Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

＂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.

Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and the Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative, a charitable organization that she founded to help people make more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses and drugs. She is a leading voice in the international movement of people who’ve left behind the medicalized, professionalized offerings of the mental health system to build something different. Laura works with individuals and families around the world seeking guidance and support for the withdrawal journey and life post-psychiatry. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children.