Inner Compass Initiative

Yesterday, ICI founder @lauradelano traveled to Washington D.C. and testified before a House Oversight subcommittee 🧵

Please share your good, bad and ugly experiences with SSRIs with the Seattle Times It won’t take too long and it’s important that a wide range of experiences are reported on

Sensible stuff from the WSJ: "“But we don’t understand the long-term consequences of many psychiatric drugs, particularly on young brains. We are running a large uncontrolled experiment on the developing brains of millions of young people, and we won’t know the full results for decades.” Behind the Boom in Psychiatric Medication by Adam Omary wsj.com/opinion/behind… via @WSJopinion

Everything that leads us to diagnoses and prescriptions is real and deeply human—the despair, self-doubt, loneliness, shame, obsession, alienation, fear, angst, and grief that shape our lives in so many different ways. Questioning the medicalized response to this suffering does not deny the suffering exists, nor the short-term relief some find in psychiatric drugs. It simply refuses to let our culture transform these varied, deeply human experiences into incurable brain pathology that demands lifelong medication, especially for our young people. (Video: our founder, Laura Delano, at the MAHA Mental Health & Overmedicalization Summit, May 4, 2026)

When you're in the depths of emotional suffering, the last thing you need is false promises. Yet the mental health industry has sold millions one story: that emotional pain is a chemical imbalance to be fixed with safe, effective drugs you’ll likely need for life. Nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2023—the highest number ever—while 65 million people, including four million children, take psychiatric drugs. We saw through the pain industry’s false promises. It’s time we see through these false promises, too. (Video: our founder, Laura Delano, at the MAHA Mental Health & Overmedicalization Summit, May 4, 2026)

@angpeacock1111 Thank you for sharing your story with the world🩷🩷

#NobodyToldMe the impacts that overmedicalization of trauma that happened to me, polypharmacy, over-medication and incompetent #deprescribing would have on my life. It’s taken me nearly 10 years of recovering from the treatment that was supposed to help.

@JenniferPropson @DanielleGansky @newstart_2024 @ACE_CoalitionEd @PSSDInstitute @PSSDNetwork @FDA @HHSGov Great question and we try to do this ourselves, so here's 👇🏻a whole thread on it with link at the bottom. Note that not everybody will experience all these symptoms to this degree of severity. 💛 x.com/i/status/20448…

@DanielleGansky @newstart_2024 @ACE_CoalitionEd @PSSDInstitute @PSSDNetwork @FDA @HHSGov @_innercompass Can someone describe the symptoms of withdrawal in less vague terms? I’d really like to know when speaking to and warning folks about this.

I am still trapped on the same SSRI I was prescribed at 7 years old because every attempt to come off has resulted in severe, debilitating withdrawal.... At 23 years old, I decided I wanted to come off antidepressants. Despite having been on them virtually my entire life — throughout my childhood and brain development — my doctor tapered me off in just 6 weeks, following the same outdated and dangerous guidance many doctors still use today. What followed was a severe full-body neurological crisis: nonstop physical, cognitive and psychological suffering unlike anything I knew a human being could endure. When I went back to my doctor and told him I was in withdrawal, I was told antidepressant withdrawal “doesn’t exist,” that symptoms of “discontinuation syndrome” are “mild and only last two weeks,” and that what I was experiencing was proof I needed the drugs After months of torturous suffering and countless emergency room visits, I had no choice but to reinstate the antidepressant. But even after reinstating, the neurological damage from the rapid, doctor-directed taper did not go away. That is why the term “withdrawal” is often deeply misleading. For many people, coming off antidepressants can trigger a devastating neurological injury that persists for years. I still do not feel normal. I am intermittently bedridden, and even as I type this, my brain feels like it is on fire. I genuinely do not remember what happiness, love, or emotional connection are supposed to feel like anymore. So much of my cognition, personality, creativity, and ability to access my mind the way I once could feels altered or gone. Some days the suffering becomes so overwhelming that I genuinely do not know how much longer I can continue living in this condition. Today, at 30 years old, I am still on the same medication I was prescribed as a child. I desperately want to come off, but every attempt has caused severe, debilitating withdrawal that has made it physically impossible. #MentalHealthMonth #NobodyToldMe #medicationinjury #HHS #HealingJourney #overmedicalization #SSRI

“I took Zoloft in 2022… ” Nobody told Lauren Freidman that 4 years later, she would have permanently lost all emotional and sexual function. “The day I woke up with this injury, I quite literally felt my soul leave my body.” Stop scrolling for 5 minutes to hear her story: “Had I known that this medication had the capacity to cause permanent loss of sexual and emotional function, I would have sought alternatives.” “Had I known SSRIs were prescribed off-label to chemically castrate sex offenders, I would have never taken this medication.” “Had I known that the leading sexual medicine doctors in the world are finding SSRIs cause fibrosis of the genitals… I would have never taken this medication.” “I’m living with a condition called Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction.” “50-70% of all patients taking these will have sexual side effects.” “What patients are not warned about is that these side effects can be permanent.” “I’m 23 years old.” “I don’t think it’s sensational to say that this is a form of chemical castration.” “PSSD is not just a loss of sexual function, but a loss for some people of emotional function as well.” “I can’t feel love for my own mother.” “Which is the hardest thing on Earth.” “I can’t feel connection or love for my friends, or even pleasure in music.” “I was a songwriter since I was a child. It was my outlet.” “And it’s been completely neurologically severed from these medications.” “There’s a reason that every song on the radio, every movie on your television, every piece of art since the beginning of humanity centers on sex and love, and not just romantic love, but platonic, familial love.” “These are the most central, intoxicating, worthwhile, and fulfilling parts of the human experience.” “To remove someone’s ability to emotionally connect with another human being is a crime against humanity.” “And I say crime against humanity because there is evidence that Eli Lilly, who created the first SSRI, Prozac, knew their drugs could cause permanent sexual dysfunction and emotional numbness.” “They withheld this from the public because they knew it would be a threat to their bottom line.” “There’s nothing more criminal or dystopian to withhold from patients and parents of patients that your medication can permanently chemically castrate and emotionally numb its user.” “The FDA actually received a citizen’s petition from sufferers in 2018 begging the risk be added to the label.” “And it was completely ignored.” “If this correction was made, I would have had full informed consent.” “I could have chosen an alternative.” “I would have been spared from the most inorganic, inhumane suffering I could have ever imagined.” “But that decision was made for me because of pharmaceutical greed and regulatory failure that has kept the general public in the dark about the truth of these drugs.” “22-year-old women and men like myself have ended their lives because, I think we can agree, life is not worth living when you can’t feel it or participate in it.” “People deserve to know the truth.” “People should not pay with their lives for trusting the medical system.” Nobody told millions of others just like Lauren that her decision to take an SSRI would spiral into permanent, lifelong injuries. We want to hear your “Nobody Told Me” story. Because you are not alone. Millions of young people are suffering through the exact same things. Please share your story below, or post a video sharing your story and tag us @_innercompass. @MAHA_Institute @lololizzle

One of the most damaging aspects of the medicalized approach to mental health is the idea that your state of mind is permanent. But as so many of you will know from the waves of psychiatric drug withdrawal, that’s not true. No state of mind is fixed. Yes, the suffering that can lead to psychiatric diagnoses and drugs can be immense, but being told that suffering will continue forever through terms such as "treatment-resistant" is another kind of suffering in itself. It's time to show the world that nobody is permanently broken. (Video: our founder, Laura Delano, speaking at the MAHA Mental Health & Overmedicalization Summit, May 4, 2026)

Many thanks to the @MAHA_Institute Institute and the @_innercompass Compass Initiative for inviting me to participate in an historic mental health summit in D.C. on Monday. This summit showed its human cost of the ADHD prescribing cascade through the powerful testimony of three young adults who lived the harm. The fact that HHS leaders were present and engaged gives hope that we can reverse the ADHD epidemic.

Overmedicalization is not a partisan issue - it is a human issue. Stats from ground.news reflect the same. We owe it to the millions of Americans currently taking these drugs to advocate for true informed choice. We owe it to them to find alternative means of community-centered care.

I became a psychiatrist because I wanted to help ease suffering. That remains the moral center for me. People deserve care when they are in pain. They deserve language for what feels confusing or unbearable. They deserve access to treatments that help, including medication when needed.

Really great thread from Javeed: "If the words transparency and informed consent make you angry, it may be worth asking why."

We are especially interested in your perspectives from research, clinical experience, and policy. Link to read the @unherd article by @CarolynGorman_ and Esme Vroom👇—let us know your thoughts. 5/5 unherd.com/newsroom/are-d…

This raises a deeper question: does framing the issue as over- or under-diagnosis still assume there is a correct “amount” of medical diagnosis, when the real need may lie elsewhere? 4/

🧵 Professionals, what's your take on the concept of overdiagnosis of depression in light of this recent UnHerd article (link below), quoted here)? 1/

To join the Q&A, you can sign up for a free 2-week Exchange trial, take part in the session with Cam, then cancel anytime (or stick around and meet all sorts of people on the same journey as you). Link here to register and join 👇 7/7 exchange.theinnercompass.org/events/livestr…

It'll be hosted on our peer support platform, Inner Compass Exchange, which is exclusively for people who want to explore life beyond psychiatrization, including tapering psychiatric drugs. 6/

🧵From his recent solo travels in Scotland to his powerful initiative to “Free The Feelings,” Cameron LaBar (@coldplungecam ) is showing the world what it means to figure out your own path while tapering off psychiatric drugs.  1/