Laura Delano

Laura Delano is an American writer and consultant who is the founder of the Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps patients understand their psychiatric diagnoses and drugs and to build community outside of the mental health system.

Early life Delano is descended from United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt through her father. She was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, the eldest of three sisters. Delano is a graduate of Harvard University.

Works In March 2025, Delano published the memoir Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. The book details her struggle with mental healthcare, beginning when she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at the age of 13. Following that diagnosis, she spent decades struggling with psychiatric diagnoses, a "cascade" of differing medications, and mental health institutions. After coming across a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, she found the group's focus on responsibility for one's own self refreshing, starting a path of personal understanding that her struggles with mental health were rooted in the very psychiatric medications she had been prescribed.