Unshrunk

A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

De: Laura Delano

Narrado por: Laura Delano

“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

“A courageous, insightful, beautifully written book challenging major tenets of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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.”
—Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Delano 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. . . . A potent reconsideration of a pressing social issue.”
—Publishers Weekly