Unshrunk
A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
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- 1,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
One of NPR’s 2025 “Books We Love”
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mental health advocate Delano chronicles her struggles with mental illness and psychiatric drugs in this thorny and impassioned debut memoir. She describes how her unstable moods and the suffocation she felt as a teen in upper-crust Greenwich, Conn., led her to become "a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven." During those years, Delano was diagnosed with multiple conditions, including bulimia, bipolar disorder, and cutting disorder. As her list of therapies and medications grew, she continued to spiral, culminating in a nearly successful suicide attempt in her 20s. After that episode, she decided to cease treatment, believing that psychotropic drugs like Prozac, Lamictal, and Lexapro were causing her more problems than they were solving. Fourteen years later, Delano is now an advocate for patients with what she calls "chronic pharmaceutical trauma." She renders difficult episodes from her past with gravity and grace, makes a convincing case that big pharma holds disproportionate lobbying power in contemporary psychiatry, and paints a resonant portrait of a culture devoted to papering over difficult emotions. Still, some readers may balk at her hard-line stances against medication. Though not every argument lands with equal force, this is a potent reconsideration of a pressing social issue.
