Laura Delano: The Dark Truth About Antidepressants, SSRIs, and the Psychiatrists Lying for Profit

Summary

Summary of "The Tucker Carlson Show" Episode Featuring Laura Delano: "The Dark Truth About Antidepressants, SSRIs, and the Psychiatrists Lying for Profit"

Release Date: June 6, 2025

In this compelling episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson engages in a profound and revealing conversation with Laura Delano, who shares her harrowing journey through the psychiatric system and offers a critical examination of antidepressants, SSRIs, and the mental health industry's underlying motives.

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1. Laura Delano's Personal Journey

Laura Delano begins by recounting her early life in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was perceived as a model student and athlete. However, at the age of 13, Laura experienced a profound psychological crisis that led to violent behavior and self-harm. Her parents, seeking professional help, enrolled her in therapy, which eventually escalated to psychiatric treatment.

• Quote:
  "I was just sharing my story. I'm not telling anyone what to do."
  — Laura Delano [00:30]

2. Questioning the Chemical Imbalance Theory

Delano challenges the widely accepted chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, asserting that it lacks scientific validity. She highlights that no measurable biological markers definitively prove the existence of such imbalances.

• Quote:
  "If something's an imbalance, what's balance? Is there any science behind that at all?"
  — Laura Delano [00:37]

3. The Escalation of Psychiatric Medications

As Laura's condition worsened, her treatment shifted from therapy to psychiatric medications. She details the progression from antidepressants and mood stabilizers to antipsychotics and benzodiazepines, emphasizing the lack of understanding regarding their long-term effects and mechanisms.

• Quote:
  "Anytime you're given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, you know, the baseline operating assumption is that this thing we call mental illness is an incurable condition that you treat and you manage."
  — Laura Delano [11:48]

4. Adverse Effects and Dependency on Psychiatric Drugs

Delano discusses the myriad side effects of psychiatric medications, including digestive issues, weight gain, cognitive impairments, and emotional numbing. She introduces the concept of "medication spellbinding," where drugs diminish an individual's capacity for critical thought and self-awareness.

• Quote:
  "The more meds I was, the more cared for I felt, and it felt like the more serious my doctor was taking me, the more my life fell apart."
  — Laura Delano [27:39]

5. Ineffectiveness of Psychiatric Treatments

Despite being on multiple medications and undergoing extensive therapy, Laura's mental health deteriorated. She questions the efficacy of psychiatric treatments, pointing out that increasing medication does not correlate with improved mental well-being, as evidenced by rising suicide rates.

• Quote:
  "One person killed himself every 11 minutes. I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves."
  — Laura Delano [33:18]

6. The Pharmaceutical Industry's Role

Delano critiques the pharmaceutical industry's influence on mental health practices, highlighting the lack of accountability and the continuation of harmful treatments despite evidence of their adverse effects. She underscores the industry's pursuit of profit over patient well-being.

• Quote:
  "These huge numbers of people who, who are in so much pain. A huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more, more suffering."
  — Laura Delano [54:10]

7. Alternative Approaches and Mutual Aid

Transitioning from her personal story, Laura advocates for community-based support systems and mutual aid as viable alternatives to traditional psychiatric care. She emphasizes the importance of human connection, empathy, and non-medical interventions in fostering mental health.

• Quote:
  "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."
  — Laura Delano [136:22]

8. Establishing Inner Compass Initiative

Laura introduces her nonprofit organization, Inner Compass Initiative, which aims to empower individuals by providing free resources on understanding psychiatric medications, recognizing their adverse effects, and fostering mutual support networks.

• Quote:
  "Our mission is to help people make more informed choices about all of this stuff... We help people help each other."
  — Laura Delano [105:58]

9. Confronting the Status Quo

Throughout the conversation, both Tucker and Laura express frustration with the existing mental health paradigm, advocating for systemic change that prioritizes informed consent, transparency, and community-based support over pharmaceutical interventions.

• Quote:
  "These were all anecdotes with no accountability."
  — Tucker Carlson [Various timestamps]

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Conclusion and Final Insights

The episode culminates with a poignant reflection on the necessity of redefining mental health care. Laura Delano's narrative serves as a powerful testament to the potential pitfalls of relying solely on medication and professional interventions. Instead, she champions a return to humanistic approaches grounded in empathy, mutual aid, and personal accountability.

• Final Quote:
  "This is my purpose... Helping people who in their heart feel that this isn't right for them."
  — Laura Delano [Various timestamps]

Laura's story challenges listeners to critically evaluate the efficacy and ethics of the current mental health system, urging a collective move towards more compassionate and informed methods of support.

Transcript

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Laura Delano]

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[Tucker Carlson]

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[Laura Delano]

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[Laura Delano]

If you're being told you know you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, here's some Prozac. It's going to help adjust the chemicals. That's a lie.

[Tucker Carlson]

If something's an imbalance, what's balance? Is there any science behind that at all?

[Laura Delano]

No, it has never been proven. Most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances.

[Tucker Carlson]

66 million Americans total on these, according.

[Laura Delano]

To the CDC, in 2022. So those numbers could well be higher.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's crazy craziness.

[Laura Delano]

There's this condition 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?

[Tucker Carlson]

What?

[Laura Delano]

Some people haven't regained it for years, and.

[Tucker Carlson]

And so they're just dead?

[Laura Delano]

Yep.

[Tucker Carlson]

Okay. Really? And no one's going to jail for. So I read this piece in the New York Times about you that's like, actually kind of hostile. And the story seems to be that you were on psych meds for a lot of your young life and then you got off them. And that's bad. That's bad. You might lead people to do the same. You might lead them astray, off psychiatric medication, out of therapy, and into, like, independent, happy life. Why would anyone be mad at you for getting off psych drugs?

[Laura Delano]

It's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I think really there's just so much fear and greed and disconnection from emotional pain that people hear a story of someone who's decided to let go of dependence on professionals and pills and institutions, and they just can't fathom trying it for themselves because they've built their whole lives around this idea of being sick and needing treatment and needing medical expertise and institutional authorities to guide them. So to hear a story of someone who said, I'm not going to do that anymore is to basically call into question their entire existence, their entire identity, their entire sense of self and purpose in the world. And it makes me feel sad. I feel sad about it because I'm just sharing my story. I'm not telling anyone what to do. I'm just talking about what I did. And yet somehow a lot of people out there think I'm insulting them or attacking them. It baffles. It baffles me.

[Tucker Carlson]

It's just, it's in. And I understand everything that you have that you've said. I mean, the. And I think you've got a lot of detail on this. But the country's pretty much addicted to these drugs. Like, a huge percentage of the population takes them, can't get off them, unclear if they're benefiting from them. So I understand that you're. You're poking at something that people rarely mention in public and that goes deep. On the other hand, I thought the goal was health and independence and joy and connection between people and productivity and creativity and. And it doesn't even seem like that those are considered virtuous goals by the New York Times, which does kind of give me the creeps a little bit.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. It's fascinating.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's what it is. It's dark.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And I don't know if you looked at the comments on that New York Times article or if you heard about the kerfuffle that article caused the readership of the New York Times, but they had to shut the comments down after 1300 just poured right in within a day of the article being out, because people were just so outraged at how basically what a fascist I am for entertaining the idea that you can take your body and your wellbeing and your identity back from a very powerful industry that profits off of us being afraid of our suffering. And I'm literally a fascist now. I've been called because you live quietly.

[Tucker Carlson]

With your family in New England, not wanting to bother anybody or tell anyone what to do. But you're for nature and peace and independence, and that makes you a fascist, basically. So amazing. Okay. I just wanted to. Just wanted to set the stage for your story. So you're from Connecticut. You come from an attack family. We had dinner last night. I heard all of this. It's an amazing story. But you wound up on psychiatric medications and it began this whole odyssey. Can you just tell us what happened to you?

[Laura Delano]

Sure. So I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is, you know, you picture the most stereotypical kind of upper middle class, affluent New England town. And it's, it's Greenwich. And I was the kind of kid who was good at school, so I happened to know how to get A's on tests and memorize and regurgitate information well and kind of follow. Follow the instructions of adult authority figures. So I was good at school. I was a good athlete on paper. I had it all together, you could say. But When I was 13, I ended up having this profound experience one night in front of the bathroom mirror as I was brushing my teeth. And I had been elected president of the middle school at my all girls private school. And the next day I was going to lead assembly with the headmistress and I started looking deeper and deeper into my eyes as I was thinking about out all that I had on my plate. And I ended up having this profound out of body experience where I lost touch with, with space and time and everything went black around me. And I was just staring at this girl in the mirror until suddenly a stranger was looking back at me and I was like, who is she? Who is she? What is this girl doing looking at me? I just was totally out of reality. And when I came to the only conclusion I could draw, you know, about what this meant was that I didn't have a real self. I was just this programmed robot who'd been raised to perform well and have it all together. But who was I really? What did I really care about? What did I want to do with my life? I didn't know the answer to that and that terrified me. And so I ended up trying to repress what had happened and pretend it hadn't happened. I didn't tell anyone about this out of body experience I'd had. And I just continued on performing well, but at home eventually I began to just. I couldn't hold it all in anymore. So I began to act out and scream and curse and I started to get physical and I push my mother, I'd terrify my sisters. 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, you know, what had happened to their eldest daughter. Seemingly overnight. She was this, you know, 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. They didn't have what they needed to, to help me. They needed to pay some, 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, is that?

[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.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah, they. They were. They were. 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. They. There weren't any visible, you know, support groups for parents of struggling teens. No one was talking about, my gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too? No, there was. No one talked about this then. And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health professional. And so, and this woman was. This 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

And.

[Laura Delano]

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

[Laura Delano]

Life, for life, for life. That's how it always is. Anytime you're given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, you know, the, 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, that defiance that I felt, you know, I, 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.

[Laura Delano]

Well, it totally is. Well, 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 is used literally to reinforce just how sick you are. You lack insight, quote unquote into your condition.

[Tucker Carlson]

This is 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 of me having wisdom, of me have, you know, they, they lacked a respect for my own ability to, to kind of define for myself what my reality meant.

[Tucker Carlson]

So it sounds like they went into the, in to the sessions knowing what you were sick with and everything that you said was confirmation.

[Laura Delano]

Exactly.

[Tucker Carlson]

They already knew.

[Laura Delano]

Exactly, exactly. It's all filtered through this clinical lens of translating your, your, you know, deep human experiences into this clinicalized language of symptom, illness, disease. And so they're just, they're trained to, 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. 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, their patients. There are no objective biological tests. There are no, there are no brain scans, lab tests that you can do to say, oh, this is proof that you have this, you know, chemical imbalance in your brain or this, you know, faulty biomarker. There's no, 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]

But is there any explanation for. So if so, they're telling you they're looking forward in to the next 70 years of your life and saying this is 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? But honestly, Tucker, 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, like.

[Laura Delano]

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, you know, personal orientation. It's, 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 most, maybe I shouldn't, I shouldn't presume most, but many people don't either, because the, the, you know, when I ended up eventually buying into all of this, a few years after that first psychiatrist as an 18 year old, you know, and I'd. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Yep. Yeah, I was playing on the squash team. I had, on paper, I'd made it. I'd arrived, you know, the, the, 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 with each, you know, through the fall, week after week after week, and I really lost, lost my any footing I might have had. I just. I just lost it all. And I was. I was just a mess and getting myself into all kinds of dangerous, impulsive, you know, 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 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 Law. Oh, yeah, 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 you mean, but like. And a lot of people say that, you know, from what I recall, and someone should, you know, 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. And that desperation drives you to just accept whatever promises is offered to you because you just. 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. 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 give. Can you tell a little bit more, you know, 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]

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[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, you know, upper echelons of performance that I'd. 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?

[Laura Delano]

Right, right in that first appointment with my new doctor. And I was put. Well, I. 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 on 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, coked out of my mind, completely trashed because I had to be to survive doing such a job.

[Tucker Carlson]

Everybody is at those things, basically. 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. On Christmas vacation, where I just was like, I either need to kill myself right now or get help. And so. So that that was. I went to my parents, I said, please help me. I hadn't asked for it, 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. 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 I, I was, 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. 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, you know, it was. It almost felt like the. I had this impression that, 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. I, I. The more meds I was, 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. 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]

During the. So you said you got meds in your fir. 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?

[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. So you're told you have a mental illness quote, unquote, and that it's in your brain that, that there's some kind of. Usually you're. It's the chemical imbalance story, which, by the.

[Tucker Carlson]

I just want to ask you to stop chemical imbalance. So this is a phrase that I first heard maybe 30 years ago when I, 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 quote, 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 is? I mean, I don't under. Like, is there any science behind that at all?

[Laura Delano]

No.

[Tucker Carlson]

I mean, 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 gotta pour another cord in. Is there anything like that with psychiatric assessment? No. Okay.

[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. The final nail in the coffin on. Has been. It has never been proven, and that's been known all along. And yet if you survey American and surveys that have been done of Americans, most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances to this day. So. So.

[Tucker Carlson]

But that's like. 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]

Correct. Exactly. And. And even if, you know this, the. This is this medicalized framework that we use to think about ourselves, you know, which has such a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human now. I mean, suffering, anxiety, madness of all kinds. I mean, most people view that as illness, quote, unquote. Like, that medical framework is so ubiquitous and what it, what it does. To return to your question about, like, did anyone ever ask me about the circumstances of my life? Like, you, You. You can't. Because. Because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry and you're just, oh, it's too bad. You had the bad, you know, genetic card and you have 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 like it's one or the other. And so the, the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient and I think 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 6 million 66 million Americans total on.

[Laura Delano]

These drugs, according to the CDC, in 2022. So those numbers could well be higher by now.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's crazy craziness.

[Laura Delano]

Y. And we are told that. That we're. We're. We're having a mental health crisis because so many rates of suicide are through the roof. Anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling. We're told, you know, 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, you're like, basically everyone is almost, you know, 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, is the mental health treatment.

[Tucker Carlson]

So I'm just. I can't. I'm 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, like, 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]

I mean, in therapy, I would, of course, talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but it was all. 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, you know, 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 know, you're having. 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 was working through those would be what helped me resolve my. My challenges. It was the meds that were going to do that. That was, you know, what I was, what I learned to believe. And I think that's the insidious. That's the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm, is that 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, like, what's the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life? Because I'm still going to have this brain disease. So, like, why does it really matter a disease?

[Tucker Carlson]

They can't define whose origin. They don't even ask about a brain disease. That's like in no scientific sense of disease, literally, is it contagious? Wow, that's. Wow, that's even crazier than I. Speaking of crazy, that's even crazier than I realized. Yeah, so. Okay, so can we just go, if you don't mind, please?

[Laura Delano]

Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

Since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs, can you just go through and 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 the, you know, Prozac, Effexor, Cymbalta, Celexa, Lexapro, the mood stabilizers, which many, many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy. But they've over, you know, over the decades when, when they were studying them, they noticed that the, you know, the animals became kind of apathetic when they were testing them for these other conditions. They're like, oh, maybe we can use this on, on psychiatric patients. So, so most mood stabilizers are actually anticonvulsants. So those would be, you know, lamictal depakote. Lithium is classed as a mood stabilizer. It's literally a neurotoxin that, you know, it was banned in, in the United States and until the late, the early 70s. It didn't get approved until the early 70s for psychiatric uses and had been banned prior. So that's the other, you know, that's considered the so called gold standard mood stabilizer. And I could talk a lot about lithium. I have a whole chapter on it in my book because of all the.

[Tucker Carlson]

Drugs that I. Lithium salts, it used to be called, I think.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah, I think 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. It started to be used for psychiatric purposes first in Australia and I can't. In the first half of the 20th century.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's what I mean. Yeah, it's been on a long time.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And if you actually, I go, I do a deep dive in, 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, you know, it's been around the longest. It has this really reliable evidence base because of how long, how long it's been in use for. It's the gold standard. If, if you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, I mean, they are the most shoddy, unscientific, completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine. You're just shocked when you. 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. So 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 this, 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, six to eight weeks. Wow.

[Laura Delano]

Some of them last a week, some of them last a day, 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 from for years.

[Tucker Carlson]

Nor is the mechanism of their effectiveness understood. Right, so you said, for example, mood stabilizers were used on animals in anti, you know, 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, like the mechanism of action is not yet understood or something. And it's, it's, it's, I mean, it is such a, so reckless. It, it's, we are all guinea pigs in a massive experiment here. And this unfortunately is the case outside of the psychiatric drug. And, and you know, when you think about the hubris and the, you know, we know so little about the human brain already as it is. It's, it's so mysterious to us how, how it works. And to think that, you know, we're just, we're going to put in this psychoactive, this synthetic, psychoactive chemical, we're going to put it into your body, it's going to course through your blood, through your bloodstream, potentially for the rest of your life to, 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, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's one of the most horrible crises of our time. I think it's it because to return to your question, you know that besides the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers, they're the antipsychotics, you know, Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon. There are of course the antianxiety 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 those are the, all the, that's the family, the psychiatric drug family.

[Tucker Carlson]

Can we go? Okay, so can we start at the beginning, if you don't mind. So the antidepressants, so 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 tricky, 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, it was in some cases gradual. So when I look back now at how my life, the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down, I can see that they, they, you know, they altered my, my body physically. So, and not just antidepressants. I mean, I couldn't answer what antidepressants specifically did. So for me, what the drugs did generally, whichever ones did what, I couldn't say. But they interfered with my basic bodily functions. So I pretty quickly began to have digestive issues. You know, you don't get told that it's like 90 to 95% of your serotonin receptors are in your gut.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Tucker Carlson]

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[Laura Delano]

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[Tucker Carlson]

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 are, that we understand them so far. So they obviously act. So an ssri selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So it's named as a serotonergic drug. So that it, you know, 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, you know, largely responsible for your how your gut functions, it also, you know, muscle function. I mean they're like basic primal. If I'm remembering correctly. I think it's the serotonin system that regulates like temp, temperature, vomiting, reflex. Like it's really primal. This is not just about happy chemicals, right? And so when you're taking an SSRI or an S N, R I, 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 you know, they'll have other kinds of digestive issues while they're on these drugs. You know, sometimes it starts quickly, sometimes it takes a while, but it doesn't occur to you because we're not, we're not wired, we're not, 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, I'm. Because I'm so mentally ill, I'm not taking good care of myself, I'm eating shitty food, you know, I, it's your fault. Exactly, exactly. And it, besides digestive issues, the, you know, the anti psychotics and mood stabilizers cause serious weight gain. My weight fluctuated 70 pounds during my, my mental patient career. I, I can, I mean, it's just, I literally looked like a different person. I, 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, you know, I had chronic aches and pains and my, my, you know, I, I had skin issues and my nails would flake off, my hair would fall out. All those, all these subtle changes that happen that just grew over time. I never linked it to the, to the drugs. And then, and then in terms of their effects on me, you know, emotionally and mentally. A lot of people talk about antidepressants, especially as having a numbing effect and 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.

[Laura Delano]

You know, who am I to tell someone, you know, you're, you shouldn't take a psych drug. For me, it's about the stories that were 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 are, you have been coerced into taking this drug through basically propaganda. But if you're told, you know, Tucker, we really don't know that much about what these drugs do. They're approved on the basis of very short term trials. Um, long term outcomes are quite poor if you actually look at the data that does exist. Your serotonin system, you know, 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. Like, I can't. I don't have support system. I'm too stressed. I have too much on my plate. Like, 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, 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. Like you take a Xanax, oh, that's going to help you a lot or might help you a lot. And so when used in, in acute situations or for a short term, a short period of time, I do think they can feel really helpful to many people. The I, I think a lot of this is, is, 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, 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. So it 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, but I guess my question is like, 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?

[Laura Delano]

I totally did, but I attributed it to how sick I was. Oh, I felt dead. I felt disconnected. I felt, I felt, I felt like I was trapped in this kind of sludgy morass of, of that was separating me from. From the world around me. I, I just. And I, I really, truly believed that that was me and my own faulty biology. And so it's so insidious. Like you. I think it's. It's A psychiatrist named Peter Bragan calls it medication spellbinding, which I think is a really compelling phrase because the, 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, yeah, for me, like, decade and a half, almost like intoxication state.

[Tucker Carlson]

Right.

[Laura Delano]

And. 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. Like, 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 step back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is, 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, you know, memory pro. Oh, my gosh. When you were. I mean, 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, I just dissipated over the years and. 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, you know, just totally incapacitated mind that couldn't engage with the world anymore and let alone, like, feel creative and curious. And I was just. I was just like a zombie, basically.

[Tucker Carlson]

Killing your life force.

[Laura Delano]

It sounds like it totally was. And that idea of a life force, like, 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 this huge, These huge numbers of people who, who are in so much pain. A huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more. More suffering. And it does.

[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, with your human spirit, with, you know, your, Your sense of aliveness in the world, your ability to feel connected to, to the sunlight on your cheek, to the, you know, the sweet child on the sidewalk, to, To God, to, To serenity. You. 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, 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 it'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. How are your 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. I did have. I had boyfriends, I had, you know, people I would socialize with. But it was all by the time I, 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 at all. But by the time I left, I had no friends. I. I had a tendency to be in. I was a serial monogamist. You could say just relationship with a guy, and then we'd break up, and then I'd get right into another relationship with the guy. And it was just. I dated guys who were as lost as I was, so suffice to say, didn't look pretty. That was my. When, when I would sometimes, you know, muster the energy to go out and socialize like I'd had to. 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, so. And my family, you know, they were, My family hung in there with me through the whole, the whole, that whole thing. That whole thing. But of course, they didn't have access to the real me. And 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, and they would take care of me and provide for me as I, you know, bumbled along through my 20s like a total mess, like, I could barely hold.

[Tucker Carlson]

They sound like really kind people.

[Laura Delano]

They. The patience and the persistence that they all had, you know, my, my younger sisters and my parents, you know, it was not easy for them and it was not always pretty in our family system, you know, we, our whole family evolved around me as the designated problem. You know, me as a designated patient. So, so understandably, that created, yeah, all kinds of challenges, but they never gave up on me. And I would just, I'd come home whenever I couldn't function anymore and, But I didn't feel, I didn't feel connected to them, to myself, to anything. And again, I believed it was me.

[Tucker Carlson]

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, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that in a sweeping generalization.

[Tucker Carlson]

But it wasn't for you.

[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 psychiatrists as kids, is that I had no, I had no sexuality. I had no kind of like erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer, as a friend, as a 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 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 of. It's called the. There's this condition 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, and.

[Tucker Carlson]

And so they're just dead.

[Laura Delano]

Yep.

[Tucker Carlson]

Okay. Really? And no one's going to jail for this?

[Laura Delano]

No, because this is the. 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 activities.

[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. As of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes. I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves.

[Tucker Carlson]

So, like, that's kind of the bottom line. I don't. 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, rises, you know, we can argue about cause and effect, but they're not working. I mean, can't. 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. 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 increase suicidal and homicidal ideation, even in some of. 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.

[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.

[Tucker Carlson]

What is that?

[Laura Delano]

It's, it's, it's. You would think that people would of course want to have that question asked and answered and if they had, 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, 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, cause violence. But of course, it's the opposite. There's, it's, you know, and I, I know, I know a friend of mine who's, who's a professor at one point tried to FOIA the medical records of various mass shooters and, and couldn't get access.

[Tucker Carlson]

I mean, I don't, you're not allowed to know.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And, and you know, it's, I don't, I can't remember when Columbine. Was it like 98 or it was 97, I think. 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 US government. And, and the 90s began the, basically the, the ubiquitization of, of psychiatric drugs, the normalization of them, the, the kind of infusion of them into every facet of our lives. And, and this of course was fueled by industry funding. So all the kind of anti stigma mental health awareness campaigns that you now, you know. 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 just righteous message that you should never feel alone with your suffering. You should feel like you can talk about your troubles. That. That is a really important message.

[Tucker Carlson]

Amen.

[Laura Delano]

That. 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. The story of how I eventually left this all behind. People hear that as me denying the reality of suffering. I mean, you're, you're, you know, 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, I think there's, I am, first of all, I struggle a lot in my life. You know, I, 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? Like, it's, 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. People.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Laura Delano]

I mean, I'm sure it's, you know, it's, it's.

[Tucker Carlson]

People stayed sober. I, 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, I think you. 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, et cetera, et cetera, and when I came off the drugs and when I also then began to educate myself about like, the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize the body and 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. I, to your point, I definitely have found my way to an equal, a kind of equilibrium that, that equips me to face life's challenges, which are inevitable. I mean, it's, 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 that would, you know, something hard happened in your life or even something not visible, but you just are in a Tough chapter. You. You kind of just 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, if you. If you orient yourself to them in that way and actually. 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

They do that with alcohol, too. I could just. I can 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 a fair look. I'm not judging anybody. I. 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 like 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. 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 do. I am connected to. To this kind of, like, 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, 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, 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. To me, 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, you're sitting through therapy a lot. How often?

[Laura Delano]

Twice a week, usually.

[Tucker Carlson]

For how long?

[Laura Delano]

An hour each time? No, but for over how many years? The whole, I mean, the whole time. I was from 18 to 27 consistently in therapy. Sometimes I would enroll in, you know, programs too, if I was. So I was, I was, I ended up hospitalizing, going to the hospital four times during those years. And then afterwards, you know, you, when you're discharged from a psych ward, you're enrolled in some kind of like step down program, you know, an intensive outpatient program for, you know, where every day from nine to five for like a few weeks you go to the psych hospital and then you go home and then you downgrade to, you know, a lesser intensive program or you go to a few groups a week. So in my 20s, I was, I was always in individual therapy and then very often in group 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. But what? That's nine years of therapy, you know, consistently full time. Almost like, what was that like? What do you talk about?

[Laura Delano]

Well, that's, that's the. I, I won't speak for all therapists or the therapy industry as a whole. You know, some of my good friends are therapists and they, they work with people in very different ways than how I was in therapy. So, but in my experience, and I do think in the experience of a lot of people because, because our society has lost so many, because you, there's so few 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. And so what happened to, for me is that because I had no other place to where I felt like I could be open, I. I kind of, I developed this like, dependence, you could say, on my weekly therapy sessions. And, and this, you know, I just, I kind of came to see my therapist as really like my substitute friends, sometimes my substitute mother, you know, they. 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 to go 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 like, just a friendship. Like, they don't understand mental illness. Like, I need doctors. You know, how could a friend help me? Like, I have a brain disease, you know, it, it.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's so dark.

[Laura Delano]

Like, really, I don't know if that happened. I don't know what percentage of psych patients that happens to, but it happened to me. And I saw it in, you know, the culture of the psych ward, the culture of these, all these programs that I was in. We were the only people, we hung out with, fellow patients. Like, we had a whole, you know, you go to lunch together in the hospital cafeteria and like, 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, and you're kind of over in the corner like, we're the crazy, like, fucked up patients over here. Like, we're not like them. I mean, there's this whole twisted, almost like romanticized culture of psych patienthood where.

[Tucker Carlson]

Heroin addicts are like this too.

[Laura Delano]

It's. It's so. Gosh, it. I feel grief about it because we truly were like the real world out there. They wouldn't get us. Like, we're so messed up. Like, we could never, like, we don't belong there. Like, we belong here on the. On the hospital grounds. It's like I. I used to feel really proud of, like, how crazy I was.

[Tucker Carlson]

I believe that.

[Laura Delano]

It's so. I mean, I chuckle about it now, but I, you know, it's. Of course I grieve too, that that was my pride. My source of pride was 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. There's a tribe. We support each other. We're, you know, we're sharing our misery, but there's a kind of feeling like we're in the elite. You know, we're junkies. And it's the same. It's the same kind of death worship.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And like, we. It. It. That word tribal, I mean, it. Because it exploits this, like, deep primal instinct that we have as tribal beings. It exploits that. Whereas, you know, 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. So, you know, grandparents had important roles helping grandchildren. And the home. The home was a place where the man and the woman had a kind of symbiosis and. And mutual interdependence. And. And I'm not trying to romanticize.

[Tucker Carlson]

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

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And. And I think our. Our modern world does make it really hard. I think, you know, this isn't for me about individuals or in you know, particular families being, you know, weak or lazy or bad. I think just we're in this toxic stew of. Of a culture in which we're, you know, the. From the food we're 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 just buffeting us all day. It makes it really hard to stay in touch with yourself enough to actually have the capacity to grow, you know, develop your own tribe, whether it's your family or your neighborhood. Like, I think it's really important to say, like, this is not about individuals, like, up. This is about our social order having evolved in such a way that it makes it feel like, impossible to have the family that you have to. For so many people.

[Tucker Carlson]

And economics play a role, too, I think.

[Laura Delano]

For sure. For sure.

[Tucker Carlson]

So a big role. So. No, I couldn't agree with you more. So I keep stepping on your story. Sorry.

[Laura Delano]

No, not at all.

[Tucker Carlson]

So you're. 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, you know, how I. Whatever job I was trying to hold down, which I never could, you know, that. How hard it was. And I talked about how suicidal I was. I was just. Suicide was like a constant companion of mine through my twenties until I did eventually. Actually, it's an important part of my story to. To bring up, like, the therapy, the meds, you know, by the time I was 25, all I had was my relationship to my. 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. And I. 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. I was told, like, the message that I received was, you know, unfortunately, your bipolar disorder has progressed to such a degree that you're now treatment resistant. Come on.

[Tucker Carlson]

Come on.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. Yep.

[Tucker Carlson]

So you 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.

[Laura Delano]

Literally. Literally. And, and so, you know this, this, this phrase, treatment resistance, like, the craziest story. So crazy. But it's a brilliant. It's a brilliant business model because, of course, you know, if you feel. If you feel better after starting a psych drug, the credit goes to the drug. Of course. See, it's helped you if you don't feel better or if you feel worse. Yes. It's never the drug. It's you and just how extra defective you are and what has now happened. And. Tucker, you're not going to believe this. It's like I'm starting to laugh.

[Tucker Carlson]

This is just so bonkers.

[Laura Delano]

No, it's. It's totally bonkers. And what I. What I would predict, and because I'm seeing from my book, I did a lot of. I wove in a lot of research into my book, and I. Way more than I originally intended. And my Editor kept wanting more, which is great. And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at the current landscape of psychiatry and like, where is it heading? Because obviously these, this drug based paradigm is failing. So like, what's next for them? Because you know, the drug companies are not making, are not focusing relatively much at all on psych drugs anymore. They've kind of moved on. They've recognized this isn't where the big bucks are. And so I was just curious. I was like, so where is it heading? And what this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this treatment resistance concept. It's building a new, a new chapter of medical devices. Literally inserting electrodes into the brain that are wired to. It's called deep brain stimulation. Where you, you, if you have treatment resistant depression because your meds haven't helped you, don't worry, Tucker. Now you just go in for a simple procedure. We're just going to open up your chest cavity, insert a heart, 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, 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 widespread.

[Tucker Carlson]

It's by remote control. So you're giving somebody else the power to control your. Physically control your brain.

[Laura Delano]

Yep, with electricity.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Laura Delano]

And there was. I have read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who've had these, these procedures and then afterwards like the battery dies and then. And you can't get the device, the device out because it's like too complicated to remove it. So there's just like a dead, you know, matchbox size thing that's like protruding from your chest under your skin. It's DBS is the, probably the least common one right now. The, the big push right now is for what's called tms, Transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is also for treatment resistant depression. So, you know, there's a wide array of options for people. Don't despair. And you basically sit under this device that shoots like very powerful magnetic, you know, currents, whatever you call energy through your skull. And it's being marketed as a non drug, you know, 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.

[Laura Delano]

Yep.

[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, they will accept any treatment. Treatment because they're panicked and they're dying. So I get it.

[Laura Delano]

And they see no other options.

[Tucker Carlson]

100. 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 anyone? Because that would be my program. Just saying. And I, I think that works. Did anybody ever say that to you?

[Laura Delano]

No. And if, 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 invalidate. It feels invalid.

[Tucker Carlson]

They're gonna really go after you. I just had this insight because 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. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. Did you. There was a Washington Post book review of my book that was wild. I mean, I, she was so. I feel for her. I, I feel for all the people who are just outraged by my story because I, I know that at, 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, she was just. I can't remember the exact phrases, but just wild how vitriolic it was. 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, that these large corporate media outlets are really pissed that you got better.

[Tucker Carlson]

Better. They hate that.

[Laura Delano]

And to be clear. And I, because people, when I, I do feel better, but by better I don't mean I'm like happy and, and put together. Like, people often assume that I'm so called mentally healthy now. Like, I, 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. Like I.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yelling children in the background.

[Laura Delano]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I, 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 that 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 bit. 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 you. If I sat down right now in front of a psychiatrist, they'd be like, oh, gosh, Laura, you're a little emotionally la pile. Maybe, you know, we might want to consider some, you know, cymbalta or whatever. Like, they, 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'm. I often find myself in this interesting position where I'm like, defending how crazy I still am a lot of the time. Because people are like, you're so happy now. And everything's. 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. 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.

[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 in his eyes and washes it off in a pool. And he's. 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? Wow. 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. Wow. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Know what I mean?

[Tucker Carlson]

But they're like mad about it. I don't know.

[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, you 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 many, some so much of consumerism more broadly. If, you know, once you realize a, the answers and you know, expertise that I'm seeking, don't lie out there in all these so called experts or products or pills or services. 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, you know, reaching back out to someone who's called me. And in, in a struggle, in, you know, 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, pay all these professionals to like listen to me ramble on about myself every week for.

[Tucker Carlson]

So 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 stuff. And so we talked about your life, but 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 there are some modalities.

[Tucker Carlson]

I'm sure there are really great kinds of therapy, but the traditional, like, let's talk about your 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, what do you get? You get the social order that we have right now where everyone is driven. Not I'm being a little sensational here, but where so many people are driven by their outrage, driven by their fear. And I. 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 decide what should happen next based on that. I am outraged. You hurt my feelings. Now let's cancel you. You know, I think the therapeutic element here is potentially a significant.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, 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. It. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. Yeah. And it's. So when you. To me, the. One of the great tragedies of this is that when you, you know, the. 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. They 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. That people don't even realize the power and capacity they have to. To be with someone in great distress. Like, you know, because of the work that I do and the work that my husband does. Like, we're. 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 yellow. 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. 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.

[Laura Delano]

I couldn't do it.

[Tucker Carlson]

Plural, pronoun for one.

[Laura Delano]

For a second, 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.

[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.

[Tucker Carlson]

My neighborhood, 51% of the population.

[Laura Delano]

And she was like, I'm on my way to the hospital. I think I'm gonna 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, I was like, so what. 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 gonna happen. They're just gonna admit me. And I was like, and then. Yeah, and then you'll be inpatient. 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. So I was like, why didn'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 her house, and the first thing she says, like, do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself? I'm like, girl, like, I'm like, me. Of course we have. Of course. I. 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 head lice. 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. And instantly, she. 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. 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 be, 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, I recognize this might sound a bit romantic, you know, just. And how, and how unfeasible this kind of thing is for so many people. What?

[Tucker Carlson]

Human connection, Love. Yeah, I know it's very possible.

[Laura Delano]

I mean, I'm with you. It's possible, but. 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, nonjudgmentally. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Yeah. And it costs no money.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yep.

[Laura Delano]

It, it pays the college, the college tuition of no children. It's like just built on empathy. It's, 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, 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, the 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. So 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, and, 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, you know, in my neighborhood, of course many people don't even know their neighbors. And that's a problem when you, when you band together and you realize, like, we can help each other through dark nights of the soul. Like, think about how much, how, 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 were like, you should be sued, you're practicing medical advice. I'm like, how is 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, that convince us we don't have the power to be with our pain, to be with each other in pain.

[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, I can't believe that. It's like, no, that's the way it is. What we should be shocked by is. Are 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 the. 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. So. 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.

[Laura Delano]

Too Mean, 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. 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? That's not a bad reason.

[Laura Delano]

And it's not. It's not a just 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. And openness and desire to help. Exactly. Exactly.

[Tucker Carlson]

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.

[Laura Delano]

Person, psychiatrist, but she is right there on the COVID Oh, really? They're 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.

[Laura Delano]

And my. What I think is part of 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, 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's. 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 of. 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 we're destroying people and we're continuing to do it. So like, what does that tell you?

[Laura Delano]

They don't love those people you're raising. I mean, this is the fundamental, like kind of philosophical, spiritual dilemma of the modern mental health industry. Is that when, yeah, when you commodify care and you turn it into a service you can't love because.

[Tucker Carlson]

Right.

[Laura Delano]

You can't, they're incongruous with each other. And so if what you're saying is true, which, which I believe, you know, what does that mean for the legitimacy of the kind of foundations of this massive like mega billion dollar industry that, you know, because it's so many, it's obviously drug companies, hospital industry, managed care, it's psychiatry, psychology, social work, it's medical device companies, it's, you know, just all the industries that supply hospitals with food. And I mean, when you think about how much money is made off of commodifying the care of suffering people and medicalizing that suffering, you know, it's, we're in quite a dilemma here. And this isn't me saying like blow up the mental health industry. Like it's obviously it exists, it's not going away tomorrow. But I do think, my view is 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 like, is this my answer? Is this really helping me? Is there something different, something more? Like if something in you is calling you to that question, like those are the people who, who I want to, who I want to reach, who I want to connect with. And I think slowly over time, the more of us, the more of us asking these questions and forging different paths, like slowly over time the demand for this industry will lessen. And I mean 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, like go literally knock on the doors of their neighbors with a pot of soup saying like, hi, we've lived next to each other for five years, like I'm just, let's just finally meet each other. You know, like when enough people do that and then band together for potluck dinners, for crisis networks, like imagine One of my fantasies is that the three streets, so we live on a grid and the street next to us on either side. Like, you know, 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, you know, if your kid is in a crisis and you need a break, come on over here. You know, to really get that grassroots about it, like, this might sound crazy to you, but I'm like, imagine if every town in every city across the country, like, enough people realize how much.

[Tucker Carlson]

Power they have, lived normal lives. Like people have always lived how we used to pre.

[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, oh, it's been. Modernity has been such a huge win. Antibiotics. I'm not against antibiotics. I'm against, you know, I'm for long life expectancy. But, like, you also have to acknowledge what was lost.

[Laura Delano]

Well, 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. How did that happen? Like, what was the moment where you set upon the path of liberation?

[Laura Delano]

Well, I think so. My, my turning point when I realized, like, this, this industry doesn't have my answers, happened when I was 27. It was 2010. I was, I, you know, just months of just unfolding dysfunction and craziness and. 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. And if I.

[Tucker Carlson]

Wait, so the booze is getting in the way of the pills?

[Laura Delano]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were making rather than. I mean, 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 So I had been very resistant to quitting drinking for that reason. And then, you know, on my. What ended up being my second to last hospitalization, just for whatever reason, I heard, I heard this message from a mental health worker about maybe try not drinking. And, and I think because I was still holding on to hope that maybe the meds would one day help me, I was like, okay, okay, because maybe he's right. If I stop drinking my super treatment resistant bipolar disorder, like, 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 like, you know, five person treatment team kind of caught wind that I was like having a hard time and maybe becoming suicidal, which, which I was. And he, he was like, you know what, Laura, why don't you get a. Take a break? Like, why don't you go over to the short term unit and just, you know, so you can feel safe. And I was like, you're right. I wanted to go. I loved, I was so afraid of myself that I loved going onto psych wards because it was the only place where I felt safe for myself. So I was like into it. I loved it. So I was a great idea. I just want to go home first. Let me get my belongings. This is not fun, going onto a locked ward without anything like 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. Like I'm coming back. I really mean it. And I meant that I was. He's like, I'm sorry. And I. Something in me, it kind of like really outraged ignited in me and I was like, this isn't fair, like, 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 on by 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, you know, 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. It's like so diligent and good at what I was doing as a patient. And now here I was, non compliant and, 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 like deep, deep faith that I had always had. Not all, I mean, not at the very beginning, but from age 18 on that I had had in this system. And I had two more experiences like that where I was, you know, 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, the, the, basically the, 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 that, and the fact that I had quit drinking, I hadn't yet found aa, so I was like really fucking miserable because I just like just stopped. I removed the one thing that I had for relief without doing any work on myself. So I was really, really miserable. 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. Like I've never known myself as an adult off meds. Like, 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? Like I just suddenly started wondering these things. And because I was questioning the power, the psychiatric power, basically I just like, I just opened up to the, 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. And in a nutshell, he was curious about the fact that outcome, long term outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much better in the, you know, so called third world in countries where we don't have, where they don't have these sophisticated medicines. And he was like intrigued by that. Like, 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. And so he did this deep Dive investigation and basically posits this very compelling, makes this very compelling case that if you look at long term data on psych drugs, on the whole, they're 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, like progressively falling apart every month, month after month after month. I was physically sick, all these chronic health issues, no friends, couldn't work, suicidal all the time, totally financially dependent on my family, like a fucking mess. And in that beautiful, terrifying moment of like starting this book, I realized like, 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 like, really wow.

[Laura Delano]

And that was like the beginning of 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. Like, I had to find out. And in the beginning when I was still like, I, you know, I still believed I had bipolar disorder. I still believed in the chemical imbalance theory. Like, 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, you know, without meds or, you know, so I started there. But I quickly began to educate myself about the dsm. You know, this, this textbook that the entire psychiatric enterprise is built around. You know, oh, you have four out of seven of these symptoms, it means you have this. So 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. Like, it. This textbook that I had just assumed for all these years was this like rigorously researched, like scientific text I quickly realized is like completely subjective, completely unscientific. And even the NIMH itself and like all of these kind of 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 basically just kept going deeper into. And I realized every single fucking 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. And it was terrifying to face this. Like my whole world fell apart. I had no idea who, who I was because all that I had been for so long was so called mentally ill. And so. But I just was so determined to, like, figure it out. And thank God I had been born into a family who could provide for me and like, literally put a roof over my head while I did, because I. When I then came off of these drugs, I. Way too fast. And I want to make sure we, like, talk about this because 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, 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 never to be arrested.

[Tucker Carlson]

That's what I think.

[Laura Delano]

Well, what's wild, Tucker, is that it is not even, you know, in 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 like, all of the psych drugs. Benzos, maybe they do. But antidepressants, mood stabilizers, you know, obviously the sleep, sleep aids, which are very similar chemically to benzos, stimulants, all of them are psychoactive chemicals that, you know, when you take them regularly for years, like, are you are going to become dependent on them? And so, 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. Like, 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, if they try going faster and the in. 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, you know, paranoia, whatever ends up happening, they're told, oh, you're having a relapse of your illness. Like, 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. I mean.

[Laura Delano]

Exactly.

[Tucker Carlson]

He's off his meds.

[Laura Delano]

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

[Tucker Carlson]

Can'T if I'm complained about being on.

[Laura Delano]

Segments 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 mean, I'm just speculating, I'm just, 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. And 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, you know, I think more and more people of, you know, 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, 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 like 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'd like move in with her parents. That's just one of like hundreds of thousands maybe that's like 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 and 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, like, 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, again, who could provide for me, like, I made it through, but I often think about how many people don't have the resources that I had access to. And, like, 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. Like, it. This is a real crisis. That's. This is the real crisis here that we need to be talking about.

[Tucker Carlson]

Oh, 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 was living with my. 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, like, that whole thing, like, she could die. Like, you know, but my God bless my aunt and uncle, they just let me be a mess.

[Tucker Carlson]

You have a very nice family. Just. They sound like nice people.

[Laura Delano]

I'm. I'm really, really lucky. I mean, so many people who want. Who would want the same things that I wanted, you know, with. With getting off these drugs, like, do not have anything, like, a supportive family. I'm so lucky. I would. I really would not be here. I would literally. I would literally be dead. And so I lived with them for basically a year. And I was super active in. 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, like, 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. Like, I had. No, I thought that was, I had. 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 because I was like, so messed up. I was so paranoid and insecure and like, I couldn't talk. I felt like I couldn't articulate myself. And I just had. I was such a mess. But I had a meeting every morning and every night and like, 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. Like, what a gift. Thank. I'm so grateful for AA At a. I would say around a year off, I started to feel less shitty. Like, I kind of like between years one and three, I, I like progressively felt better, you know, physically, especially cognitively, emotionally. And by year three, I was, I, I, When I look back, I'm like, that was the year when I kind of like came alive again. And I would actually have these, like, these are my fingers. I'm real. Like, I'm here. Oh my God, that's the sun. The sun. It feels warm on my sheet. Like, literally that, that level of like, I exist. Like, it was like, so profound. And I, and I hadn't realized that I hadn't been exit. Like, I didn't know what I had been missing. You know what I mean? It's like, 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, like, even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal, I started blogging about my experiences basically right after I. Right at the end of finishing coming off the drugs because I had reached out that author, that journalist who wrote that, 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, you know, I, 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, like, all over the world. This was 2010, so this was like not a commonly talked about thing online. Like most people then were like, I love my meds I've embraced my diagnoses. And like, here I was being like, I'm an ex mental patient. Like, 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. And, and if I take. It's not. It wasn't wasted time, wasn't fruitless suffering, meaningless suffering, like, this meant something. This means something. And if I, if I put myself out there in the world and the more open I am about it, like, the, the more, the more of a chance I'll have it. Like actually helping others. And so I, Even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal for a while, like, I, I was a lot. I was living, I was, I was like 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 like I've met them at conferences or, you know, to me that if, you know, like the one takeaway from my book, from my story that I want like every struggling person to leave with, if I could leave them with, one thing is like, your suffering means something. Like, it is so much more than just faulty brain pathology, which is bullshit, first of all, like, not even true. But it's not wasted time. All is not lost. Like, what you've been through might actually be the medicine that another person needs. And like, I just, I'm so grateful for all of it. I wouldn't change a minute of any of it because I'm just. This is my purpose. Like, this is what I'm makes me cry. Like, this is what I'm here to do is just, literally just talk about how hard it is to be alive and, and, and, and just, you know, the power of store. The stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be human. Because, like, 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, and I'm like. And kind of. I've found my way to an actually, like, 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, you know, once was. Lost now and 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. And any. 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. Thank you so much for doing this.

[Laura Delano]

Thanks for having me, Tucker.

[Tucker Carlson]

Oh, my gosh, the best. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it. Good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news things that actually matter. Telling the truth, always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.