
Unshrunk
A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
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Narrated by:
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Laura Delano
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By:
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Laura Delano
About this listen
“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.
©2025 Laura Delano (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Delano has considerable skill as a memoirist. Her early chapters describing the alienation of a smart, sensitive, hyperaware teenager in an emotionally inhospitable universe cover Holden Caulfield territory in a new and highly engaging way. Her fruitless years of polypharmacy combined with intensive therapy will be depressingly familiar to many families who go into debt paying for what they’ve been told is the best treatment money can buy, only to find it isn’t worth much.”—Judith Warner, The Washington Post
“Bracing and heroic. . . . Delano writes with the hard-won authority of the longtime patient. She provides a searing narrative of her descent into the hell of pharmacological imprisonment, and then her climb out of it to freedom. . . . She writes insightfully, at times lyrically, about not just her own psychological condition but also our culture’s. . . . This is a valuable and important book.”—Scott Stossel, The American Scholar
“Wrenching and insightful. . . . Anchored by her medical records, which she is careful to request from those who diagnosed her, Delano’s Unshrunk is invaluable in documenting American selfhood and adolescence on polypharmacy and off, where the differences are stark and painful, and the diagnoses guiding treatment compounded by error and missed signals.”—Psychology Today
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The honesty
- By Shannon Waller on 04-30-25
By: James Renner
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Mind Fixers
- Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
- By: Anne Harrington
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1980s, American psychiatry announced that it was time to toss aside Freudian ideas of mental disorder because the true path to understanding and treating mental illness lay in brain science, biochemistry, and drugs. This sudden call to revolution, however, was not driven by any scientific breakthroughs. Nor was it as unprecedented as it seemed. Why had previous efforts stalled? Was this latest call really any different? In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington offers the first comprehensive history of the troubled search for the biological basis of mental illness.
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A summary relevant to each of us
- By R3 on 04-28-19
By: Anne Harrington
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Firstborn
- A Memoir
- By: Lauren Christensen
- Narrated by: Lauren Christensen
- Length: 4 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Christensen is a thirtysomething editor in New York City when she meets her future husband, Gabe, a writer with whom she falls in love right away. Her beloved grandfather is dying, but the young couple is bringing new life into the family: Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone. As Lauren faces the prospect of becoming a parent, she learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control, but just weeks after their wedding, they learn that their worst nightmare has come true: Simone is dying in the womb.
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Beautiful
- By Ashley M. on 03-28-25
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May Cause Side Effects
- A Memoir
- By: Brooke Siem
- Narrated by: Candace Joice
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Brooke Siem was among the first generation of minors to be prescribed antidepressants. Initially diagnosed and treated in the wake of her father’s sudden death, this psychiatric intervention sent a message that something was pathologically wrong with her and that the only “fix” was medication. As a teenager, she stepped into the hazy world of antidepressants just at the time when she was forming the foundation of her identity. For the following fifteen years, every situation she faced was seen through the lens of brokenness.
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Beyond Five Stars! A Must-Listen Audiobook!
- By Frankie on 03-30-25
By: Brooke Siem
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Changing My Mind
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Julian Barnes
- Length: 1 hr and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.
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Captivating from its beginning to its end.
- By Carol Randolph on 04-12-25
By: Julian Barnes
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The Beauty in Breaking
- A Memoir
- By: Michele Harper
- Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.
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Fantastic!!
- By Monica MD on 07-09-20
By: Michele Harper
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Spellbound
- My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith
- By: Phil Hanley
- Narrated by: Phil Hanley
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When Phil Hanley was in first grade, he realized something that would forever set him apart from his peers: he couldn’t read. His teachers were ill-equipped to assist him, and he slipped through the school’s cracks, year by year falling further and further behind his friends. Finally, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that would shape the rest of his life. Unable to pursue college or a traditional job, Phil was thrust into a life defined by unconventional twists. Eventually, he found himself on a stage with a microphone, a spotlight, and five minutes of jokes.
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I love Phil Hanley’s comedy and I hope someone reads this to him!
- By J. Brown on 03-20-25
By: Phil Hanley
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Funny Because It's True
- How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
- By: Christine Wenc
- Narrated by: Christine Wenc
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon.
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Her lack of knowledge.
- By Anonymous User on 04-20-25
By: Christine Wenc
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The Maverick's Museum
- Albert Barnes and His American Dream
- By: Blake Gopnik
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America’s first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs.
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A colorful portrait of a complicated man
- By Stephanie on 03-21-25
By: Blake Gopnik
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I'll Never Call Him Dad Again
- Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight
- By: Caroline Darian, Stephen Brown - translator
- Narrated by: Heather Long, Caroline Darian
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The trial of Dominique Pelicot has captured the world's attention. Behind Pelicot's unthinkable crimes are a mother, Gisèle Pelicot, and her daughter, Caroline Darian, who were forced to rebuild their lives. This is their story.
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Beyond Words
- By Debra Nelson on 03-19-25
By: Caroline Darian, and others
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On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
By: Solvej Balle
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The Age of Diagnosis
- How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker
- By: Suzanne O'Sullivan
- Narrated by: Suzanne O'Sullivan
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in an age of diagnosis. Conditions like ADHD and autism are on the rapid rise, while new categories like long Covid are being created. Medical terms are increasingly used to describe ordinary human experiences, and the advance of sophisticated genetic sequencing techniques means that even the healthiest of us may soon be screened for potential abnormalities. More people are labeled "sick" than ever before—but are these diagnoses improving their lives?
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The book we need right now
- By Matt Haag on 05-22-25
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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A part of American history I’d never heard about
- By Janet Stanek on 05-13-25
By: William Geroux
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Sister Europe
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends.
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a look into such a different world.
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 05-15-25
By: Nell Zink
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The Man Nobody Killed
- Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
- By: Elon Green
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.
By: Elon Green
Redeeming finale!
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Every so often, she backs up what she says with info from studies. The US is behind in being accountable for harms caused by psychiatric drugs.
A Rite of Passage For the Rest of Us
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This book questions standard psychiatric treatment as it exists today, but leaves you the freedom to make your own choices.
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Moving, Powerful, and Important Work
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This book is true
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