electroshock, which is alive and well and that’s long been a treatment resistant depression treatment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I had a relative who did it and then committed suicide. So yeah, it’s been around for a long time.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I just want to restate what you said so eloquently, which is people subject themselves to these horrors because they are in such pain, because they are so desperate. They will accept any treatment because they’re panicked and they’re dying. So I get it.

LAURA DELANO: And they see no other option. 100%.

The Importance of Simple Wellness Practices

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not judging anybody who submits to shock treatments or deep brain, like whatever the hell that was. But this is just. But does anybody ever say, you know, you really need to go outside more often, get a dog, make a date to sleep with your spouse every other day, get on your knees and pray to God. Let’s just start there. Like maybe take your shoes off on the lawn occasionally. Does anybody could. That would be my program. Just saying. And I think that works. Did anybody ever say that to you?

LAURA DELANO: No. And if, like, if you had met me 16 years ago and said that to me, I would have been like, fuck you, Tucker. How dare you insult me. Do you not understand how seriously sick I am? You’re telling me to get some sunlight. And I think a lot of people feel that way. It’s like it’s invalidating. It feels invalidated.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re going to really go after you. I just had this insight. Cause you’re too articulate. Your story is too great. Because you actually recovered from these tortures and you’re a real threat. I just want to say that. I just want to be on the record saying that. So it’s just a fact, like that New York Times story that I thought kind of slammed you in a subtle way. That’s just the beginning.

Media Backlash and Recovery Reality

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. There was a Washington Post book review of my book that was wild. I mean, she was so. I feel for her. I feel for all the people who are just outraged by my story because I know that at the heart they’re afraid. I know it’s fear. And so I don’t mean this in a, you know, I mean it from a heartfelt place. She was so, so set off by my story and her review. I mean, she was just. I can’t remember the exact phrases, but just wild how vitriolic it was. It was an attack on my character. Really. It wasn’t even really about my book, this book review. And, you know, I was ready. I’ve been ready. I take it as a sign that I’m doing something right. That these large corporate media outlets are really pissed that I got better.

TUCKER CARLSON: They hate that.

LAURA DELANO: And to be clear. Because people, when I do feel better, but by better I don’t mean I’m like happy and put together. Like, people often assume that I’m so called mentally healthy now. Like, you can ask my husband. Like, do not catch me on a day where I have, you know, I’m sleep deprived and have been in front of my screen too much and I’m about to get my period and I feel really stressed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yelling children in the background.

LAURA DELANO: Oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely, I’ve been off of these drugs for 15 years now, but I can tell my central nervous system is still quite sensitized to stress. So I, and I’ve always been a big feeler from, you know, I was a little girl. Like, I have this vivid memory of one day I was outside in the sun in the summer and I saw this worm, this dead, dried out worm, like, shiny as it had been dehydrated by the sun. And I just remember crouching down and looking at it and holding it and just crying. This life that had been taken and I buried it in my garden, my mother’s garden.

And I just, I couldn’t handle facing the death of this little bee. I mean, I’ve always been that kind of intense feeling person. And so I’m often angry, I’m often very angsty. I can get panicky. I feel a lot of grief about a lot of things. Like, I could feel myself right now. Like I could start crying just thinking about all the kids right now who are getting sent to their first psychiatrist.

Like, if I sat down right now, in front of a psychiatrist, they’d be like, oh, gosh, Laura, you’re a little emotionally labile. Maybe, you know, we might want to consider some, you know, Cymbalta or whatever. Like, they wouldn’t be able to compute. Like, crying is actually a sign of being alive and being in touch with life. It’s not a sign of pathology.

And so I often find myself in this interesting position where I’m defending how crazy I still am a lot of the time. Because people are like, you’re so happy now and everything’s great. I’m like, I am a dark, twisted, fucked up person basically on a daily basis. But you know what? I’m not afraid of it anymore. Like, that’s the big difference. Psychiatry and the mental health industry taught me to be terrified of my pain and my mind, and that’s been the most liberating.

The Fear of Healing

TUCKER CARLSON: But what’s interesting is how terrified they are of healing. I mean, there’s this amazing scene in the New Testament, it’s in Luke or John, where Jesus heals a man who’s been blind for his whole life, since birth. And he’s like, Jesus, heal me. And Jesus goes, okay. And he puts mud on his eyes and washes it off in a pool. And he can see. I mean, amazing talk about healing.

And the religious authorities, the Pharisees, show up immediately and they’re like, who did this? And they start interrogating him. Then they interrogate his parents, and their only interest is not they were infuriated by the fact he was healed. Infuriated. And they’re trying to find Jesus to kill him.

LAURA DELANO: Wow.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’m like, that’s like the most burnt, screwed up thing I’ve ever read in my life. But it doesn’t seem so different from the response that you’re getting. It’s like, I don’t know. Laura Delano maybe has emotional days. But, like, happily married kids, like, functional, like, enjoying life, loving life, loving people. That’s like such a massive win, you know what I mean? But they’re, like, mad about it.

Finding Meaning Beyond Happiness

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. No, and I think when you realize that the objective to living is not happiness, it’s meaning and purpose and finding your calling in the world and the way that you are meant to be of service to the world. I mean, when you find access, when you find your way to those states, then you don’t care about being happy all the time anymore. You don’t care about the next quick fix, because that’s just like, you just know, like that’s not the point to being here.

And I think that message is such a threat, not just to the mental health industry, but to so much of consumerism more broadly. If, you know, once you realize the answers and expertise that I’m seeking, don’t lie out there in all these so called experts or products or pills or services. It’s if I look inwards and I just trust that if I do the next right thing, I find ways to get out of self.

I mean that’s like my go to when I’m getting a little too occupied with myself, which a long career as a therapy patient primes you to be. I’m like, okay, what’s the fastest way I can forget myself? Usually it’s like playing with my stepson or my son or it’s reaching back out to someone who’s called me and in a struggle, in a tough spot, when you realize like you can do that anytime you want, like get out of yourself, then you’re like, why would I go pay all these professionals to like listen to me ramble on about myself every week for five.

The Problem with Therapy Culture

TUCKER CARLSON: That was the thing that I was really struck by. Almost five hour dinner last night. And I asked you all about your life and your story and your family and all this. And so we talked about your life a lot, but you did not talk about yourself in a way you were at all. It was like. And that was really striking to me because I do think the hallmark of a therapy person is narcissism. I’m sorry to say that I think they’re really hurting people, including people I love who go to therapy, whatever. But. So I don’t want to be mean at all, but I do think that narcissism is death and I feel like it encourages it. Do you think that?

LAURA DELANO: I think a lot of. I mean there are some modalities that I’ve never tried myself that are like, for example, one is called somatic experiencing therapy. I think to my understanding, it’s actually about getting you out of your mind and into your body. So when you talk about I’m anxious, they’re like, what does that feel like in your body?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like yoga kind of.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And so I think they’re some modalities.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sure there are great kinds of therapy, but the traditional like let’s talk about their mother kind of thing.

LAURA DELANO: I totally agree with you. It teaches you to navel gaze, it teaches you that whatever, like, fleeting emotion or thought is in your head is, like, so important, most important thing in the world. Nothing else matters but your own upset. And if you think about it, if you scale outwards and imagine that at scale, it’s like when you get. You get the social order that we have right now where everyone is driven. Not everyone. I’m being a little sensational here, but where so many people are driven by their outrage, driven by their fear.

And my, you know, unscientific theory that I just based on my own experience and what I’ve seen in so many people is like, I can’t help but wonder how much of that is because a lot of these people grew up therapeuticized and taught to prioritize and privilege how they feel all the time. And then, like, decide what should happen next based on that. Like, I am outraged. Like, you hurt my feelings. Like, now, let’s cancel you. Or, you know, I think the therapeutic element here is potentially a significant.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s the same. It’s the same people. You know, 100% of the people who’ve ever yelled at me in public are from the demographic that you’re describing. And I don’t want to be more precise because I don’t want to make race or class part of it, but it’s very noticeable. You know, it’s people in expensive therapy programs who are mad at their husbands and, like, talking a lot about themselves. Those are the ones who scream at me. I’ve just noticed.

Community Support vs. Paid Services

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised. And one of the great tragedies of this is that when you—because there are so few visible spaces in our culture right now where you can get help, that isn’t a paid service.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, exactly.

LAURA DELANO: You know, people just don’t even realize that’s an option in the first place. They’re so. We’ve been so disempowered by all these helping industries that have billions and billions of dollars to make off of us thinking we need them, that people don’t even realize the power and capacity they have to be with someone in great distress.

Like, because of the work that I do and the work that my husband does. Like, we are often like our home, for example. We have a spare bedroom. And the way we live our lives is like, we have a spare bedroom. Like, if you are in a crisis, you’re feeling lost, and, you know, like, we know you and we trust you, like come. Come stay and eat dinner with us and, you know, hang out with our yelling children and just be with us in our lives.

TUCKER CARLSON: And, you know, you’re making me emotional. That’s like such a.

LAURA DELANO: And, you know, of course, we are in a position where we have a house with an extra room. Like, I’m mindful that so much of my story. And I try to talk about this all the time, like class, economic factors are a huge factor here. So I acknowledge that not everyone can do this if they wanted to.

But just as an example, there’s someone we know in our neighborhood who just. I’ll anonymize the descriptors just to protect them. They’re young. They got psychiatrized as a teen. Bad things had happened to them. They ended up. Instead of those bad things being addressed, they ended up getting sent to a psychiatrist and diagnosed and medicated. Now they’re in their early 20s, and they really haven’t yet figured out how to be an adult in the world because they’re just emerging from the psychiatric nightmare, so to speak. So this person called me up a couple months ago, and I have to stop saying they. She was on her way. She was on her way to the hospital.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s like, I love your commitment to good grammar. I just love that that is one benefit of the high school and college you went to. It’s like, it pains you to do. I couldn’t do it plural pronoun for a second.

LAURA DELANO: I’m like, it’s still anonymous.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that. Thank you. I hate the word they. Not just because of the trans thing.

The Power of Human Connection

LAURA DELANO: But just, yeah, I couldn’t do it. And I think it’s still anonymous enough. There are a lot of women in my neighborhood, 51% of the population. And she was like, “I’m on my way to the hospital. I think I’m going to die. I think I’m having a heart attack.” And so I instantly was like, I think she’s having a panic attack for sure. And I was like, “Well, so what is it that you’re wanting by going to the ER?” And she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

And then she started thinking it through, and she’s like, “And I know what’s going to happen. They’re just going to admit me.” And I was like, “And then?” Yeah, and then you’ll be impatient. And then… And I just walked her through just to help her remember, like, how this goes. Like, you don’t just go into the ER and then someone makes you a cup of tea and comforts you and then sends you on your way. You’re, like, boarding sometimes for days on a psych ward with a security guard watching you. And then you’re carted off to some psych ward, and who knows how long you’ll be there? And then, you know, it just disrupts, like, potentially months of your life.

So I was like, “Why don’t you just… We’re about to have dinner. Cooper’s almost done cooking. Just come over and have dinner with us.” And she came over, and just like the loveliest young woman who I see… I get so emotional. I see so much of me in her. And she’s, like, super lost right now. She’s just trying to emerge from this dark, dark experience of being a psych patient.

And so she comes into our house, and the first thing she says, like, “Do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself?” I’m like, “Girl…” I’m like, “Me? Of course we have. Of course.” I mean, I don’t think about that anymore, but literally every day for like, a decade, I was like, should I kill myself today? And so what I think… And I could feel in her instantly, like a shift. And her poor parent was out in the driveway, had been driving her, and he was like a deer in headlights. I was like, “We’re good. You go on. Like, we’re good. I’ll touch base with you later.”

And what she felt in me was that I wasn’t afraid. And instantly I could feel her be like, “Oh.” And I was like, “Come on, let’s go eat.” And we just sat down at the table. Our yelling children are like, you know, being wild men. And we didn’t over dramatize what she was in. We just, like, had a regular dinner together, and I could just feel her energetically, like, settling in, opening up.

And she ended up staying with us for a week, sleeping in our room. Like, we hadn’t planned on it. And just in that period of time, like, all we did was offer her a space where she could fully be herself in all of her darkness. We weren’t afraid of it. We didn’t make a huge deal out of it. We just, like, kind of brought her into our life and went on walks and we talked about stuff. And she didn’t need to talk a lot about stuff. There was stuff to work through, but it was that simple. And when I, you know, I recognize this might sound a bit romantic, you know, and how unfeasible this kind of thing is for so many people, what human connection love.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, no, it’s very possible.

LAURA DELANO: I mean, I’m with you, it’s possible. But again, like our social order is set up in such a way where it feels impossible for so many people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well then commit the revolutionary act of loving someone one on one, non-judgmentally, bring them into your home, have dinner with them, make them sit there while your kids cry. Like that is the answer to everything, actually.

Support Built on Empathy, Not Profit

LAURA DELANO: Yeah. And it costs no money. It pays the college tuition of no children. It’s like just built on empathy. It’s support built on empathy, not profit. And that’s, I think part of why a lot of people are pissed at me right now is that the nonprofit that I started, Inner Compass Initiative, that my husband Cooper now runs, our mission is to help people make more informed choices about all of this stuff.

So, like, everything that you weren’t told by your doctor, we have it available for free on our website. We teach you how to read a drug label. We walk you through, like how these drugs are researched and brought to market. The history of the DSM, you know, psychiatry’s so-called bible of disorders, how unscientific it is. Like it’s literally based on voting. You vote disorders in and out based on, you know, the opinions of these committee members, most, many of whom have drug company money.

So we provide all of that for free. But really the most radical, which of course is not radical, thing we do is we help people help each other. Like mutual aid in the most pure sense of the word, like AA, like that support that you offer and receive from fellow humans who’ve been where you’ve been. And it’s driven not by the desire to make money, but because of love and service.

And to me, that’s the biggest threat to the mental health industry is when enough people realize I have the power. And the people in my neighborhood, of course, many people don’t even know their neighbors. And that’s a problem when you band together and you realize we can help each other through dark nights of the soul. Like, think about how much, how many services and prescriptions and facilities will be no longer needed.

And yeah, the fact that that’s a radical concept and a dangerous one. “You’re not a doctor.” I mean, the number of times you’re like, “You should be sued, you’re practicing medical advice.” I’m like, how is it speaking about my own experiences practicing unsolicited medical advice or whatever it is they say, it’s just, it’s wild how dehumanized we’ve all been by these industries that convince us we don’t have the power to be with our pain, to be with each other in pain.

The Supernatural Power of Love

TUCKER CARLSON: So I was really moved by that. I will say, like, emotionally moved by that. And a couple wise people in my life have convinced me of something in the last year or so, which is stop being shocked by evil that you see in the world. That’s the status quo. It’s always been that way. If every time you see something horrible, hear your story about how kids are being put on life destroying drugs, and I’m like, “I can’t believe that.” It’s like, no, that’s the way it is.

What we should be shocked by is acts of love and altruism and self-sacrifice. And that’s unnatural. That’s like supernatural. That’s what we should be thrilled by. So I believe that. I’ve come to believe that. And I was just… I was absolutely thrilled and moved by the love that you showed to your neighbor who’s having a panic attack. It’s like, if everybody did that once a week, like, we would… We’d be like living in the kingdom of God. I mean, that’s like… Anyway, that’s my view.

LAURA DELANO: So…

TUCKER CARLSON: But I just want to… You’ve been very nice about psychiatrists and you gave them the benefit of the doubt, that these are people of goodwill. And I love to hear you do that and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. However, maybe I think you’re being a little generous, like, how can they keep doing something that’s not working? And why is it that… I’m sure there are great psychiatrists, but I’ve known a number of psychiatrists and they’re the craziest people I’ve ever met in my life, with the most screwed up personal lives. Like, they have no standing to give other people life advice. Like, what? So I don’t know, am I being too mean?

Understanding the Path to Psychiatry

LAURA DELANO: I mean, I think you’re asking an important question and I think, you know, to the question of why… Why do screwed up people become psychiatrists? I think, you know, speaking for myself as a screwed up person, you know, you’re on a… on a quest to understand yourself. And, and because the only visible place where… Not the only, but the primary visible place in our culture where you go to do that is psychiatry or psychology. When you yourself are screwed up and then you think about what you want to do with your life, whether you’re conscious of this or not. I do think maybe that’s why you’re pulled to this field.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it, okay?

LAURA DELANO: That’s not a bad reason, and it’s not… it’s not a justification or an excuse for them. But I do think a lot of people come to this profession from a place of true… Originally at least, like true curiosity and openness and desire to help.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. I had problems. I want to help other people. I think that’s… Well, you clearly feel that way in your own life, so that’s a good thing. I guess what I’m saying is you want wise people, compassionate, empathetic people who really are putting others at the center of their lives. That’s the profile of the… of the healer. And I… There’s some exceptions. Anna Lemke at Stanford is a wonderful person, psychiatrist, but she is right there.

LAURA DELANO: On the COVID? Oh, really? There on the bottom.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s… She is a huge exception to everything I’m saying. But… But in general, like, you don’t feel a lot of wisdom coming off these people.

The Dehumanization in Medical Training

LAURA DELANO: And my… What I think is part of the… why that ends up happening is that the… the indoctrination that young medical students… Because I think this… This goes beyond just psychiatry to much of kind of allopathic medicine where… Where doctor… Young doctors or, you know, young medical school students are, you know, in year one, for example, I think, to my understanding, at the beginning, at least, pre-Covid… Maybe things have changed with COVID but the beginning of your first year, you’re given your cadaver.

And I can’t remember who… where I read this, but I read it many years ago from someone who was writing critically about the medical enterprise and basically saying that’s very deliberate. You enter into medical school because you want to help. You want to help heal. And then the first thing that you are thrown into is basically this experience of having this object in front of you who once was your fellow brother or sister and is now just an object that you’re going to cut apart.

I think that’s a… it’s really like a degradation ritual that… that you are put through so that you can separate yourself from this fellow human. And it becomes a specimen, it becomes an object. And it’s… And so I think this phenomenon happens across medicine where, you know, you have an issue with your thyroid or whatever body part of you, and you sit in front of a specialist who is trained to just see you as, you know, they are trained to not emote. They are trained… You are actually, as a doctor, not meant to feel too much, because how could you sustainably do this for decades if you’re just emoting all the time? And, and opening yourself up and being vulnerable, like you’re meant to be closed off.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who came up with that idea?

LAURA DELANO: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know enough about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: You weep over your children. You laugh with your children. Like, you’re so emotionally engaged with your children at all times. If you’re a good parent, and that’s the way to parent them, that’s the way to heal them. I don’t… I don’t get it.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think you could survive. I don’t… Because I don’t think it… it’s feasible to cross… So let’s go back to psychiatry. You know, if you’re, as a psychiatrist, let’s say you work for 40 years, so you cross paths with thousands and thousands of people. You don’t have the bandwidth to fully emote and, and be open and be vulnerable. You have to survive that.

I mean, my view is that… And knowing many mental health professionals like you either, if you are… If you stay in touch, like, you can’t stay in touch with your heart and your humanity and last for decades in this, you either have to numb out and disconnect and come to view your patients as these other. Like, you have to other them and just see them as lists of symptoms to write scripts for. Like, or you quit or have a breakdown or, like… I have to imagine that it is not possible to be fully in touch with your own humanity for decades, immersed in the suffering and struggle of, like, thousands of people. So I kind… I almost, like, I feel for the spot that I do, too.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just… But there’s an irreconcilable problem at the core of it, which is you can’t heal people without loving them, period. You can’t actually make the best decision for somebody else unless you love that person. So… And in the absence of love, you wind up with a system like the one you’re describing where we’re destroying people. And, like, there’s a lot of evidence that we’re destroying people and we’re continuing to do it. So, like, what does that tell you?

The Commodification of Mental Health Care

LAURA DELANO: They don’t love those people you’re raising. I mean, this is the fundamental philosophical, spiritual dilemma of the modern mental health industry. When you commodify care and turn it into a service, you can’t love because they’re incongruous with each other.

And so if what you’re saying is true, which I believe, what does that mean for the legitimacy of the foundations of this massive mega billion dollar industry? Because it’s so many industries – drug companies, the hospital industry, managed care, psychiatry, psychology, social work, medical device companies, and all the industries that supply hospitals with food. When you think about how much money is made off of commodifying the care of suffering people and medicalizing that suffering, we’re in quite a dilemma here.

This isn’t me saying blow up the mental health industry. It obviously exists, it’s not going away tomorrow. But I do think what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is helping people who in their heart feel that this isn’t right for them. If you feel helped by your meds, you love your psychiatrist, all the power to you – I’m truly happy for you. But if something in you is asking “Is this my answer? Is this really helping me? Is there something different, something more?” – those are the people who I want to reach, who I want to connect with.

I think slowly over time, the more of us asking these questions and forging different paths, the demand for this industry will lessen. This is probably going to be multi-generation evolution here. It’s not going to change overnight. But when enough people with each passing decade actually meet their neighbors, go literally knock on the doors of their neighbors with a pot of soup saying, “Hi, we’ve lived next to each other for five years. Let’s just finally meet each other” – when enough people do that and then band together for potluck dinners, for crisis networks…

Like, one of my fantasies is that the three streets – we live on a grid and the street next to us on either side – I’ve thought often about making a flyer, putting it in the mailbox of every single person and being like, “Let’s all get together and meet. Let’s all share our stories with each other, figure out who has what tools that we can exchange and borrow, figure out who has extra bedrooms in case your kid is in a crisis and you need a break, come on over here.” To really get that grassroots about it. This might sound crazy to you, but imagine if every town in every city across the country, enough people realize how much…

TUCKER CARLSON: Power they have lived normal lives, like people have always lived how we used to.

LAURA DELANO: Pre-industrial revolution.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So I think most people, I’m definitely in the category, would trade life expectancy for that. It’s like, modernity has been such a huge win. Antibiotics. I’m not against antibiotics. I’m for a long life expectancy. But like you also have to acknowledge…

LAURA DELANO: What was lost and our life expectancy is dropping.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’m aware, I’m highly aware of that. Okay, so I’ve got two more big questions for you. The first is how did you go from being like damaged to the point of attempting suicide repeatedly? Like the most damage you can be and still be alive to being someone with, I can say, having interviewed thousands of people, a person of unusual wisdom, truly unusual wisdom. How did that happen? Like, what was the moment where you set upon the path of liberation?

The Turning Point

LAURA DELANO: Well, my turning point when I realized this industry doesn’t have my answers, happened when I was 27. It was 2010. I was, you know, just months of unfolding dysfunction and craziness, and I found myself in a substance abuse day program because I had decided to quit drinking specifically because I had been convinced that maybe the reason why all these meds weren’t helping me was because I was getting shit faced every night.

TUCKER CARLSON: The booze was getting in the way of the pills.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah, which was true. Yes, this is true. The booze was complicating things. But of course the booze was also what was keeping me alive. Like ironically, getting drunk was the one thing that kept me from killing myself for literally years because at least I didn’t care how messed up my life was.

So I had been very resistant to quitting drinking for that reason. And then, on what ended up being my second to last hospitalization, just for whatever reason I heard this message from a mental health worker about maybe try not drinking. And I think because I was still holding on to hope that maybe the meds would one day help me, I was like, “Okay, because maybe he’s right. If I stop drinking my super treatment resistant bipolar disorder, maybe now it will be treated.”

So I was in this substance abuse day program. I was living with my aunt and uncle who had generously offered up their home to me. And the psychopharmacologist on my five-person treatment team kind of caught wind that I was having a hard time and maybe becoming suicidal, which I was. And he was like, “You know what, Laura, why don’t you take a break? Why don’t you go over to the short-term unit so you can feel safe.”

And I was like, “You’re right.” I wanted to go. I was so afraid of myself that I loved going on psych wards because it was the only place where I felt safe from myself. So I was into it. I said, “Great idea. I just want to go home first, let me get my belongings.” This is not fun going onto a locked ward without any of your comforting possessions.

And he’s like, “Oh, I can’t let you do that.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Well, you’re suicidal right now, so I have to take you directly there. I can’t let you leave.” I was like, “I just told you I want to go. I’m coming back. I really mean it.” And I meant that. He’s like, “I’m sorry.”

Something in me kind of really outraged, it ignited in me and I was like, “This isn’t fair, I’m coming back.” And I started to raise my voice and I started to get more angry. He ended up calling security and a couple of security guards came and they escorted me over to this unit and they gave me the so-called “choice” of going voluntarily or involuntarily.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, this progressed quickly, didn’t it?

LAURA DELANO: Oh my gosh. In a matter of 15 minutes. And never in my wildest dreams had I ever considered that I might once be faced with this kind of situation. Because I had been this good little mental patient for so many years, doing everything my doctor said, always saying yes, taking my meds as prescribed, so diligent and good at what I was doing as a patient. And now here I was, non-compliant.

And that recognition that my psychiatrist had the power to strip me of my civil liberties and incarcerate me on a unit, stripping me of my right to fresh air and freedom, dislodged this deep, deep faith that I had always had in this system.

I had two more experiences like that where I was made to take a drug that I didn’t want to take. And then after I had been discharged from that, what would be my last hospitalization, I slept through a therapy appointment because I was so tranquilized by that drug and my therapist called the cops to do a wellness check on me, which I talk about in the book.

Those three experiences with the power that psychiatry has to force you to do things you don’t want to do made me step back and just start questioning all of it. And it was in that questioning space – and the fact that I had quit drinking, I hadn’t yet found AA, so I was really miserable because I just stopped. I removed the one thing that I had for relief without doing any work on myself.

But in that space opened up this new curiosity, like, who would I be off of these meds? I’ve been on these meds since I was a kid. I’ve never known myself as an adult off meds. What would my baseline look like? What would my personality be like? How would I think? What would I care about? What would my body look like? I just suddenly started wondering these things.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

Because I was questioning psychiatric power, I just opened up to the possibility that not all was as it seemed. And then it was in that space that I found a book by a medical journalist named Robert Whitaker. The book is called “Anatomy of an Epidemic.”

In a nutshell, he was curious about the fact that long-term outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much better in the so-called third world, in countries where they don’t have these sophisticated medicines. And he was intrigued by that – why are outcomes better in poor countries that don’t have a lot of drugs? Because he had been under the assumption that these drugs are these great amazing things.

So he did this deep dive investigation and basically makes this very compelling case that if you look at long-term data on psych drugs, on the whole, they are making us sicker, more disabled. And there I was on five psych drugs, previous 10 years of my life that I’d been this compliant patient, progressively falling apart every month, month after month. I was physically sick with all these chronic health issues, no friends, couldn’t work, suicidal all the time, totally financially dependent on my family, like a mess.

And in that beautiful, terrifying moment of starting this book, I realized, holy shit, what if it’s not treatment resistant mental illness? What if it’s the treatment?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s coming from inside the house. That’s really wow.

LAURA DELANO: And that was the beginning that set me on this path that I’ve been on ever since, where I just knew I had to find out who I would be off of these drugs. I had to find out. In the beginning when I was still like, I still believed I had bipolar disorder. I still believed in the chemical imbalance theory. I wasn’t even questioning any of that stuff yet. But I was just like, I want to find out what my untreated bipolar state is like. At least let me see. Maybe I could manage it without meds.

I started there, but I quickly began to educate myself about the DSM. This textbook that the entire psychiatric enterprise is built around – “Oh, you have four out of seven of these symptoms, it means you have this, or you have three out of five of them means you have that.” And of course, our insurance system is built around it for billing codes. It’s what the whole entire psychiatric research enterprise has been built around.

This textbook that I had just assumed for all these years was this rigorously researched, scientific text, I quickly realized is completely subjective, completely unscientific, and even the NIMH itself and all of these key opinion leaders in psychiatry admit this. This is not controversial to say. I learned that very quickly.

And that was just the first onion layer of self-education that I kept going deeper into. And I realized, every single thing that I believed about myself through the most formative years of my life – about my suffering, about my mind, about everything – was like a marketing trick. Everything I thought I knew.

It was terrifying to face this. My whole world fell apart. I had no idea who I was because all that I had been for so long was “mentally ill.” But I was so determined to figure it out. And thank God I had been born into a family who could provide for me and literally put a roof over my head while I did, because when I then came off of these drugs way too fast – and I want to make sure we talk about this – I had no idea that all these drugs I’d been on for all of these years had completely changed my central nervous system and that my brain was physically dependent on them.

TUCKER CARLSON: You had no idea?

LAURA DELANO: No idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the physicians who prescribed them never told you that?

LAURA DELANO: Never told me.

TUCKER CARLSON: They should be arrested. That’s what I think.

The Withdrawal Process and Dependence on Psychiatric Medications

LAURA DELANO: Well, what’s wild, Tucker, is that it is not even certain. Certain drug labels acknowledge dependence, like benzodiazepines. Those drug labels will acknowledge dependence.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can die getting off them.

LAURA DELANO: Yeah, you can have seizures if you stop them abruptly. But a lot of drug labels say nothing about this. And the establishment kind of authorities often do not acknowledge this, at least not for all of the psych drugs. Benzos, maybe they do, but antidepressants, mood stabilizers, obviously the sleep aids, which are very similar chemically to benzos, stimulants—all of them are psychoactive chemicals that, when you take them regularly for years, you are going to become dependent on them.

Because I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that I needed to taper off really slowly. And by slow, I don’t mean like a few weeks or a few months. People who’ve been on these drugs for any length of time, especially like a decade or longer, often need years of tapering—years. I’m not even kidding you, Tucker. Because the withdrawal symptoms can be so debilitating if they try going faster.

And I feel like I’ve said the word insidious like 30 times in this interview, but so much of it is insidious. The insidious thing is that because our public does not understand how dependence forming these drugs are and because doctors don’t realize it and are certainly not telling their patients this. When people come off their psych meds too quickly and they feel like shit, intense anxiety, insomnia, despair, panic, paranoia, whatever ends up happening, they’re told, “Oh, you’re having a relapse of your illness. See, this is why you need to stay on your meds.” So it keeps people in this vicious cycle for literally decades because when they try to stop, they feel horrible and then they use that as a reason to go back on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, he’s off his meds.

LAURA DELANO: I mean, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s off his meds.

LAURA DELANO: Exactly. And to return to the mass shooter thing for a minute, like, this is just total speculation on my part, but obviously, the narrative is often like, “Oh, these were mentally ill people who were untreated. That’s why they committed this violence.” I can’t help but wonder, I mean, I think in the case of James Holmes, I know in his journals…

TUCKER CARLSON: If I complained about being on segments.

LAURA DELANO: And how weird they made him feel. So it’s like, did he stop them cold turkey because he was like, “I don’t like how I feel.” I’m just speculating. I’m truly asking that question from a place of curiosity. But people assume if you’re off your meds, like that’s your illness, whatever you’re doing is because you’re mentally ill. It’s never like, “Oh, because you’re in acute withdrawal.”

I think my hope is that, especially now with the growing awareness just more broadly in our society about the ways we’ve been betrayed by medical authorities. I think more and more people, the 66 million people on these drugs, more of them are going to realize they might want to pursue a different path for themselves. And my fear is that they won’t know about dependence and how important it is to taper slowly.

They’ll come off too fast and it will be like, talk about a crisis. I mean, I have friends who came off like antidepressants, for example, basically in a couple of weeks, because that’s what they were told to do. They were bedridden. Like one friend I’m thinking of in particular, she had been on an antidepressant and a benzo, always taken as prescribed for work-related anxiety. She went to a detox facility because she wanted to come off of them. They ripped her off in two weeks and she was bedridden for like two years because every time she stood up, she would have vertigo and she’d fall over. She couldn’t stand, let alone walk to her car, let alone drive for like two years. She had to move in with her—she was like 40 years old—she had to move in with her parents.

That’s just one of like hundreds of thousands, maybe at least a hundred thousand stories online of people who didn’t have this information from their doctors, came off too fast, often at their doctor’s instruction because the doctors have no idea. You are taught how to put people on these drugs, not how to get them off. And so people often only figure this out after the fact when they’re already destabilized in withdrawal, not knowing what the hell is happening to them, freaking out.

And then they start googling. And then they find this online community of like at this point, thousands of Facebook groups and online forums. They find our nonprofit Intercompass Initiative. They start to learn about what they just did and they’re like, “Oh my God, I had no idea.”

Sometimes people recover from withdrawal within weeks or months. Sometimes it takes years. It took years for me, really. And because I had a family who could provide for me, I made it through. But I often think about how many people don’t have the resources that I had access to. I wouldn’t have survived this if I didn’t have a family who could literally provide for me because I could not function. And 66 million people are on this stuff. This is a real crisis. This is the real crisis here that we need to be talking about.

The Long Road to Recovery

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s… It’s a horrifying story. How long did it take you to recover?

LAURA DELANO: The first year, I would say, was like, every day was hell. Showering was a success. Like, if I took a shower, I’m like, I had a really good day. I ended up living with my aunt and uncle for almost a year. They opened their home to me as I went on this journey.

And, you know, everyone was scared because everyone in my family believed I had this serious brain disease. And, like, “someone with diabetes needs insulin,” you know, that whole thing, like, “she could die.” But God bless my aunt and uncle, they just let me be a mess.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have a very nice family. They sound like nice people.

LAURA DELANO: I’m really, really lucky. I mean, so many people who want the same things that I wanted, you know, with getting off these drugs, do not have anything like a supportive family. I’m so lucky. I really would not be here. I would literally be dead.

And so I lived with them for basically a year. And I was super active in AA at that time because I had quit drinking. And thank God for AA. I mean, I went to a meeting every morning and every night, and I didn’t even realize at the time that most of my struggles were because I was in cold turkey withdrawal, because I came off five drugs in six months, which is like cold turkey. I didn’t know. I thought that was—you know, that would have shocked me if you told me that was cold turkey. I’m like, “What do you mean? It took half a year.”

And so I would just go to AA meetings, and I was so messed up. I was so paranoid and insecure and I couldn’t talk. I felt like I couldn’t articulate myself. And I was such a mess. But I had a meeting every morning and every night, and I didn’t even realize it was withdrawal for a while. It didn’t matter. Like, just being able to talk to other people about the most vulnerable, painful parts of my daily reality. What a gift. I’m so grateful for AA.

I would say around a year off, I started to feel less shitty. Between years one and three, I progressively felt better, you know, physically, especially cognitively, emotionally. And by year three, when I look back, I’m like, that was the year when I kind of came alive again. And I would actually have these, like, “these are my fingers. I’m real. I’m here. Oh my God, that’s the sun. That’s the sun. It feels warm on my cheek.” Like, literally that level of “I exist,” it was so profound and I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t been existing. I didn’t know what I had been missing, you know what I mean? Because my whole adult life I’d been under the influence of these drugs.

So it took me a long time. And what I will say is that very early on I found my purpose though. So even though I was super messed up in withdrawal, I started blogging about my experiences basically right after finishing coming off the drugs, because I had reached out to that author, that journalist who wrote that book, Robert Whitaker, who wrote that book that had sparked my aha moment. I had reached out to him and had asked if I could write for his website because I was like, “I grew up psychiatrized. I have no idea who I am. Can I write about what this whole thing has been like?” And he said, sure.

So I started blogging very early about what I was going through and began hearing from people all over the world. This was 2010, so this was not a commonly talked about thing online. Like most people then were like, “I love my meds, I’ve embraced my diagnoses.” And here I was being like, “I’m an ex-mental patient. What the fuck just happened back there?”

And so I just realized so early on, and God, I’m so grateful. Like, what I went through actually has value. It wasn’t wasted time, wasn’t fruitless suffering, meaningless suffering, like this meant something, this means something. And if I put myself out there in the world and the more open I am about it, the more of a chance I’ll have at actually helping others.

And so even though I was super messed up in withdrawal for a while, I was living, I was connecting. And it was like, what a gift. I mean, at this point now it’s like thousands and thousands of people have either emailed me or I’ve met them at conferences.

The one takeaway from my book, from my story that I want every struggling person to leave with, if I could leave them with one thing is, your suffering means something. Like, it is so much more than just faulty brain pathology, which is bullshit, first of all. Not even true. But it’s not wasted time. All is not lost. What you’ve been through might actually be the medicine that another person needs.

I’m so grateful for all of it. I wouldn’t change a minute of any of it, because this is my purpose. This is what I’m here to do is just literally just talk about how hard it is to be alive and the power of stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be human. Because that’s really all I’ve done. I’ve just changed the story. I let go of this bullshit, medicalized, pharmaceuticalized story that I grew up believing in, and I’ve found my way to an actually human one. Like, life is hard. Pain isn’t something to run away from. The best way to find your way to peace of mind is to get out of yourself. And mutual aid and the fellowship of other human beings is so simple and oftentimes so powerful to help you find your way through.

TUCKER CARLSON: Other people are the greatest gift. Let me ask you one final question. So I think any person listening to this would conclude, you know, this is what it means to recover. This is victory. Like, once was lost now am found. I mean, this is like the greatest story arc. How many of your professional psychiatric caregivers have called you to say, “Congratulations? I’m so glad you’re well?”

LAURA DELANO: None of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so that we’re going to end on that Laura Delano, because that just kind of tells the whole story right there, because it’s not like you’re in hiding. You know, you have an unusual name. Anyone who treated you is probably aware of how you are now, and anyone who’s not thrilled by that is, like, serving darkness. That’s my view, but I’m thrilled by it. So thank you so much for doing this.

LAURA DELANO: Thanks for having me, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, my gosh. The best.

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