“I once believed deeply that the only reason I was alive was because I was on psych meds,” Laura Delano told me. From age 13 until 27, doctors prescribed her a total of 19 psychiatric medications, including antidepressants and antipsychotics.
Now, she’s taking on a role in the federal government to curb the overprescription of those same drugs. Monday is Delano’s first day as a senior policy adviser in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, where she will help him set guidance for tapering off antidepressants.
Her appointment comes six months after Kennedy announced a “MAHA Action Plan” to reduce the “overuse” of antidepressants, “especially among children.” Delano was, in many ways, the obvious choice to help him. For years, she has been highlighting the risks posed by psychiatric drug dependence, before rising to national prominence in 2024 thanks to her best-selling memoir, Unshrunk. The book details her tumultuous life story, from her upbringing in a privileged Greenwich, Connecticut family (yes, that Delano), to a 2008 suicide attempt and multiple hospitalizations, to a shocking realization: Her pills were making her worse, not better.
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In 2010, Delano began to taper off her meds—going through an agonizing five-medication withdrawal process—and when she came out on the other side, she realized that the anger, frustration, and self-harm that had been cited by her clinicians as diagnostic criteria were actually something very different.
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