Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s breakaway from psychiatry
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.
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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 [Australia] 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.
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