Unshrunk

"The powerful memoir of one woman's experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medication, and her journey to discover her true self outside the mental health system At age thirteen, Laura Delano's parents brought her to her first psychiatrist who quickly diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a treatment of psychiatric drugs. At school, Delano was the model student, earning straight-As, a national squash ranking, and elected president of her class; at home, she unleashed all the rage she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, contemplating her death. Delano's initial bipolar diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga. For the next fourteen years, she sought treatment at the country's best psychiatric hospitals, collected an expanding catalog of diagnoses, and was prescribed a medication cascade of twenty-one drugs. Delano welcomed the pharmaceutical regimen in the hopes that it would bring her stability, peace, and treatment for what she'd been convinced was an incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms became more severe and untenable, and eventually deemed "treatment resistant," she started to wonder if the drugs she was prescribed were contributing to her illness. After years of being an obedient patient, Delano made the radical decision to uncover her baseline-the unadulterated state-of-being where she could experience the full intensity of feelings that she'd never truly known: happiness, sadness, anger, desire, and joy. It was a decision that would require her to leave behind the diagnoses and the drugs, all she had known for the better part of her life. Weaving Delano's medical records and doctors' notes from her time in treatment with 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"--