As part of the Mental Health and Public Child Welfare Lecture series, Laura Delano, founder and executive director of Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), visited UCLA Luskin on Nov. 16 to discuss her efforts to reclaim care from the “psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex.” Through the ICI, Delano has worked to provide information and resources to facilitate more informed choices regarding all things mental health. Speaking to her experiences as an ex-psychiatric patient, Delano said, “I fully embraced the mental health system and my diagnosis when I was so hopeless for a solution to the pain. I thought maybe if I embrace this diagnosis and do everything the doctor says, I will be able to survive.” Delano suggested that the system must change the way it portrays mental illness as being in opposition to “normalcy” in order to put an end to patients feeling ostracized because of their medical diagnoses. Click below to view a Flickr album of photos from the lecture by Bryce Carrington.