Last Thursday Laura Delano was one of three experts invited to participate in a U.S. House  Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services roundtable discussion about the American mental health system. Glenn Grothman, the Chairman of the Subcommittee, invited Delano, Dr. David Hyman from the Cato Institute, and Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and a lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, to participate in the discussion that he introduced by saying, “There is something in this system that is not working as intended.

     Our constituents already know something is wrong. They are living it.”

     Laura Delano is the author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance and is the founder of The Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to shift “culture, science, and policy away from medicalized responses to human suffering.” From the age of fourteen on, she spent over a decade under the “care” of the best psychiatrists in the country, but they kept her on a cocktail of psychotropic medications and gave her a litany of diagnoses until they finally declared her “treatment resistant.”

     It dawned on her that her life had been falling apart, not despite all of the psychiatric treatment, but because of it. She successfully tapered off all her medications, became a writer, speaker and consultant, and founded The Inner Compass Initiative to help others with a similar plight. She is a champion of connecting individuals and communities who can now flourish together outside the traditional American medical and psychiatric industry.

     She is also a champion with social “credentials” that few others have. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. She is a graduate of Harvard University. She is a Delano because her father is a descendent of our 32 nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In fact, in 1960 John F. Kennedy Jr. visited ex-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to secure her support for his presidential campaign. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. certainly knows who Laura Delano is.

     Her ongoing mission to expose the dangers of psychiatric medication was clearly voiced during her appearance at that subcommittee roundtable last week. Perhaps some of those in power who heard about the American public’s danger from overprescribed psychotropic medication — from one of their own — will finally begin to listen.