Unshrunk

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

At age fourteen, Laura Delano’s parents took her to her first psychiatrist. At school, she was the model student, but at home Laura felt an uncontrollable rage that she unleashed on family, friends and herself. She was promptly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started on a course of mood stabilizers and antidepressants.

It was to mark the beginning of a painful and relentless journey. For the next thirteen years, Laura sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals, accumulating an ever-expanding list of diagnoses and prescriptions for nineteen different drugs. She accepted her diagnoses and embraced the pharmaceutical regime she’d been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms only got more severe and eventually she was deemed ‘treatment resistant’, Laura began to wonder if the drugs and diagnoses were the cure – or had they become the problem?

Weaving together Laura’s medical records and doctors’ notes with illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk is the powerful memoir of one woman’s battle against the commercial psychiatric industry and the role it plays in shaping what it means to be human.