At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. Her initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga and for the next thirteen years, she sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a prescription cascade of nineteen drugs. After some resistance, Laura accepted her diagnosis and embraced the pharmaceutical regimen that she’d been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But her symptoms only worsened. Eventually doctors declared her condition so severe as to be “treatment resistant.” A disturbing series of events left her demoralized, but sparked a last glimmer of possibility. . . What if her life was falling apart not in spite of her treatment, but because of it? After years of faithful psychiatric patienthood, Laura realized there was one thing she hadn’t tried—leaving behind the drugs and diagnoses. 

Now, after successfully tapering off all psychiatric medication, Laura is a writer, speaker and consultant, as well as our Founder. As a result of this work, she is a leading voice in the international movement of people who’ve left behind the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry to build something different, working every day with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support for their withdrawal journey and life post-psychiatry. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children.

You can find out more about Laura through her personal website, or her memoir, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.