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Title details for Unshrunk by Laura Delano - Wait list

Unshrunk

A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

by Laura Delano
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“Delano’s story is compelling, important and even haunting. . . . Her memoir evokes Girl, Interrupted for the age of the prescription pill. . . . In Unshrunk, she tells her own story, and she tells it powerfully.” —Casey Schwartz, The New York Times Book Review
“A must read for anyone probing the dark side of mental health treatment.” —Anna Lembke, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Dopamine Nation
“A really moving and heart-rending story. Unshrunk will help and empower so many people.” —Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus
The powerful memoir of one woman’s experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medications, and her journey to discover herself outside the mental health industry
At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death.
Delano’s initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga. For the next thirteen years, she sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a prescription cascade of nineteen drugs. After some resistance, Delano accepted her diagnosis and embraced the pharmaceutical regimen that she’d been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But her symptoms only worsened. Eventually doctors declared her condition so severe as to be “treatment resistant.” A disturbing series of events left her demoralized, but sparked a last glimmer of possibility. . . . What if her life was falling apart not in spite of her treatment, but because of it? After years of faithful psychiatric patienthood, Delano realized there was one thing she hadn’t tried—leaving behind the drugs and diagnoses. This decision would mean unlearning everything the experts had told her about herself and forging into the terrifying unknown of an unmedicated life.
Weaving Delano’s medical records and doctors’ notes with an investigation of modern psychiatry and illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk questions the dominant, rarely critiqued role that the American mental health industry, and the pharmaceutical industry in particular, plays in shaping what it means to be human.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 18, 2025

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781984880499

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781984880499
      • File size: 1666 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from February 1, 2025
      Finding herself--off of meds. At 13, Delano was put on her first too-potent psychiatric drug because she was experiencing what was (to her, in hindsight) mere teen angst. What followed were decades of psychiatric drugs that were given to counteract effects of other drugs, which were given to counteract effects of still other drugs: the classic "cascade of prescriptions." She quickly became one of the 80% of 59 million Americans on psychiatric meds long-term. Only after years of brain-fogging drugs-upon-drugs, punctuated by years of hospitalizations, did she stumble into an Alcoholics Anonymous group, which focused on taking responsibility for one's own life. That simple notion, along with the common fellowship of people helping each other without professionals--and without pharmaceuticals--led her to wonder if her worsening mental health was due not to her lack of response to drugs, but to the drugsthemselves. Against advice, she began tapering off all of them. As she did, she researched. She read Robert Whitaker'sAnatomy of an Epidemic, Viktor Frankl'sMan's Search for Meaning, John L. McKnight'sThe Careless Society, and Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. "The words of these men ignited a fire in me to feel, to just sit and feel, for how beautifully they articulated the art of leaning into the darkness of being alive." She also began mentoring others. Off all drugs, she had a "holy shit" realization: Her problem really was "the meds" all along. She founded a nonprofit organization and now runs a psychiatric drug withdrawal consultancy. She concludes: "I don't need to 'figure myself out, ' to force a change in my day-to-day reality. I trust fully in my own process--in this intelligence within me, within each and every one of us...that sits deeper than thought, that knows where to take us each from here....We're built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We're meant to feel it all, and bear it all, together." A courageous, insightful, beautifully written book challenging major tenets of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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