Unshrunk

A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

By: Laura Delano

Narrated by: Laura Delano

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.

A Must-Listen

This is the most important memoir of the century so far regarding psychiatry. The book is so compelling and entertaining as a memoir but her thesis of the harm of the psychiatric industry is well-fleshed-out and even more compelling. I have had a similar experience with treatment resistance, and her story is so so accurate and a much needed voice in the world of brainwashed big-pharma control.

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.

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.

Interesting story

I appreciate author’s story and the fact that she shored up technical & medical terms with simple explanations. I especially found the info regarding psychiatric drug withdrawal helpful. Narrator has a nice voice, calming.

Powerfully moving

I absolutely love this book. It’s one of a kind, honest, compelling, and full of heart. The author’s words moved me deeply and stayed with me chapter after chapter.