Unshrunk

A beautifully written memoir about one woman's battle to discover her true self outside of the deeply flawed American mental health system

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' I began to think about the forces at play, not just within me, but beyond me. What if my life hasn't fallen apart in the way that it has because of 'treatment-resistant mental illness', as I've been led to believe, but because of the treatment itself?

At age thirteen, Laura Delano's parents took her to her first psychiatrist. At school, she was the model student but at home she felt an uncontrollable rage that she unleashed on family, friends and herself. She was promptly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began a course of psychiatric drugs.

For the next fourteen years, , Laura became a 'professional mental patient', collecting an expanding catalogue of diagnoses and living appointment to appointment. Prescribed a medication cascade of twenty-one drugs, she embraced the regime in the hope it would bring her stability, peace and treatment for what she'd been convinced was an incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms got more severe and untenable, with each new drug always countering the consequences of the last, she was eventually deemed 'treatment resistant', and began to wonder if the drugs and diagnoses were the cure - or had they become the problem?

Weaving together her medical records and doctors' notes with illuminating research, Unshrunk is a record of Laura's battle to disentangle herself from the all-powerful mental health system. It was a decision that would require her to leave behind the only life she knew, to peel back the layers of diagnoses and drugs and discover her true self again: her 'personality, vitality, creativity, sense of humour; the simple state of being awake to the world'. Beautifully written, insightful and probing, it is both a moving memoir and powerful rebuke of the commercial psychiatric industry, which often does not seem to have the interests of its patients at its heart.