Leading a Movement Away from Psychiatric Medication Leading a Movement Away from Psychiatric Medication

Laura Delano walked away from the treatments that defined her teens and 20s. Now, she’s hoping to create a road map for others to follow.

On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise.

At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse?

“It still does go to the place of — what if the doctors are right?” said Daniel.

On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically.

Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been “a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.” During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time.