At the tender age of 13 Laura Delano had her first mental emotional crisis and entered into the “mental health” system. Then, one day while in a bookstore Laura happened to notice the cover of a book with the image of a brain divided in sections and labeled with the names of many of the drugs she had been taking. It was Robert Whitakers’s Anatomy of an Epidemic. The book began Laura’s recovery.
In spite of struggling emotionally, being told her brain was broken and being placed on heavy medication Laura managed to graduate from high school and get into Harvard. Today, Laura works with individuals looking to free themselves from the psychiatric labels and drugs, and communities seeking to build alternatives to current mainstream treatment approaches.
Laura talks about being told she had a disease by her doctors and how she stopped trusting herself. She states, “ There is no greater betrayal than to be stripped of your right to believe in yourself and to trust your intuition”. She goes on to say that she finally realized that she had to stop running away from her suffering and listen to what meaning it had for her.
We have heard this from many ‘people with lived experience’ before. The mental emotional suffering is bearable if one can find meaning in it and believe they are going through a difficult but temporary process of growth.
Learn more about Laura on her website: Recovering from Psychiatry
