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

“An unsparing account. . . . What makes Unshrunk so valuable is not that Ms. Delano’s mental-health struggles are unusual. Just the opposite: Her experience is depressingly commonplace in 21st-century America, as are the ‘solutions’ she was offered. Yet only rarely are these struggles described with such insight and self-awareness.”—Carl Elliott, The Wall Street Journal

“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

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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

“Wrenching and insightful. . . . Anchored by her medical records, which she is careful to request from those who diagnosed her, Delano’s Unshrunk is invaluable in documenting American selfhood and adolescence on polypharmacy and off, where the differences are stark and painful, and the diagnoses guiding treatment compounded by error and missed signals.”—Psychology Today

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.

Very important book!

I have a few family members who are currently in the mental health system and I have always been trying to find a way to talk to them about their struggles. I believe I now have a way to do so without offending or imposing. I am extremely grateful to Laura for her bravery in writing and publishing this book.

An Incredible Story of a Young Woman Finding her Way Back to Life.

This was a very well presented story, narrated by the author in an exceptional fashion which became completely enthralling to someone who has not dealt with mental illness, but who has had a whole new world opened up to her thanks to this excellent telling of a remarkable woman who listened to her heart.

Any people who come across your work and as consequence are able to heal themselves the way you did, will be so grateful about you have shared your story and have been able to guide people the way you have. You are a nightstanding role model.

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.

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.

Vital Information

This autobiographical account was crafted by a brave and honest woman. Thank you so much. It should be required reading for all medical professionals, parents and students.

Excellent book

The author does a great job of narration.
Her story gave me insights to relatives who are on these drugs. Why they were put on them, how they feel and think when on them along with their fears.
Thank you for this book
Buy this book, it is worth your time and money.
I would give it 10 stars if I could

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.

Pure and authentic

Pure raw emotion of the author. This book will be an absolute lifeline for people trying to get off pharmaceutical drugs. God bless you Laura.