“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.
Praise for Unshrunk
“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
“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
“I just devoured this book. . . . Unshrunk is a must-read.”
—Michael Smerconish
“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
“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, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Dopamine Nation
“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.”
—Tao Lin, author of Leave Society
“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
“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.”
—Heather Heying, author of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century
“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.”
—Jessica Nordell, author of The End of Bias: A Beginning
“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.”
—Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn
“Laura Delano’s Unshrunk is a revelation. 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. This book is essential reading for patients, their families, and their health care providers.”
—Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar
“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.”
—Ann Dowsett Johnston, author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol
“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.”
—Martha McPhee, author of Omega Farm
“Laura Delano’s book is as gripping as it is important. Despite a loving family and elite psychiatric care, she sinks deeper and deeper into a life dominated by murky diagnosis, a life swallowed by no less than twenty powerful psychiatric medications, drugs that often have damaging effects on mind and body. This is a thought-provoking story of warning—and triumph.”
—Daniel Bergner, author of The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches
“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. She offers practical guidance as well as hope for those who feel hopeless and despairing. Unshrunk is equally inspirational and riveting.”
—Sally Bedell Smith, New York Times bestselling author
Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps people make more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. She is a leading voice in the international movement of people who’ve left behind the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry to build something different. Laura works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support for the withdrawal journey and life post-psychiatry. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children.
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