Skip to content
Description
By: Laura Delano
“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.
“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.
You may also like
熱銷中 Top Trending
Dog Man 14: Dog Man: Big Jim Believes: A Graphic Novel (Dog Man #14)
Sale priceHK$85.00
Regular priceHK$150.00
In stock
Dragon Masters #30 Vortex of the Chaos Dragon (Branches) (Tracey West)
Sale priceHK$55.00
Regular priceHK$69.00
In stock
The Gruffalo and Other Stories (with QR code audio)(8 Books)(Julia Donaldson)(Axel Scheffler)
Sale priceHK$249.00
Regular priceHK$768.00
In stock
First 100 Box Set- Farm, Dino, Trucks Collection
Sale priceHK$100.99
Regular priceHK$162.00
In stock
Pip and Posy Bundle (Books with Audio QR Code)(Axel Scheffler)
Sale priceHK$349.00
Regular priceHK$821.00
In stock
Popcorn: A hilarious and moving story about coping with anxiety
Sale priceFrom HK$64.00
Regular priceHK$100.00
In stock
The Last Kids on Earth and the Destructor's Lair
Sale priceFrom HK$61.00
Regular priceHK$95.00
In stock
Inheritance Games, The #4 The Brothers Hawthorne (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)
Sale priceFrom HK$79.00
Regular priceHK$126.00
In stock
Dragon Masters #29 (正版) Magic of the Wizard Dragon (Branches) (Tracey West)
Sale priceHK$48.00
Regular priceHK$69.00
In stock