Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s Breakaway from Psychiatry

Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s Breakaway from Psychiatry
by Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone Institute

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance is more than a memoir of Laura Delano’s journey through pain, survival, and recovery. It is a fearless, forensic examination of a psychiatric system that too often harms those it is meant to help.

Instead of merely recounting her own harrowing experience, Delano exposes an industry that, despite its claims of scientific rigour, frequently silences, dismisses, and pathologises those in distress.

What emerges is not just a personal reckoning, but a scathing indictment of modern psychiatry and a call for urgent reform.

As someone who has spent years reporting on the scientific shortcomings of psychiatric drugs—the flimsy trials, the regulatory capture, the financial conflicts—I’ve documented many of the system’s failures. 

But I could never portray them with the visceral clarity of someone who’s lived it. Delano gives a voice to the silenced, puts flesh on the statistics, and brings coherence to the chaos so many feel when trapped inside the ‘prison’ of psychiatry.

Last September, I had the opportunity to meet Laura in Connecticut after she reached out in response to some of my investigative reporting. 

In person, she was warm, grounded, and intelligent. She and her husband, Cooper Davis, radiated a quiet but unmistakable sense of hard-won purpose. It was clear they hadn’t merely survived the system—they were now working to help others navigate it, through the nonprofit Laura founded: Inner Compass Initiative.

Delano’s descent into psychiatry began at the tender age of 13. She describes a moment standing in front of a mirror, repeating to herself, “I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.” 

Instead of seeing this as a young girl’s profound cry for help, psychiatry interpreted it as a pathological symptom—one that demanded medication.

From there, her life became a procession of diagnostic labels and prescriptions. She was rapidly swept into a whirlwind of psychiatric disorders—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder—each new label reinforcing the falsehood that she was fundamentally broken.

This, I believe, strikes at the heart of psychiatry’s core failure: it strips suffering of context and meaning, and replaces it with abstract diagnostic codes.

Alongside the diagnoses came the inevitable avalanche of drugs: Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Abilify, Depakote, lithium, Klonopin, Ativan, Ambien, Celexa, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin—the list goes on. But instead of healing her, psychiatry hijacked her identity.

Even I was stunned by the sheer volume and velocity at which she was prescribed drugs. What struck me most was the absence of curiosity from clinicians who should have known better—who never paused to consider whether the treatment itself might be causing harm.

The title Unshrunk captures this journey perfectly. It’s a nod to the profession of “shrinks” while also reclaiming one’s identity—undoing the diminishment that comes from being reduced to diagnoses and drug regimens. 

“This book—these pages, this story, my story—is a record that has been unshrunk,” she writes.

Throughout, Delano explains how the system instilled in her the deepening belief that something was fundamentally wrong with her—a belief reinforced at every turn by diagnoses and medications. Her story lays bare a broader truth: psychiatry has a tendency to medicalise ordinary human suffering and pathologise natural responses to life’s challenges.

I know first-hand how taboo it remains to critique psychiatry. Years ago, while producing a two-part documentary series on antidepressants for ABC-TV, I spent over a year interviewing patients, researchers, and whistleblowers. We sought to expose the overstated benefits and hidden harms of psychiatric drugs. 

But just before broadcast, the series was pulled. Executives feared that telling the truth might prompt people to stop taking their medication. It was a sobering reminder of how tightly controlled this conversation remains—and why voices like Delano’s are so vital.

Predictably, Unshrunk has drawn criticism from legacy media outlets like the Washington Post, which characterised it as a “treatise against psychiatric medications” and lumped it into a “highly predictable” anti-psychiatry genre. 

But this knee-jerk framing only highlights how resistant our culture has become to honest, nuanced conversations about mental health.

To be clear, Delano is not “anti-psychiatry” or “anti-medication.” She has explicitly acknowledged that some people find psychiatric drugs helpful. But she also knows many have not been helped—in fact, many have been harmed. Their stories matter too. And that’s exactly what Unshrunk offers – a voice to those erased from the dominant narrative.

This intolerance of dissent is reflected in politics, too. When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently questioned the safety of psychiatric drugs, Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) accused him of spreading “misinformation” that could discourage people from seeking treatment. But Kennedy wasn’t opposing treatment—he was calling for transparency, informed consent, and scientific accountability. As Delano’s memoir makes painfully clear, those are precisely the conversations we should be having.

Delano writes candidly about how psychiatry eroded her sense of self—how she became a “good” patient, internalising every label and obeying every directive. 

“I took all of this as objective fact; who was I to question any of it?” she writes.

One especially crucial chapter confronts the now-debunked “chemical imbalance” myth—the idea that depression is caused by a deficiency in serotonin. Delano references the 2022 review in Molecular Psychiatry by Moncrieff et al., which found no convincing evidence to support the serotonin-deficiency theory. 

She reflects on how the drugs impaired her capacity to think critically: “For nearly half my life, I’d been under the influence of drugs that had impaired the parts of my brain needed to process, comprehend, retain, and recall information.”

The darkest chapter in Unshrunk—and the one I found most difficult to read—is her suicide attempt. Delano recounts the moment with unflinching honesty. It hit me like a gut punch. But it’s that refusal to sanitise her pain that gives this memoir its extraordinary emotional weight.

And yet, Unshrunk is not without hope. Delano eventually emerges from the depths of despair, scarred but intact, with a renewed sense of purpose.

The pivotal moment came when Delano read Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, a book that poses a confronting question: why, after decades of soaring psychiatric drug use, are rates of mental illness and disability still climbing?

Drawing on long-term research, Whitaker argues that while psychiatric drugs may offer short-term relief for some, they often lead to worse outcomes over time—and that, on balance, they may be causing more harm than good at a societal level.

The realisation hit Delano like a bolt of lightning: “Holy shit. It’s the fucking meds,” she writes. She wasn’t “treatment-resistant”—the treatment itself had become the source of her suffering, a case of iatrogenic injury.

Delano’s journey to withdraw from psychiatric drugs, however, is another ordeal. At first, she assumes a quick detox will bring quick relief—but she is disastrously wrong. 

“The logic seemed simple at the time,” she writes. “I had no idea that I had it backward—that the fastest way to get off and stay off psychiatric drugs successfully… is to taper down slowly. And by ‘slowly’ I don’t mean over a few weeks or months. I mean potentially over years.” 

It’s a lesson that remains dangerously absent from much of mainstream psychiatric care, where withdrawal symptoms are routinely mistaken for relapse.

“Coming off psychiatric drugs had been the hardest thing I’d ever done,” she recalls.

At its core, Unshrunk is about reclaiming bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice,” Delano writes—underscoring the way psychiatry frequently undermines consent and personal agency. The harm didn’t just come from the drugs, but from being denied fully informed consent regarding her treatment.

Ultimately, Delano’s message is both sobering and empowering: true healing begins when people are treated not as “broken brains,” but as whole human beings. 

“I decided to live beyond labels and categorical boxes,” she writes, “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.”

Unshrunk is a brave, unsparing account of Delano’s escape from a broken system. At times tormenting, sometimes funny, always courageous—it’s one hell of an emotional rollercoaster.

If you want to understand the lived experience behind psychiatry’s failures, this book is essential reading.

Laura will be speaking at Brownstone’s Supper Club in West Hartford, Connecticut

April 23 @ 5:30 pm – 9:30 pm

Details: https://brownstone.org/venue/brownstone-supper-club-at-butterfly-restaurant/

Republished from the author’s Substack

Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s Breakaway from Psychiatry
by Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society