SPEAKER DETAILS
LAURA DELANO
Laura Delano is an author, speaker and consultant. She is also the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps people make informed choices about taking and safely tapering off psychiatric drugs while working to shift culture, science and policy away from medicalized responses to human suffering. Laura has worked as an advocate within and beyond the mental health system and has spent the past fifteen years working with individuals and families around the world seeking guidance and support for psychiatric drug withdrawal. She is regularly turned to by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals wishing to learn about safer medication tapering protocols. Her book, "Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance", was published in March 2025.
PRESENTATION
BEYOND PSYCHIATRIZATION: BUILDING A LIFE AFTER MEDICATIONS AND DIAGNOSES
FRI., OCT. 16 AT 11:00 AM
For fourteen years, Laura Delano was a professional psychiatric patient. She accumulated a long list of diagnoses, took a regimen of meds, was in years of therapy and cycled in and out of hospitals and programs. Laura believed deeply that she had a chronic mental illness which she would have to manage with psychiatric treatment for the rest of her life—until, at the age of twenty-seven, she decided to walk away from all of it.
In this talk, Laura will position her own story within the broader story of the modern mental health industry: what we know—and don’t know—about the safety and effectiveness of psychiatric medications, why it can be so hard to come off these meds and how to do so as safely as possible, how to support someone looking to build a life after medications and diagnoses, and what truly informed choice should look like for all of us.