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 The
word “recovery” is heard a lot these days in the mental health system, but what
does it really mean? Is it that a person “recovers from” a condition of some
kind? Is it about finding “mental health recovery”? Or, could it perhaps be
about “recovering” something that was actually lost, or even taken? In this
talk, Laura Delano will explore what “recovery” has meant for her on her
journey through the mental health system. She will reflect on what it was like
to be diagnosed “bipolar” and seek help from the mental health system over the
fourteen years to follow, and share what would become her most important
discovery along the way: that she needed to come off medications and leave her
psychiatric diagnosis behind if she stood a chance at recovering what it was
she was really looking for: herself.
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Laura Delano is a psychiatric liberation
activist, writer, and community organizer. She entered the
"mental health"¯ system as a thirteen-year old and escaped
it fourteen years later, after accidentally stumbling upon
Robert Whitaker's book,
Anatomy of an Epidemic. Today, Laura works
with individuals looking to free themselves from psychiatric
labels and drugs, and communities seeking to build
alternatives to the “mental health” system.
She lives near Boston, Massachusetts, where she’s
founded a mutual support group for people coming off
psychiatric drugs She
serves on the boards of the
International
Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP),
the National Association for
Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), and
Mad in America, Inc.
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Sponsored by the Law Project for
Psychiatric Rights and made possible by a grant from the
Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority
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