“This system I had been turning to for help through all of these years, through the most formative years of life, that I had been assuming existed to take care of me ... was actually a system of control. And I just hadn’t seen it for what it was, because I had never said no to it before,” says Laura Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.”

For 14 years, Delano was a “professional mental patient,” as she puts it, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was a teenager.

Now she wonders whether the dominant, medicalized approach to mental illness is actually making us as a society sicker.

“Sixty-five million American adults and 6 million American children are currently on psychiatric drugs, and there are zero off ramps for getting them off these drugs safely within the mental health industry. Zero,” she says. “This is not about being ‘pro’ or ‘anti.’ This is about using straightforward, honest language to talk about what these drugs are, to talk about our limits of knowledge around what these drugs are and how they actually affect us, and then to let people make their own decisions from there based on their own life circumstances.”

In this episode, we dive into Delano’s story and discuss the dangers of relying solely on medical treatments to treat mental health issues and of rapidly withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.