Founder @_innercompass. Author of Unshrunk. Working to build safe off-ramps from the psych med highway.
United States
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- Followers 11,865
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For decades, those of us speaking about the harms caused by taking and coming off psychiatric drugs have been ignored, denied or dismissed.
I’ve been labeled everything from “antipsychiatry,” “anti-science,” and “Scientologist,” to “right-wing fascist” and “anti-vax,” to simply “too mentally ill” to understand what was happening to me.
Now the APA’s own annual meeting is full of panels on deprescribing, overmedication, withdrawal, and psychiatrists openly admitting they regret not helping patients come off these drugs sooner.
The hundreds of thousands of personal stories of psychiatric iatrogenesis have become impossible to keep waving away as meaningless anecdotes.
I have deep compassion for how hard it must be to face the possibility that you’ve been inadvertently causing harm to patients you’ve been trying to help.
But fear is the master distorter of truth, and the only way out is through.
We are eager to build a big-tent coalition to begin work on these changes we all know are necessary. I hope you’ll join us.
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Laura Delano retweeted
In an analysis of drug withdrawal to the FDA adverse effects database here were the signals for the 20 drugs with strongest risk of withdrawal. Paroxetine, duloxetine and venlafaxine where in the top 20. Paroxetine was no. 4, above several opioids.
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Laura Delano retweeted
New prospective cohort study published by my group with @markhoro We show that rapidly increasing depressive and anxiety symptoms during antidepressant tapering likely reflect withdrawal reactions - and not relapsing mental disorders.
Open access: karger.com/pps/article/doi/1…
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“That’s what we’re learning now: the rate at which you stop the medication can really make a difference as to whether you can do it successfully.”
The psychiatric establishment is finally starting to understand what current and former patients have been educating the public about for decades.
And @HHSGov under @SecKennedy’s leadership is working hard to address it.
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Sexuality is not just about sex. Sexuality is our gateway into pleasure and beauty and desire and romance and intimacy and vulnerability. When psychiatric drugs take that from you, they are robbing you of a core aspect of what it means to be human.
I was put on psych drugs before I could even explore those fundamental facets of myself, and it wasn't until my late twenties, off the meds, that I discovered for the first time what they felt like.
I’d been told for years that my inability to feel desire or closeness was a “symptom” of my so-called “mental illness.”
I had no idea what I was missing.
I was lucky, though. I was able to reclaim my capacity to feel pleasure after getting off psych meds. Many people I've heard from over the years have not yet been so lucky. @PSSDNetwork @PSSDInstitute
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We’ve taken experiences that are part of being human and turned them into symptoms to treat. It’s a cultural shift @HHSGov and @RobertKennedyJr are now speaking to directly: have we begun medicalizing problems that were never medical to begin with?
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Laura Delano retweeted
What an amazing episode and a must-see for everyone in the system or with a loved one in the system…so, everyone.
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Laura Delano retweeted
Go to theinnercompass.org and look for our free companion guide before paying anyone
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For most of my twenties I wanted to die.
I felt sure death was the only solution to the life the American mental health industry taught me I was sentenced to: one of so-called “treatment-resistant mental illness,” with its psych wards, lifelong pills, and hopeless despair.
It took me a long time to understand that my urge to die was not about dying, but about ending that psychiatrized life.
I just couldn’t then see what that unknown future might look like.
All these years later, I’m so glad I took that leap of faith.
@TheoVon @ThisPastWeeknd
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I was two years off psych meds, sitting on my couch, so agitated I wanted to rip my skin off.
I realized at that moment that the freedom I’d been yearning for in the wake of my psychiatrization wasn’t about withdrawing from the prescriptions, themselves, but from the belief that pain is a problem with a quick fix.
@TheoVon @ThisPastWeeknd
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Laura Delano retweeted
A lot of older physicians reaching out to me in a kind way. They are apologetic for the ways of the past. See how they have contributed to overprescribing. They are glad that @_innercompass is supporting project like this that wouldn't get attention.
"We don’t even list those risks! Even if we list them, it does not mean we actually said them, let alone emphasized them."
"I agree with the conclusion of the study and I must admit that I am one of those guilty of not having fully informed patients about the possible side effects of SSRIs."
We should use this report to think about what informed consent of SSRIs could mean.
Antidepressants have been in the spotlight. Are we prescribing them too much? Do they have more side effects than we initially thought? Should the message be “safe and effective” or something more restrained?
ICI helped me and a few colleagues put together a survey of 1,260 U.S. adults previously prescribed SSRIs, asking what they remembered being told about side effects. The goal is to find potential opportunities for improvement, and better understand the current state of what patients recall being told.
This was not a survey of disgruntled people looking to bash SSRIs. It was run by an independent organization seeking a broad sample of U.S. adults with prior SSRI use.
Key findings:
• For none of the 11 side effects did a majority of patients recall being informed
• For each of the 11, a majority said they would have preferred to be informed
• 44% said they would have been less likely to take the medication if they had been fully informed
• The largest gaps between “I was told” and “wanted to know” were for bleeding risk and sodium imbalance. Among the common effects, withdrawal and sexual dysfunction showed the biggest gap.
Link below
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A beautiful, moving story of finding light through the darkness by @DrAnnieHickox.
As she puts it so well in the end, "[E]very part of our lives carries meaning and helps shape who we become."
Grateful for her voice in @_innercompass's newsletter. We are all in this together ❤️🩹
It is an honour to have my personal story of growing up with mental illness in my family published by @_innercompass.
I hope that many people who read it will come away with a sense of shared experience, regardless of how different our paths may have been.
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In 16 years of doing this work, I have never told anyone to stop taking their psychiatric medication.
I do not know what is right for another person, and I have never claimed to.
I share my story, basic facts about the mental health industry, and why informed choice matters.
Here’s the problem: Most people never get to make a true choice regarding psychiatric diagnoses or treatments. They aren’t told about the unscientific underpinnings of the DSM, the comprehensive list of risks that come with taking psychiatric drugs, how absent their long-term safety and efficacy data is, or how hard it can be to get off them. Without that as a starting point, informed choice is impossible.
@DrJosefWD
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Laura Delano retweeted
I’ve seen so many psychiatrists claim that patients are never told that mental health conditions are ‘just like diabetes’, or ‘just like a heart condition’. Supposedly the chemical imbalance myth is dead. But I had ‘bipolar’ for 20 years and I was told over and over that I needed to take my pills because they were the same as insulin. I’d love to see how many other former psych patients (cc @LauraDelano) were told something similar. Drop a comment below if this applies to you too 👇
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I grew up trusting medical authority without questioning it.
For years, I believed doctors understood my mind, my body, and my struggles better than I understood them myself.
That belief kept me in the psychiatric system for nearly 15 years.
We live in a culture that places medical authority on a pedestal while teaching people to interpret more and more of life through a medicalized lens.
Doctors may bring years of training and good intentions to their work, but the expertise born of a clinical degree is one kind of many, and isn’t by default the source of all our answers.
@DrJosefWD
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I am not “against” psychiatric drugs, nor am I “anti-psychiatry.”
My view is that we’ve allowed the modern mental health industry to lay monolithic claim to the territory of human suffering – what it means, how to define it, and how to address it – and that this has actually worsened our personal and collective problems.
My book, Unshrunk, goes into all of this and more:
unshrunkthebook.com/order/
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In the 90s and early 2000s, people talked far less about their so-called “mental health.”
We were told the problem was “stigma” and that we should focus on increasing “mental health awareness” to fight it– which would, in turn, lessen rates of suffering.
Today,” conversations about “mental health” are everywhere and access to treatment has never been higher.
Yet more people are anxious, depressed, and unhappy than ever before.
That should make us rethink the direction we have taken.
@Doctortro @BrianLenzkes
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After I left the mental health industry, I stayed trapped by it in a different way.
I let anger, grief, and resentment define my reality.
I stopped identifying as a patient and started identifying as a victim.
This mindset allowed the mental health industry to keep shaping who I was, long after I’d walked away from it.
I took my power back when I stopped centering my life around what “The System” had “done to me.”
The anger was still there, but I began using it to build something rather than letting it consume me.
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