Photograph Source: Cover art for the book Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, the newly published book by Laura Delano, is scaring the hell out of establishment psychiatry and its Big Pharma partners, who in recent years could count on the mainstream media to ignore books and films that cost them status and business. However, the mainstream media, including the New York Times, cannot simply ignore a book published by Viking, owned by Penguin Random House, especially a book authored by an articulate Harvard graduate and relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So, the NYT has attempted to marginalize Delano and Unshrunk in another way.

A significant genre in the publishing industry consists of memoirs focusing on psychiatric treatment. An Internet search provides lists such as “50 Must-Read Memoirs of Mental Illness” that include titles such as William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, the latter two turned into films. There are some well-written memoirs that convey what it feels like to be really fucked up; and a few of these books are critical of psychiatric drugs (Styron in Darkness Visible states: “A final cautionary word, however, should be added concerning Halcion. I’m convinced that this tranquilizer is responsible for at least exaggerating to an intolerable point the suicidal ideas that had possessed me before entering the hospital”).

Delano does a superb job in conveying why she got fucked up and how she experienced it, and she is more expansive than Styron and others in her appraisal of psychiatric drugs (coupling her experience of being prescribed a large array of psychiatric drugs with the latest scientific research on them). What makes Unshrunk unique is that Delano moves into territory that truly threatens establishment psychiatry and its Big Pharma partners. Having been disempowered by these institutions for fourteen years—“The simplest way to put it is that I became a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven”—Unshrunk is the story of how Delano regained control of her body and her life, which could not have happened without her delegitimizing the authority of establishment psychiatry.

In reaction to Delano’s challenging the authority of establishment psychiatry, NYT reporter Ellen Barry, in a lengthy feature story, attempted to marginalize her (shortly after, the NYT published a tamer brief review of Unshrunk, written by non-NYT book author, which only accuses Delano of being “reductionist”). The job of the NYT, long made clear by Noam Chomsky, is to protect the status quo and the ruling class by marginalizing anyone who seriously challenges it and its enabling institutions. Barry does her job, insidiously demeaning Delano’s discoveries, her independence from professional authorities, and her valuing mutual aid; and Barry distorts the radical thrust of Unshrunk. I’ll return to Barry’s NYT feature on Delano, but first a look at the preface of Unshrunk in which Delano makes her message clear:

“I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not, and it wasn’t because I was misdiagnosed. I wasn’t improperly medicated or over medicated. I haven’t miraculously recovered from supposed brain diseases that some of the country’s top psychiatrists told me I’d have for the rest of my life. In fact, I was properly diagnosed and medicated according to the American Psychiatric Association’s standard of care. The reason I’m no longer mentally ill is that I made a decision to question the ideas about myself that I’d assumed were fact and discard what I learned was actually fiction. This book is a record of my psychiatric treatment, my resistance to that treatment, and what I’ve learned along the way about my pain. I decided to live beyond labels and categorical boxes and to reject the dominant role that the American mental health industry has come to play in shaping the way we make sense of what it means to be human.”

In 1996, Delano was thirteen when her journey into the mental health system began. She was the incoming president at a prestigious middle school, an excellent student who would eventually get into Harvard, and a natural athlete who would eventually become a nationally ranked squash player. Looking back at herself, she now recognizes that “it was the praise of adult authority figures that I most craved,” however, this created confusion. At age thirteen, she began to self-reflect as to whether all her good grades and accomplishments were simply a “performance.” She questioned whether “My whole life’s been fake,” and asked “Have I just been brainwashed by them?” The thirteen-year old Laura then had enraging insights: “they controlled me. They controlled all the girls. They convince us we have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, perform a certain way, I thought. We’re just puppets.”

Acting on her new insights, Laura told her parents she wanted to quit Greenwich Academy, and she pleaded with them to let her live with her grandmother in Maine, but her parents opposed this. To which Laura responded, “I hate you! I hate my life! Fuck you!” In previous eras, before the dominant societal narratives were being written by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex, Laura would have been seen as having “teen angst” or, less patronizingly, having an “existential crisis.” However, Prozac had hit the market by the late 1980s, and commercials for Prozac and other SSRIS began flooding the airwaves in the mid-1990s; and in 1996, for upper-class parents such as hers, it would have been “irresponsible” not to at least send the belligerent Laura into therapy. And so it began.

Delano’s next “crime” was to not get along with her first therapist, the consequences of which was that she got declared “too serious a case for therapy alone” and in need of “a more substantive intervention.” That meant a psychiatrist, a serious mental illness diagnosis, and serious psychiatric drugs. Laura had not yet lost her fighting spirit, so when her new high-status psychiatrist asked her if she had ever heard of bipolar disorder, Laura recalls, “What I wanted to say was Yes, I have, and FUCK YOU.”

Eventually, however, Laura gets dispirited, stops fighting her labels and treatments, and becomes “treatment........

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