Diagnosed as a Bipolar Teenager: A Patient’s Story and Redemption - Latest What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast
Laura Delano was diagnosed as bipolar at just 14, but after a decade and half on psychiatric drugs, she began to wonder, could the medical care she was receiving be the problem rather than the cure?
The latest episode of the What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You Podcast - Diagnosed as a Bipolar Teenager: A Patient’s Story and Redemption is now available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod. The next episode will be released on 22 July 2025.
In this week’s episode, I am talking to Laura Delano who - as she explains in this clip - was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was just a teenager.
Over the next 13 years, Laura would be diagnosed with more and mental health conditions and in total would take a cocktail of around 20 different psychiatric drugs. But as she explains in her new book Unshrunk – How the mental health industry took over my life and my fight to get it back, there was a problem - Laura was not getting better.
One of the issues that emerged early on was how the different medications she was taking were negatively interacting with each other.
During our conversation, I asked Laura if she was aware of any effect that the drugs were having on her body and her mind.
Then one day Laura’s life changed for ever when she walked into a bookshop, nothing would ever be the same again. She bought a book written by the award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Controversially, this asked could it be that the pills rather than being the answer, might actually be causing or exacerbating many mental health conditions?
And so began a slow and painful process as Laura attempted to gradually come off all the medications she had been taking for years, against the advice of many of her doctors. A lot of psychiatric drugs can cause significant withdrawal effects, therefore, this was neither quick nor easy, so I asked Laura how long it was before she felt fully functional again.
You can hear the full conversation with Laura Delano on the podcast.
Today, Laura is the founder of the Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organisation that, she says, helps people make more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs and drug withdrawal.
“Unshrunk” – How the mental health industry took over my life and my fight to get it back by Laura Delano, is published by Monoray
You can find out more about the podcast at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You and follow me on Twitter @lizctucker.
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