Laura Delano, author of the memoir “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance,” will be in conversation with author Nancy Slonim Aronie, founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop, at 7 pm, Wednesday, July 16, at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, 23 Main St., Vineyard Haven.
At age 14, 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.
For the next 13 years, Delano sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a prescription cascade of 19 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 her medical records and doctors’ notes with an investigation of modern psychiatry and illuminating research on the drugs Delano 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.
Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps people make more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. She works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support for the withdrawal journey, and life post-psychiatry.
The author of “Memoir as Medicine” and “Writing from the Heart,” Nancy Slonim Aronie is the founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop. She has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” as well as a columnist for multiple newspapers. She has taught writing at Kripalu, Omega, Esalen, and Harvard.