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.
stablishment psychiatry has recently switched the biological cause of mental illness from a “chemical imbalance” to a “brain circuitry defect.” There is no more important institution in establishment psychiatry than the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and in 2022, psychiatrist Thomas Insel, NIMH director from 2002-2015, stated in his book Healing, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.”
As Phyllis Chesler warned us in 1974, gender bias has accompanied psychiatric power throughout its history. Years later, in 2005, in the last annotated edition of Women and Madness , the author insisted on the persistence of this bias, which even today, 50 years later, seems to remain unchanged. Authors such as Ussher, Caplan, Margot Pujal and many others were situated in that same space. With their differences and nuances, they all converge on the same point: gender problems and discomforts produce deep suffering. This suffering leaves marks on our bodies and our behavior.
“. . . if the major media picks up on this story, they will have the chance to report on what arguably is the worst—and most harmful—scandal in American medical history”
Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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