She Was on 5 Psychiatric Drugs at 27. The Pills Were the Problem All Along | Laura Delano EP 234
In a Nutshell
Laura Delano spent 14 years on psychiatric drugs, accumulating diagnoses and worsening disability until she realized the medications—not an underlying "treatment-resistant" illness—were driving her dysfunction. After cold-turkeying five drugs at 27, she endured three years of severe withdrawal including akathisia, hallucinations, digestive collapse, and chemical sensitivities before stabilizing through dietary changes and slow recovery. The core message is that long-term psychiatric drug use causes neurological injury misdiagnosed as relapse, millions lack safe tapering options, and proper hyperbolic tapering plus lifestyle support offers the only realistic path off these medications.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Laura Delano is the founder of a nonprofit called Inner Compass Initiative that helps people make informed choices about taking and safely tapering off psychiatric medications. She has spent significant time helping people navigate medication withdrawal in a consulting capacity because they had nowhere else to turn but those who have had to figure it out for themselves. In the past year, she has been working to help inform policy in Washington DC since Secretary Kennedy came in, believing there is finally a real opportunity to change the cultural conversation and health policy around safe medication tapering.
Delano describes her experience as a 14-year relationship with the mental health industry. She was a smart, sensitive, intense kid from a family with financial means who went to private school and had resources and opportunities, but also faced intense performative expectations. At age 13, she had a breakdown, realized she did not know who she was or how to get out of the performance game she felt stuck in, and began acting out at home, cutting herself, and despairing. Her parents sent her to a therapist who sent her to a psychiatrist. She was promptly diagnosed with bipolar at age 14 and put on a couple of meds within an hour.
The longer she was on these meds, the more meds she took, the more she came to rely on her doctors and therapists to steer her through her life, the more diagnoses she accumulated, and the more her life fell apart. Every step of the way, her parents and she thought this was her illness progressing. Eventually, she was declared so sick that she was treatment resistant, meaning no treatments could help her. This led to a suicide attempt because she believed if all she had was mental health treatment and it was not going to help, why should she stay alive. She eventually woke up from that false story and unshrunk herself.
Between ages 14 and 18, she tried hard to avoid taking the medications because she hated the idea that she needed to take pills to change her. Once she began taking them consistently at age 18, she would have brief periods at the start of a new drug where she felt more hopeful, but whether that was the drug effect or her belief that this one would finally work, she does not recall feeling sustainably helped in a meaningful way where she was actually functioning better, feeling more connected, or more at peace. It was year after year of dysfunction to the point where it became normal and she did not realize it could be anything else.
The host shared his experience at age 12 with severe mental problems that he now believes was largely caused by living in a moldy basement, manifesting as OCD tendencies, staying up late reorganizing books, sharpening pencils, and planning escape routes. He was put on Lexapro and initially experienced sedation and relaxation that did not last, followed by depression. Delano shared that she had chronic ear infections as a baby and was on antibiotics frequently, was a very OCD kind of kid with counting and making bets with herself, was also cesarean so she did not go through the birth canal, and wonders how much that seeded the physical foundations for her eventual mental and emotional breakdown.
Delano explains that the conversation gets polarized around whether mental illness is real or does not exist. She approaches it by asking what we mean when we say mental illness and how to tease apart the words from what people actually mean. She has long been a critic of medicalization more broadly, taking very real experiences whether emotional, mental, or physical and automatically translating them into the language of symptom, illness, and disorder. At the same time, she acknowledges that people are really suffering, people really get psychotic, people really have delusions, and people really are in intense physical pain. She believes finding nuance is essential for change because there are more points of agreement than polarized people think.
Delano states that the chemical imbalance mythology is scientifically unevidenced even for extreme psychosis. She notes that every emotion and thought is rooted in biology and biology can go awry, such as with a brain tumor or late-stage syphilis causing hallucinations. However, the chemical imbalance narrative is misleading and at best lacking evidence and at worst not true. She emphasizes that everything is environmental in the sense that what you eat and what you are exposed to is environmental and then becomes biological. She believes more nuanced conversations are needed to move beyond polarized views.
Delano notes that psychiatric medications especially long-term can cause neurological changes that end up in injury. A significant percentage of the population is on these medications, with many taking them long-term. She states that because we are in the early days of naming the reality that long-term psychiatric drug use can lead to serious neurological injury, all the evidence we have is anecdotal experiences, which she considers valid data and evidence. She emphasizes the need to prioritize better understanding of what is happening structurally and functionally in the body from long-term use, while also not waiting to help injured people until more research is done.
Delano states that with the opportunity to address the overmedicalization crisis as HHS is calling it, we need to take action now to help injured people. Hospitals cannot be turned to because people will just be put back on meds. There is no respite for navigating an akathisia crisis. She emphasizes the urgency of addressing this because people have nowhere to turn for help.
At age 27 in 2010, Delano was on five medications: lithium, lamictal, abilify, effexor, and ativan. Her job was going to treatment at the psych hospital every day. She stumbled on Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an Epidemic, whose thesis is that if you look at the long-term evidence on psych drugs, they tell a different story than what has been led to be believed, showing worsening disability and worsening outcomes. Reading the book while medicated led to an aha moment where she realized what if it is not treatment resistant mental illness, what if it is the treatment. This catalyzed her to come off all of them.
Delano had no idea about dependence and withdrawal or tapering. At the time, the only resources were benzobuddies and survivingantidepressants.org. She came off all five medications in about half a year, thinking that was slow, with no idea she was basically cold turkeying herself. She was grateful she was so messed up on meds because she was comfortable with being in agony. The first year of withdrawal was severe, where taking a shower was a massive accomplishment. By three years off, she felt integrated and in herself. She made dietary shifts two years off, removing gluten and dairy which was a game changer. She wonders if removing those food groups earlier would have lessened her prolonged suffering.
During the three-year period, cognitive symptoms like memory function, ability to retain words when reading, and ability to articulate herself trended upward pretty steadily but slowly. She has vivid memories in year one where she would have an idea in her head and start talking and wonder what was coming out of her mouth. The emotional piece was definitely a roller coaster kind of thing, and in retrospect she thinks that tied into what was happening in her life stressor-wise.
Laura notes she remains sensitized to stress years later, though improved from earlier periods. Social situations like holiday family gatherings and cocktail parties remained significant challenges during recovery.
Physical symptoms included extreme digestive issues that she attributed to IBS for approximately ten years while on psychiatric medications. She believes SSRIs were primarily responsible, and during withdrawal experienced alternating periods of severe constipation with small pellet-like stools and episodes of watery diarrhea.
The speaker discontinued Lexapro over a two-week period, which aligns with conventional psychiatry guidelines of two to four weeks for tapering. During the taper, symptoms initially improved progressively, followed by several days of clarity and well-being after stopping. However, reintroducing foods while following a low-carb diet triggered a severe allergic reaction after consuming soy, which caused the first hallucination.
Throughout the withdrawal period, symptoms were not recognized as antidepressant withdrawal but were attributed to dietary factors. A list of approximately 17 tolerated foods, primarily meat and greens, appeared to reduce symptoms, making the experience feel different from typical drug withdrawal.
When the speaker's father was hospitalized, it became clear that symptoms were withdrawal-related rather than purely dietary. Severe visual disturbances included hallucinations of terrifying images that appeared as brief flashes, similar to seeing monsters in the dark as a child. These were not constant but occurred intermittently.
The pattern during the first year involved eating something, experiencing 24 days of severe symptoms, then having brief periods of calm before attempting another food. This cycle was described as brutal.
The second year was complicated by pregnancy. Hormones were poorly tolerated throughout, and symptoms remained present. Stabilization began approximately two and a half years after discontinuation. The speaker found that an all-meat diet provided rapid stabilization, with symptoms returning when any variation such as spices was introduced. After about five months on this restrictive approach, stability was achieved.
Laura asks whether pregnancy helped or hindered withdrawal recovery. The speaker confirms pregnancy was only a disturbing factor with no beneficial effect. The experience was described as traumatizing, with withdrawal symptoms returning and becoming completely intolerable. This included severe reactions to prolactin during milk let-down, and the postpartum period involved suicidal feelings.
The speaker notes that some psychiatric medications can increase prolactin levels, similar to SSRIs, though research on this connection is lacking. In retrospect, the first pregnancy and postpartum experience was horrifying compared to typical postpartum challenges.
The conversation addresses the lack of meaningful informed consent, estimating that only 0.01% of women receive adequate information about psychiatric medication risks. The years required to recover sufficiently to raise a child make early education critical, beginning in girlhood and well before childbearing years are considered.
Women who have been on medications like Zoloft since adolescence face impossible choices when pregnant: risking harm to the baby through continued use or facing acute withdrawal that may cause suicidality.
Reference is made to a doctor named Adam who is publicizing existing research on fetal harm from SSRI exposure. The speaker notes that developing brains exposed to withdrawal effects cannot be good, though specific research remains limited. The dilemma for pregnant women on these medications is acknowledged as having no good solution.
The discussion turns to the birth control pill's capacity to cause serious depression in young women, potentially leading to psychiatric medication prescriptions. The speaker was on oral contraception for 16 years, started at age 14 while already on psychiatric medications. An endocrinologist prescribed it to restore cycles after starvation-induced amenorrhea, without explaining that the bleeding was a withdrawal bleed, not a true period.
The speaker stopped all medications including the pill at age 23. Laura discontinued the pill at age 30 and describes her early 30s as the first time in adulthood she was free from pharmaceuticals.
The profound consequences of developing through teenage years with synthetic hormones and central nervous system drugs are discussed. The culture is described as only recently pausing to examine these practices, with momentum building around these issues due to the sheer number of affected people.
CDC survey data from 2022 indicates 23.8% of the population on psychiatric medications, approximately one in four people. Earlier estimates from six years prior suggested one in six, indicating an increase.
TikTok content about antidepressant withdrawal experiences has been removed as misinformation. A video detailing severe symptoms including akathisia and hallucinations received fewer views than expected, suggesting suppression. Content promoting psychiatric medication use with hashtags like "live love lexapro" appears widely promoted.
The speaker speculates this may relate to TikTok being run by the Chinese Communist Party, though acknowledges this view is somewhat conspiratorial. The pattern of censoring withdrawal experiences while promoting medication use is noted as concerning.
Laura, age 43, describes the phenomenon beginning in the 1990s of romanticizing psychiatric diagnosis and medication, particularly for girls and women. She internalized pride in having four different diagnoses and displaying pill bottles as validation of suffering.
This is framed as symptomatic of a deeper spiritual void and lack of meaning for young people immersed in performative virtual reality, seeking belonging through diagnosis and medication.
The speaker's experience differed from the current cultural narrative. Diagnosed with arthritis in grade two, she initially hid the condition as an "old person disease." By grade seven with antidepressants, she openly discussed family history of depression.
The cultural shift moved from dismissing mental illness as weakness, to accepting it as real with a chemical imbalance explanation, and then to hashtags like "live love lexapro."
Anti-stigma mental health awareness campaigns began in the 1990s with pharmaceutical funding. Organizations like the National Alliance for Mental Health and Mental Health America receive significant industry funding. Industry exploited legitimate messages about reducing shame around pain and treatment, blending them with medicalized frameworks that validate illness identity.
This created a perfect storm of factors incentivizing medication use. However, both speakers express that a cultural awakening is occurring.
Rumors that RFK intends to remove psychiatric medications are described as absurd. At an event attended by Laura, no statements were made about removing access to medications. HHS has zero intention of banning medications.
Media headlines have misrepresented the position. Secretary Kennedy's actual message addresses the millions on these medications who do not want long-term use but lack safe discontinuation protocols. The goal is providing safe off-ramps for those who choose to stop, not forcing anyone off medications.
Doctors without awareness of protracted withdrawal typically recommend stopping medications in two to four weeks. The policy aims to replace this unsafe approach with proper clinical training in safe tapering protocols.
Media response to Secretary Kennedy's announcements has been more positive than other recent health policy issues. Both speakers express hopefulness despite clickbait headlines.
At the APA annual conference, Dr. Chris Palmer spoke on metabolic psychiatry to a standing-room-only audience. Many psychiatrists are recognizing these issues and pushing forward, particularly around distinguishing neurological symptoms from relapse during tapering.
A doctor inquired about distinguishing overlap between original mental illness symptoms and protracted withdrawal. The speaker states this differentiation is difficult, especially after long-term medication exposure when no baseline was ever established.
Mark Horowitz's work includes methodology for distinguishing symptoms. New symptoms never experienced before can indicate withdrawal. Time is considered the best indicator, potentially requiring years to establish baseline, particularly for those medicated since childhood.
The current moment presents an opportunity to build bridges between former patients who have become experts on safe tapering and doctors leading research on hyperbolic tapering, including Mark Horowitz and Yseph with Doring. Deprescribing should be framed as an invitation rather than a threat to psychiatry.
The goal is collaborating on tapering protocols based on hyperbolic tapering as described in the Maudsley deprescribing guidelines, providing training to clinicians and families. This represents a win-win approach where all parties want patients to feel good.
Many doctors feel frustrated treating patients who worsen despite following medical school teachings about adding stabilizing medications. New symptoms provide clearer differentiation from original illness: extreme agitation, insomnia, hallucinations, food sensitivities, light sensitivity, and new autoimmune conditions.
The transcript cuts off mid-sentence while discussing the distorting effect of the withdrawal versus relapse framework.
The distorting effect that we've all been under, whether it's doctors themselves and therapists or us as patients and our family members, is the idea that how you feel when you stop your medication is like your baseline, your illness, your untreated state. This is simply not true. Once this distortion is removed, people can see clearly that decisions shouldn't be made based on someone having a hard time off their meds. This doesn't mean reinstating and tapering more slowly, giving new diagnoses, or telling them this is why they need to be on medications forever.
The other distorting factor is withdrawal mistaken for relapse and long-term adverse effects or even just adverse effects mistaken as worsening condition. These two distorting narratives are a big part of why there are 65 million Americans on these meds right now, most of them long term, because people have been given a misinterpretation of what's happening. This information problem is critical to address, especially for psychiatrists who say they don't see withdrawal ever in their practice because everything they see they're diagnosing as a relapse of the illness.
Going in with major depressive disorder and then four years later receiving a bipolar diagnosis means the medication is not putting you in the direction you want to go because you should be getting better, not worse. One horrible side effect that was attributed to an autoimmune disorder was fibromyalgia-like nerve pain. Once withdrawal occurred, it became clear those physical symptoms were from the antidepressant, not arthritis. Unbelievably horrifying restless legs started badly at age 18 and got worse and worse, beginning after six years on medication started at age 12. Riding the bus to university in Montreal, hitting legs on the bus and crying because of the inability to get relief was the experience.
The restless legs were thought to be the autoimmune disorder, but they were a side effect of the medication. When withdrawal occurred and pain got worse, the restless leg part went away pretty quickly. A personal experience with akathisia occurred on a really high dose of Lamictal while on other meds. The sensation was an unspeakable pulsing energy that wanted to get out of the body, literally grabbing flesh and pulling it, scratching to open it up to get it out.
When you see someone experiencing akathisia, clawing at themselves or hitting themselves, it looks like that needs to be treated as mentally ill or psychosis. With restless legs, it wasn't that the person wasn't there, it was just extreme physical discomfort to the point of weeping, and hitting it brought relief. Heavy blankets seem to help people going through antidepressant withdrawal or psych med withdrawal because the pressure relieves some of that crawling sensation. A friend in the thick of akathisia had her mother lie on top of her on the couch because that weight was the only thing that helped her feel safe. If you haven't lived it yourself or witnessed it in someone you love, you simply don't get it. It looks like you could tell somebody to just stop, but you simply cannot.
For people who have been on medications for more than two to five years and are having side effects or have tried coming off and were told they were relapsing, the first thing is knowing how far from alone you are and that there's so much support out there to navigate this. The Inner Compass Initiative, the nonprofit founded, has a community and lots of free information. The next most important thing besides recognizing you're not alone is getting informed, educating yourself, learning about the drugs you're taking, actually reading the drug labels themselves which can be 50, 60, 70 pages long. Inner Compass has a guide that teaches how to read your drug label. Learn about physical dependence and why hyperbolic tapering is so important.
Take all the time you can to get properly informed before taking any action of any kind because information is power. If you've connected with the fact that you don't want to take these medications anymore or you're sensing you might not want to, and if you start to feel urgency around it, the fastest way to get off and stay off these medications is to taper very, very, very slowly and hyperbolically. By slow, it doesn't mean over weeks or months. It might potentially need years depending on how long you've been on and all kinds of other factors that aren't fully understood yet.
The taper and withdrawal experience is not even about the drugs themselves as much as reclaiming yourself, your life, your agency, after growing up as a psych patient where authority and agency were basically deferred to mental health professionals. Finding peace with the fact that the taper and withdrawal experience may take time, and the only way to know how fast you can do this is by going really slowly and figuring out bit by bit over time what the maximum rate your body can handle. Everyone is different. For some people, it's 5% a month hyperbolically, calculated on whatever the previous month's dose was, so each month the cut gets smaller. Some people can do 10%, some can do more than 10%. You can't know upfront how fast you can go, and it's not worth the risk of starting out too fast and then potentially destabilizing yourself for who knows how long.
Information is key, support is key, and lifestyle optimization is key. As much as possible, optimize your body through sleep, removing whatever stressors you can from your plate, diet. A lot of people find whether it's full on keto or just removing gluten and dairy, removing inflammatory foods more generally really helpful. Brain friendly food, fat. Our brains are made out of fat basically, and especially in withdrawal, eating really healthy fat is needed.
Switching to eating meat and eating ridiculous amounts of fat, enough that digestion wasn't happy about it, revealed a need for something. That need went away really when withdrawal symptoms lessened. It was probably needed to hit a certain level of ketosis to get more relief. When ramping up fat intake three to two years in, huge changes were seen especially in a deep sense of feeling integrated, not having the same kind of unhinged unmedicated feeling, not being buffeted about as much. When focusing more on healthy fat and leafy greens, bitter greens, the ability to handle fermented foods came, though a lot of people can't because of the histamine. A steadiness that wasn't there before emerged when fat was ramped up. It definitely didn't cure the unstable nature of it, but it gave a level of stability. All psych symptoms were attributed to food reintroductions for two years, like thinking soy made someone hallucinate, when it was antidepressant withdrawal making them hallucinate and soy just exacerbated some inflammatory response that provoked that.
Piecing it together while someone was experiencing akathisia happened in December 2019, and starting to talk about it was January 2020 when it was recognized as a side effect and physical dependence. There's still lingering symptoms that can't be explained. During pregnancy when trying to reintroduce foods, arthritis didn't happen, which was the main obvious physical symptom that was triggered by almost everything eaten, and that seems to have calmed down over the last two years. When stress occurs, there's more sensitivity to fragrances, light, sound, chemicals. These were really severe early on, but the question remains why there's still sensitivity to light, fragrance, chemicals, and sound, those weird chemical sensitivities, and why the main symptom is mood when hit. One thing that would occlude is the inability to take B vitamins at all or insomnia, agitation, restlessness occurs. Those weird neurological symptoms persist even though the arthritis component has much desensitized.
There's a kind of inevitable mystery to what makes something click in someone, like maybe it's not treatment resistant mental illness, maybe it's the treatment, or for someone else maybe this isn't relapse, this is withdrawal. The more the culture starts to have this conversation and it starts to infuse day-to-day conversations in people's lives and it's more in the ether, that will hopefully help catalyze more aha moments for people who haven't yet had them and who need them. Not everyone needs them. There's a certain percentage of people out there who can take long-term psych meds without any visible measurable tradeoffs that they seem aware of.
For families, the original reason for taking medications is thought to stem from a genetic predisposition to sensitivity towards mold, which can cause neurological damage according to lots of studies. Maybe a certain percentage of the people who are prescribed psych meds already have a level of neurological damage that they're treating with psych meds, and when they stop it's just like all hell breaks loose. Somebody who was prescribed them for a family member dying or some severe stress can take them and get off of them and don't have these side effects as often as the people who had some sort of neurological problem to begin with. Research would be good because who it hits or what the pattern is isn't known yet. HHS has access to tons of data, and AI could be potentially really helpful in analyzing vast swaths of anonymized health data to try to figure out patterns, but the problem is that a lot of people probably don't even know that they have these issues.
There's blood work now that can monitor inflammatory responses to environmental things and that covers mold. The SURGE research has discovered a bunch of blood markers that aren't normally tested that really do correspond with mold exposure. That would be one way to rule out mold exposure or an environmental toxin causing mental disorders. Something easier would probably be really intense health histories to identify people who are depressed because of relationship or toxic things happening in their life versus someone who goes, I don't understand, my job is good, my life is good, and I'm miserable. Put them in different camps and monitor that, and maybe AI could be useful with that.
For the first group who maybe really doesn't need to start or doesn't need to pursue more medical interventions, the key thing is how to actually help them access meaningful support to navigate those life challenges. Therapy can be helpful for many people but for many other people it isn't helpful. When talking about medicalization, it isn't just turning all human experience into medicalized lists of symptoms, it's also what it means for how we think about what help is and this idea that you can only get help navigating your life challenge by going to see a mental health professional. Maybe what you really need is to be of service and get out of yourself and help someone else, or maybe it's deepening your friendships and having weekly coffee meetups with your best friends and that's all you need to navigate it. People lose touch with the fact that there's so much we can all do just as in our authentic relationships with each other to help each other get through hard times that so many people have just kind of assumed you can only get through if you get mental health interventions of some kind, which isn't always necessary.
People can get depressed from life. Life has some really awful aspects of it. Seeing somebody you love in pain is going to cause you pain, or seeing someone you love die, or caring for a sick person, or being in a really stressful relationship, or the postpartum period. All these things can be so painful that you want to escape the situation. But it's also part of the horrible human experience sometimes. If it was as easy as taking a pill and it could just help you get through that period and nothing bad would happen, that would be one thing. But now that neurological consequences are known, the suffering that you experience by these horrible human experiences could be significantly less suffering than you experience from the harm of taking these medications. That's something people at least need to be aware of when they're making the decision to start them.
The so-called mental health crisis is all about our relationship to emotional pain and to what it means to be human. Having spent the most formative years convinced that intense despair and angst and anger were symptoms to get rid of, looking back now shows how much that belief perpetuated suffering, first because of all the harms caused by these treatments, but also how much it disconnected from what it means to be alive. People often assume if you weren't ever bipolar then everything's fine now and it's just balanced and things are good and happy, but the reality is being an intense person who cries all the time, has intense anger, is very prone to anxiety and distrust, even paranoia. None of this is thought of as an illness anymore, and there's no fear of it. Sometimes pain is a signal that something different needs to be done, like getting off the computer screen and doom scrolling, and other times it's just needing to feel grief, like watching that parent whose kid is desperate for him to look at him and is just lost in his phone. That is something to cry about and we should cry. Crying all the time and loving crying and doing it in places where people are uncomfortable with it because we all need to be crying more is the stance.
On antidepressants there was a really hard time crying. The years coming off when starting to feel good, there were periods where especially writing a lot of what happened down, balling, every single time that hadn't been cried throughout the years of being medicated was stored somewhere. The emotion hadn't been processed and had to be cried so much. It was needed to process all the emotions that hadn't been processed properly on antidepressants because thinking of the memory would just bring crying and realizing it wasn't cried at the time.
On antidepressants there were definitely many stretches of time when super numb and dissociated, feeling completely disconnected from emotion. There were other times when alcohol was involved, on three, four, five psych meds and getting ridiculously intoxicated every night at the same time. Those periods had almost like synthetic emotion where it was so extreme and felt like possessed, and that would get pathologized as extra borderline or whatever. There was all kinds of numbness.
A funny story about starting medications at age 12. One of a friend's relatives came to visit at age 21, which was probably when peak sick. Eating really terribly while in university, swapped to a medication for a
Laura describes realizing that sexual numbness was not normal after a friend mentioned her vagina going numb on Lexapro. Laura had experienced this her entire life and assumed it was just how her body was. She recognizes she was one of the lucky ones because many people experience permanent numbness from SSRIs or finasteride. Upon stopping the medication, her sexual function normalized completely.
After withdrawal, Laura developed neurological sensitivities to many things but avoided permanent sexual numbness. Her emotions normalized relatively quickly. She notes increased proneness to anger when stressed and takes longer to calm down—approximately two hours—requiring her to sit alone and breathe. Her husband has become accustomed to this pattern, especially during a hyper-stressful year.
Laura and the host share similar experiences: zero sexual function while on medications starting in childhood, regaining function after stopping in their late 20s, and developing chemical sensitivities including potential mold sensitivity. Both have always had angry temperaments. Laura recounts a childhood story from age five where her grandmother found her standing in the driveway with clenched fists and face, stating she was just so angry.
Both women describe developing meta-awareness during difficult periods, recognizing when they are "possessed" by anger or dysregulation. This awareness proved critical during protracted withdrawal. Laura recalls knowing the intense anger and recirculating thoughts were not truly her, which helped her endure the experience by treating symptoms as temporary rather than identifying with them.
Laura mentions extensive notetaking during withdrawal, watching patterns and tracking symptoms. She emphasizes the value of developing distance from immediate experience so that even unbearable pain does not become one's entire reality. This capacity allowed her to recognize that thoughts and sensations were not her core self.
Laura describes realizing that thoughts are not real and do not require belief or serious engagement. This single insight has been more helpful than fourteen years of therapy, medications, hospitalizations, and programs combined. She notes that dark and twisted thoughts are normal for all humans and that treating them as mere noise rather than significant material has brought freedom and power, especially compared to the psych patient tendency to analyze and discuss every feeling and thought extensively.
Laura discovered mold sensitivity when intrusive thoughts disappeared on a carnivore diet and returned upon re-exposure to mold within a day. Violent intrusive thoughts and anger can be triggered by mold exposure or fragrances. She describes classic examples like "knife thoughts" when sensitized. Fragrances in Ubers or laundry softener can trigger intense anger or panic reactions.
Laura suggests psych symptoms from mold may stem from inflammatory responses. She references C4A cytokine levels, which can rise dramatically in sensitive individuals upon entering a moldy building. This measurable inflammatory marker may explain "mold anger" and volatility documented in the mold community. Bodies react negatively when ill, manifesting as psychiatric symptoms.
Stress can also trigger recirculating thoughts and difficulty letting go, though Laura distinguishes this from the more immediate, visceral reactions to mold or fragrances. She describes needing to apologize to hotel staff when unable to stay due to fragrance exposure, while maintaining meta-awareness that the reaction, though real and totalizing, is an overreaction she wishes she did not have.
Laura's father, previously tolerant of essential oils, recently developed complete fragrance intolerance alongside worsening akathisia. Laura notes she generally tolerates small amounts of essential oils better than synthetic fragrances like laundry softener, which trigger panic. She expresses hope that mechanisms behind these sensitivities will be understood in the future.
Laura recommends the Inner Compass Initiative at intercompass.org, which offers extensive free information including a step-by-step self-directed tapering manual available for nearly ten years. The site hosts a community for people at various stages of coming off psychiatric medications and healing from their effects. Her personal website is lauradelano.com. Her book is titled Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. She can be found on X as Laura Delano and maintains accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
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