Unshrunk
- Author Laura Delano
- Narrator Laura Delano
- Publisher Octopus
- Publish Date 20 March 2025
- Run Time 10 hours and 54 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Autobiography: general, Autobiography: science, technology and medicine, Care of people with mental health issues, Health, illness and addiction: social aspects, Memoirs, Mental health services, Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality.
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What to expect
One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
'Girl, Interrupted for the age of the prescription pill... compelling, important, haunting.'
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A really moving and heart-rending story. Unshrunk will help and empower so many people.
JOHANN HARI, author of Stolen Focus and Lost Connections
Unshrunk is the story of a young woman who dared to be herself, and a potent reminder of why human suffering can never be reduced to a diagnostic manual. A must read for anyone probing the dark side of mental health treatment.
ANNA LEMBKE, author of Dopamine Nation
'A wonderful, incisive and deeply moving book... provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a profession in peril.'
DR JAMES DAVIES, AUTHOR OF CRACKED AND SEDATES
'Inspiring... A wake-up call about a deeply flawed system'
PROFESSOR JOANNA MONCRIEFF
In this gripping, essential memoir, Laura Delano takes readers through the labyrinth of the American mental health system, where 'the best available care' left her sicker, more desperate, and more lost than ever before. This beautiful, rageful, joyful book is a beacon for all seeking a life beyond labels, beyond medication, beyond disorder.
JESSICA NORDELL, AUTHOR OF THE END OF BIAS: A BEGINNING
***
I began to think about the forces at play, not just within me, but beyond me. What if my life hadn't fallen apart in the way that it had because of 'treatment-resistant mental illness', as I'd been led to believe, but because of the treatment itself?
At age fourteen, Laura Delano's parents took her to her first psychiatrist. At school, she was the model student, but at home Laura felt an uncontrollable rage that she unleashed on family, friends and herself. She was promptly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started on a course of mood stabilizers and antidepressants.
It was to mark the beginning of a painful and relentless journey. For the next thirteen years, Laura sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals, accumulating an ever-expanding list of diagnoses and prescriptions for nineteen different drugs. She accepted her diagnoses and embraced the pharmaceutical regime she'd been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms only got more severe and eventually she was deemed 'treatment resistant', Laura began to wonder if the drugs and diagnoses were the cure - or had they become the problem?
Weaving together Laura's medical records and doctors' notes with illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk is the powerful memoir of one woman's battle against the commercial psychiatric industry and the role it plays in shaping what it means to be human.
'Girl, Interrupted for the age of the prescription pill... compelling, important, haunting.'
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A really moving and heart-rending story. Unshrunk will help and empower so many people.
JOHANN HARI, author of Stolen Focus and Lost Connections
Unshrunk is the story of a young woman who dared to be herself, and a potent reminder of why human suffering can never be reduced to a diagnostic manual. A must read for anyone probing the dark side of mental health treatment.
ANNA LEMBKE, author of Dopamine Nation
'A wonderful, incisive and deeply moving book... provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a profession in peril.'
DR JAMES DAVIES, AUTHOR OF CRACKED AND SEDATES
'Inspiring... A wake-up call about a deeply flawed system'
PROFESSOR JOANNA MONCRIEFF
In this gripping, essential memoir, Laura Delano takes readers through the labyrinth of the American mental health system, where 'the best available care' left her sicker, more desperate, and more lost than ever before. This beautiful, rageful, joyful book is a beacon for all seeking a life beyond labels, beyond medication, beyond disorder.
JESSICA NORDELL, AUTHOR OF THE END OF BIAS: A BEGINNING
***
I began to think about the forces at play, not just within me, but beyond me. What if my life hadn't fallen apart in the way that it had because of 'treatment-resistant mental illness', as I'd been led to believe, but because of the treatment itself?
At age fourteen, Laura Delano's parents took her to her first psychiatrist. At school, she was the model student, but at home Laura felt an uncontrollable rage that she unleashed on family, friends and herself. She was promptly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started on a course of mood stabilizers and antidepressants.
It was to mark the beginning of a painful and relentless journey. For the next thirteen years, Laura sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals, accumulating an ever-expanding list of diagnoses and prescriptions for nineteen different drugs. She accepted her diagnoses and embraced the pharmaceutical regime she'd been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms only got more severe and eventually she was deemed 'treatment resistant', Laura began to wonder if the drugs and diagnoses were the cure - or had they become the problem?
Weaving together Laura's medical records and doctors' notes with illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk is the powerful memoir of one woman's battle against the commercial psychiatric industry and the role it plays in shaping what it means to be human.
Critics Review
A really moving and heart-rending story. Unshrunk will help and empower so many people.
Unshrunk is the story of a young woman who dared to be herself, and a potent reminder of why human suffering can never be reduced to a diagnostic manual. A must read for anyone probing the dark side of mental health treatment.
In this gripping, essential memoir, Laura Delano takes readers through the labyrinth of the American mental health system, where 'the best available care' left her sicker, more desperate, and more lost than ever before. As she deftly weaves the history of psychiatry with her own harrowing odyssey out of its grip, Delano's clarity and compassion are awe-inspiring. This beautiful, rageful, joyful book is a beacon for all seeking a life beyond labels, beyond medication, beyond disorder.
A powerful, inspiring, rigorously research-backed memoir about escaping the nightmarish trap of psychiatric drug treatment. As Delano writes, 'The more I suffered, the more medical treatments I was convinced I needed, but the more treatments I received, the more I suffered.' I highly recommend this brave and important book.
Laura Delano's 15-year odyssey through the most exclusive corridors of American psychiatry lays bare the self-deception and hubris of a profession which has alienated so many seeking its help. That she came out the other side and reclaimed her purpose, humanity, humor - her full self - would be impossible to believe, except that it is all here in this book, a juicy blend of biography, authoritative science, and cultural criticism. Anyone seeking help for mental despair would do well to read Unshrunk before taking the leap. This is reading-as-therapy, of the most bracing kind.
Turning children into psychiatric patients is tricky business and can have grave consequences, creating a life sentence unless the child grows into an adult with the courage to course correct. Laura Delano beautifully captures this plight in her harrowing memoir. In an age of fast drugs and cure-alls, sometimes letting things alone, be as they are is the healthiest course of all. I will not soon forget Unshrunk and the wisdom at the heart of Delano's story.
Unshrunk is a revelation-haunting, but ultimately hopeful. For many, there is a way out from behind the veil of mental illness. Delano has gifts for both intense personal story and deep analysis.
Delano takes us by the hand and leads us into the depths of mental illness, the ways that modern psychiatric treatment can go awry and, most importantly, she illuminates a path back to mental health and hope for the future.
An intimate and riveting memoir of a spiral into despair, Laura Delano's Unshrunk is required reading for any of us who have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Harrowing reading, superb detective work, frank and unflinching, this book leaves its mark-and raises as many questions as it answers. Delano should be applauded for her keen intelligence and bravery. It takes guts to take on a system-and a diagnosis. Bravo.
Laura Delano's book is as gripping as it is important. This is a thought-provoking story of warning-and triumph.
Laura Delano's Unshrunk bravely describes her harrowing journey through the American mental health system. It is both a memoir and a detective story. She trains the most powerful lens on herself, unsparing in the details, yet without a trace of self-pity. Her analysis of the science behind psychotropic drugs is rigorous and eye-opening.
Inspiring...A wake-up call about a deeply flawed system. The book is more than a personal story, delving into the history and science of psychiatry to show how it is the premises of the system that are at fault.. that the things that finally helped Laura were not medication or therapy [and instead] celebrating the power of ordinary life to help with healing. Ultimately it testifies to the importance of the critical but never simple task of finding purpose or meaning in life.
This is a wonderful, incisive and deeply moving book. Delano's harrowing journey into and through the world of psychiatry, exposes how the psychiatric profession can both trap and harm individuals, while also offering a deeply human example of how to survive its most destructive aspects. This tale of hope and courage provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a profession in peril, one's woman's struggle to overcome it, and what may be required to bring about meaningful change.
'A radical look at the mental health industry and its overwillingness to pathologize and medicate: Unshrunk promises candor and rage in lieu of therapy-speak, questioning the ease with which diagnoses and their life-altering paths are handed out to clients seeking psychological help. Laura Delano delivers a heart-rending and deeply inquisitive memoir about her psychiatric journey: the times spent in treatment centers, the vast array of pills she's been on, the slew of diagnoses she's been handed, and the crushing realization that she became worse off from these interventions than she'd been at the outset. What ensued was the complete disavowal of medication and psychiatry; Delano bravely reports from the other side of her decision, from an earned, embodied perspective. Delano has chosen the raw, often painful, always worth it experience of being human, and offers experience and research to readers who are curious to do the same.'
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.
'A courageous, insightful, beautifully written book challenging major tenets of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry.'
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