From psychiatric patient to HHS adviser: Curbing overprescription

A woman who spent more than a decade on psychiatric drugs is joining the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a senior policy adviser to curb the overprescription of antidepressants.

Recounting how she came to believe psychiatric medications had worsened her condition, Laura Delano criticized what she described as the medicalization of human emotion in an interview published by The Free Press Nov. 1.

“I once believed deeply that the only reason I was alive was because I was on psych meds,” Delano, who was set to begin her appointment Nov. 2, told The Free Press.

According to the outlet, her work at HHS will include reviewing antidepressant labels for clear warnings about psychological and behavioral risks and helping clinicians receive Medicare and Medicaid payments for counseling patients on safely reducing their medication. 

Doctors prescribed her 19 psychiatric medications between ages 13 and 27, including antidepressants and antipsychotics. Her history also included multiple hospitalizations and a suicide attempt in 2008, according to the outlet.

She began tapering off her medications in 2010. After what the report described as an “agonizing five-medication withdrawal process,” she came to question how her clinicians had interpreted what they cited as “diagnostic criteria.”

“Medicalizing these very deep facets of what it means to be human, to feel, to think, to believe—to reduce them to symptoms of illnesses needing treatment I do think is profoundly misguided,” she said. “As long as we are focused solely on seeing our minds and our emotions as medical problems to fix with medical solutions, we will only perpetuate suffering.”

Delano told the Free Press her approach to navigating her feelings has also evolved. 

“When I’m feeling intense emotions, I no longer view them as symptoms to treat or fix—I view them as signals,” she said.

The Free Press cited research showing a median of five years of antidepressant use in the U.S. compared with eight weeks for trials of commonly prescribed SSRIs, highlighting gaps in information that Delano told the outlet she sees as her responsibility to address.

“There have been no safe tapering guidelines, no training in medical schools, just a total void of information on safe tapering,” she said.

The Free Press noted that Delano brings experience as a patient and advocate rather than formal psychiatric credentials. In 2018, she founded the Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit that helps people safely taper off psychiatric medications and manage withdrawal symptoms and is now run by her husband.

Kennedy’s comments about “overmedicating our entire population” during his 2025 confirmation hearings resonated with Delano. She and her husband later traveled to Washington to share her memoir, Unshrunk, with his staff and others involved in the MAHA movement, according to the outlet. 

The outlet also noted criticism surrounding her appointment, reporting that critics have dismissed her as “anti-psychiatry,” a label the outlet said she rejects.

“To make sure people know about how to safely taper off psych meds is not the same as telling people to taper off psych meds,” she said.

Delano also acknowledged that joining the administration had strained relationships.

“I’ve long made peace with the fact that no matter what decision I make, someone’s going to be upset with me,” she said, adding that “a lot of former friends and colleagues think I’ve sold out.”

She said criticism of the pharmaceutical industry was associated with the left during her early advocacy years. Although people now assume she is right-wing, she maintained that her values have not changed, and she hopes to reach people across political lines.

“My hope is to really expand beyond partisan politics here and to help people of all political inclinations see that this really should not be a right-left issue,” Delano said. “Americans are suffering at historic rates, while we have historic rates of conventional mental-health treatments. Something isn’t adding up here, and we have to come together and do something about it.”

She also stressed the stakes of helping patients safely come off antidepressants.

“Forty-five million adults and 2 million kids are on an antidepressant, and inevitably some percentage of them are going to want or need to come off it,” she told The Free Press. “If they don’t know how to do it safely, we are going to lose lives.”