Laura Delano had everything going for her.
Born into an upper-class Connecticut family, her childhood was an enviable montage of sports camps, country clubs, and squash tournaments. Oil paintings of beach scenes alongside a portrait of her relative, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hung on the walls. By middle school, she was already a rising star, poised to serve as class president.
But in 1996, at the age of 13, Laura’s world began to unravel. One day, gazing into the mirror, she felt a jarring disconnect. The girl staring back at her looked like a stranger or a paid actor. She felt like her life was being controlled by an external force. She screamed at her parents, demanding to abandon her life and move to Maine to live with her grandmother.
She was promptly brought to a therapist, then to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and prescribed Depakote and Prozac.
The crises multiplied. So did the diagnoses and drugs. By her first year at Harvard, she was on antipsychotics like Seroquel, along with Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue, and lithium for stabilization. New diagnoses were added. Hypomania. Eating disorder. Borderline personality disorder.
Each pill was meant to fix a problem, but instead, it seemed to multiply them. Laura’s life became a whirlwind of side effects and despair.
A Life-Changing Encounter
Laura’s journey of recovery began in an unlikely place: a quiet Vermont bookstore. At the age of 26, she stumbled upon Anatomy of an Epidemic by journalist Robert Whitaker.
The book posed a simple question: Why, despite the surge in psychiatric drug prescriptions, was mental health in decline? For instance, in 1987, one in 184 Americans received disability for psychiatric reasons. By 2007, the figure had soared to one in 76.
His provocative thesis: Psychiatric drugs, rather than solving the problem, might be making it worse. His book recounted stories of people like Laura, whose symptoms intensified with every new prescription.
Laura made the daring decision to taper off her medications. Her doctors warned against it, but she needed to know what it felt like to be her.
As she weaned off the drugs, without clear guidance from doctors, new sensations flooded back into her body—feelings long dulled by medications. At 28, she experienced her first orgasm, a bittersweet reminder of how much the drugs had muted her existence. (About half of SSRI users experience sexual dysfunction.)
But the journey was difficult. She endured a range of unexpected withdrawal symptoms, including crippling insomnia, brain zaps, and waves of unrelenting anxiety—none of which her doctors had warned her about. It became painfully clear to Laura that medical professionals are trained to prescribe drugs, not to get you off of them.
Laura began documenting her journey and connecting with others who were struggling to break free from psychiatric medications. Her writing resonated deeply, and soon she founded Inner Compass Initiative, an organization dedicated to supporting individuals navigating the challenges of tapering off medication. In 2019, a New Yorker profile by Rachel Aviv pushed Laura into the national spotlight, cementing her as a leading voice in rethinking mental health care.
A Powerful Testament
Laura Delano’s memoir, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, which will be released tomorrow through Viking, is a profound and deeply unsettling exploration of the strange new world of psychiatric drugs. Equal parts memoir, history, and manifesto, Delano weaves her personal journey with a scathing critique of modern psychiatry.
Psychiatry Essential Reads
She asks urgent questions: How did we arrive at a point where one in five American college students is on psychiatric medication? How has the pharmaceutical industry shaped our understanding of mental health? And most importantly, what does healing look like without a prescription?
Troublingly, she reveals how some of the most widely used medications hit the market without rigorous testing for long-term safety. The phenomenon of polypharmacy—mixing multiple drugs with little understanding of their combined effects—has only added to the crisis.
She also highlights startling conflicts of interest, such as the fact that over 60 percent of the task force members for the DSM-5—the “bible” of American psychiatry—received funding from pharmaceutical companies, totaling over $14 million.
Yet, amid the bleak revelations, Unshrunk also offers a beacon of hope. Delano challenges readers to rethink mental health care, advocating for approaches that prioritize understanding and addressing the root causes of distress, rather than silencing symptoms with drugs.
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