Unshrunk

A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

De: Laura Delano

Narrado por: Laura Delano

“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.

©2025 Laura Delano (P)2025 Penguin Audio

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Praise for Unshrunk

“Delano has considerable skill as a memoirist. Her early chapters describing the alienation of a smart, sensitive, hyperaware teenager in an emotionally inhospitable universe cover Holden Caulfield territory in a new and highly engaging way. Her fruitless years of polypharmacy combined with intensive therapy will be depressingly familiar to many families who go into debt paying for what they’ve been told is the best treatment money can buy, only to find it isn’t worth much.”
—Judith Warner, The Washington Post

“Bracing and heroic. . . . Delano writes with the hard-won authority of the longtime patient. She provides a searing narrative of her descent into the hell of pharmacological imprisonment, and then her climb out of it to freedom. . . . She writes insightfully, at times lyrically, about not just her own psychological condition but also our culture’s. . . . This is a valuable and important book.”
—Scott Stossel, The American Scholar

Redeeming finale!

Such bravery and what a timing for this book to come out in 2025! At a time when so many are questioning conventional medicine, and are so distrusting of the medical fiel entirely.

A Rite of Passage For the Rest of Us

A real account of one person's journey through and out of what doesn't work for them despite being told by experts there is only one way.
Every so often, she backs up what she says with info from studies. The US is behind in being accountable for harms caused by psychiatric drugs.

This book questions standard psychiatric treatment as it exists today, but leaves you the freedom to make your own choices.

As a person who has been on medications to treat OCD and depression for 35 years, it was good for me to take a look at the life of someone who decided to get off of these types of medications and who has had successful results. But at the same time she fully admits that life is hard and that she still struggles with her mental health challenges, but chooses to deal with them by using her own wisdom which she has developed through many years of trial and error, and doing intensive research on her own. She has fully accepted that she is simply human and has strengths and weaknesses… As we all do. She has found her own way of navigating life, during both good times and bad… That works for her, and does not require the assistance of medications. She is very clear that what works for her may not work for you and me.

This book is true

I found mad in America because I googled “abilify is the worst drug” and found that website and some related articles. It saved my life. Everything Laura says is true.

Moving, Powerful, and Important Work

Laura Delano is obviously an extraordinary human. Few could travel beyond the event horizon of intense psychiatric therapy and return with such emotional and intellectual clarity. Warning: I am an ED physician and a bit of a hard ass, and I was pretty emotionally affected by this work. Laura writes beautifully and is telling a very important story. Make no mistake about it, this is a much-needed wakeup call for modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology. I read a lot of books. This is the best one in the last year.