"Unshrunk"

A story of psychiatric treatment resistance.

In December, Jill and I had the pleasure of spending time with Laura Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Resistance,” at a Brownstone Institute retreat. This book is a fascinating memoir about her journey as a long-term patient in the mental health industry, which led to Laura taking on the mental health-industrial complex in this fascinating book.

Laura’s journey touched a nerve for Jill. See, Jill grew up in a family profoundly damaged by the long arm of the mental health establishment of the 1950s through 1970s. This was because her sister had been diagnosed as being profoundly mentally ill long before Jill was born.

Jill's parents were much older, and Jill was the “oops” baby, born in 1960. So her sisters are 17 and 18 years older than her. Both sisters were born in England during WWII. Then, after the war, her family immigrated to the United States in the late 1950s.

Jill’s oldest sister, Christine, was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic when she was about thirteen years old (she would probably now be labeled as having bi-polar disorder and medicated with SSRIs). In the 1950s, “paranoid schizophrenia” was a standard label for people who came out as gay during the 1950s.

At the time, the theory of the "schizophrenogenic mother" was a concept that posited that schizophrenia in children was caused by mothers who exhibited a combination of overprotective and rejecting behaviors. Psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a prominent proponent of this idea, describing these mothers as dominating and unaware of their children's needs, ultimately driving them to psychosis.

The theory extended into broader parenting practices, with Gregory Bateson introducing the "double bind" theory in the mid-1950s, which suggested that contradictory parental messaging could contribute to schizophrenia. These ideas placed significant blame on parenting styles, particularly maternal behavior, for the development of schizophrenia. The damage done to families over this systemic mental-health medical malpractice has lasted for generations.

Long story short, when Christine was a young adult, she married briefly and had a daughter just a few years younger than Jill. Jill’s parents ended up as legal guardians, as the state made Christine turn over her child to Jill’s parents to raise when Christine’s daughter was about four years old. Hence, in Jill’s family - her mother and father were both blamed for her sister’s “illness” and also had the responsibility thrust upon them by the state to raise their grandchild. Talk about familial tensions! Christine both blamed her parents for causing her to be mentally ill and blamed them for taking away her daughter. This forced arrangement by the state created dysfunction in the family for generations to come.

Jill’s mother never got over the guilt or stopped blaming herself. This very formal, sweet woman never could forgive herself or stop wondering how much her parenting was to blame for her daughter’s mental illness.

Early on, long before Jill was born, when Christine was a young teen, she was placed into Camarillo, the state mental health institution for California, and suffered horrifically with the various “treatments” prescribed. One such treatment was having her sleep in sheets that had been frozen to shock her out of her mental illness.

As a young teen, she was prescribed cigarettes to calm her nerves, placed on lithium and who knows what other drugs, and spent her young adult life drugged up. This then led to her living a way too fast life in Los Angeles, CA.

At around age thirty-five, she was an utterly non-functioning member of society on permanent social security. I don’t think, up until that point, she had ever held a job due to the severe side effects of the psychotropic drugs she had been placed on. Frankly, when I first met her as a teenager, she was one scary person. The drugs they had her on caused tardive dyskinesia (TD), a movement disorder characterized by involuntary, repetitive movements of her arms, hands, face, and lips. She also developed a profound anger - as she began to realize the damage done to her by the medical establishment.

Her daughter also suffered greatly, as she loved her mother and wanted nothing more than to be able to live with her. I don’t think she would mind me writing that the pain of this followed her into adulthood.

Laura’s book resonated so profoundly with Jill because of the parallels between Laura’s personal history of ditching the mental-health establishment and Christine’s similar decision.

Around age 35, Christine concluded that she wasn’t insane. That the prescribed drugs she was on were ruining her life. She went to her parent’s house and went cold turkey off of all the psychotropic medications (note- going “cold turkey” is not recommended; using a weaning-off protocol is highly preferred). The withdrawal symptoms were genuinely awful. The psychiatrist in charge of her case then “fired" her” - for her irresponsible decision un-medicating herself.

After this, and over the many following months, Christine was slowly able, at some level, to function normally. Much more normal than she had ever been since first being placed in a mental hospital at age thirteen.

Shortly thereafter, Christine found her soul mate, an ex-nun. She picked up her life and became a professional artist, creating beautiful and haunting works. The last decade of her life was as happy as the prior twenty-five years had been tortured and miserable.

Even though Christine had stopped smoking years before, when she went off of her prescribed medications, she ended up dying around age fifty-two from lung cancer in 1993. Yep, from those very same cigarettes that had been prescribed to her so long ago by “medical doctors.”

Jill’s experiences in dealing with her sister’s “schizophrenia” caused us to early on research the mental health industry. As a consequence, as a couple, Jill and I developed a long-standing and deep-seated distrust of the medicalized mental “health” sector early on. To this day, it is hard to get Jill to go to any doctor.

So, when Jill met Laura and heard her story - there was an immediate connection.

See, Laura was diagnosed as “bipolar” as a teenager, and suffered years of what I consider abuse by the mental health industrial complex. She was given ever-increasing doses and cocktails of drugs, which made her all the more unable to cope with the real world. The first half of “Unshrunk” is the story of Laura’s downward spiral, both physically and mentally, over many years due to the various treatment regimes she was placed on.

But the second half of the book is what I found particularly inspiring.

Like Jill’s sister, Laura had an epiphany that changed her life. Like Jill’s sister, she realized that it was the medicalized mental “health” establishment that was making her “ill”. Laura also weaned herself off of all drugs and began her journey of self-healing. It took years to become fully functional again.

She writes of the rage of realizing what happened to her, of all the years she lost of her life. She also writes of the joy of finding herself again. Of learning how to cope and the realization that life without pain is almost no life at all. That we all suffer pain as well as rage and that learning to handle that pain and anger is part of life that should not be dulled.

Then Laura began her research journey, which ultimately led her to found the “Inner Compass Initiative,” an international non-profit dedicated to “helping people seeking guidance and support for the withdrawal journey and life post-psychiatry.”

Inner Compass Initiative (ICI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization uniting people with firsthand experience of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs to chart a new path forward beyond the current limits of today’s mental health industry.

Rooted in layperson expertise and mutual aid—the voluntary exchange of support and resources–we are working to change the way the world understands and addresses the challenges that come with being human in the modern age.

Jill and I are so focused on keeping up with the news cycles, that we rarely have time to read books. But we both thoroughly enjoyed ‘Unshrunk”, particularly the back half. The honesty and wisdom of Laura Delano shines through on every page.

This is a book to read not only for yourself but also to consider giving as a gift to anyone suffering under the heavy hand of the medicalized mental-health industry, including family members. It is ultimately hopeful and inspiring. It goes beyond labels—it goes to the heart of what it is to be human.

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Laura Delano’s preface reads:

My youth was shaped by the language of psychiatric diagnosis. Its meticulous symptom lists and tidy categories defined my teens and twenties and determined my future. I believed that my primary condition, bipolar disorder, was an incurable brain disease that would only worsen without medications, therapy, and the occasional stay on a psych ward. This belief was further reinforced each time I heard of the tragic destruction befalling someone who stopped her meds because she thought she could outsmart her disease. I embraced the promises of a psychopharmaceutical solution, welcoming the regimen of pills I ingested in the hope that they’d bring me stability, reliability, functionality. That they’d show me what it felt like to be happy or, at the very least, have some peace of mind. That they’d maybe, one day, even provide me with the chance to feel something close to normal.

I took all of this as objective fact; who was I to question any of it? I wasn’t a doctor. I hadn’t gone to graduate school to become an expert in brain biochemistry. I didn’t know how to interpret scientific research or comprehend dense pharmacological information. Doctors made an oath to, first, do no harm, after all. If there was a better way to resolve my dysfunctional suffering, I surely would have heard about it. My parents had the financial means to get me top-notch care from some of the nation’s best doctors and psychiatric hospitals, and so we dove right in, desperate for answers, eager to get me needed relief. We accepted the grave reality that came with a disease like bipolar disorder: the unpredictable ups and downs, the inability to take on too much stress or responsibility, the many impulsive mistakes and destructive behaviors I’d engage in during unmanageable episodes, the risk I’d kill myself. For fourteen years, I lived tethered to the belief that my brain was broken, and redesigned my entire life around the singular purpose of fixing it.

If you’d told me back then that I’d one day decide to face my agonizing emotions, twisted thoughts, and relief-seeking impulses without translating them into symptoms to be treated with prescribed pharmaceuticals, I’d have called you crazy. If you’d told me that I’d eventually decide to leave behind the idea that I had serious mental illness, the only framework for understanding my emotions and behaviors that had ever made any sense to me, I’d have been offended, convinced as I was that the only way for my pain to be properly acknowledged was through its medicalization. And if you’d handed me a memoir like this, I’d have glanced at the book jacket and handed it right back, outraged at the mere insinuation that my fourteen years of self-destructive madness might never have needed meds in the first place, or been symptoms of a brain disease at all.

The simplest way to put it is that I became a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven. The best way to describe what happened next is that I decided to leave behind all the diagnoses, meds, and professionals and recover myself. There is no “antimedication” or “antipsychiatry” moral to this story; to be clear, I am neither of these things. I know that many people feel helped by psychiatric drugs, especially when they’re used in the short term. I find it counterproductive to orient myself “against” anything. In fact, there is much that I am for in the context of this labyrinthian ecosystem we clumsily call the mental health system. First and foremost, My Body, My Choice, and the right we each have for this choice to be fully, accurately, and therefore meaningfully informed. This book is a story about informed decision-making: what it takes to make a true choice regarding psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, the repercussions when you don’t have the information necessary to do so, and what happens after you realize the choices you thought you’d been making were never really choices at all.

For a long time after I made the decision to leave behind my psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, I flailed and floundered, overwhelmed by raw emotion as I faced the menace of the unknown: How will I explain my agonizing struggle, if not with the language of mental illness? What will I strive for, if not the right treatment? What will it mean for me if I can no longer explain away my hurtful behaviors as symptoms of a faulty brain? I navigated the brutal aftermath of stopping psychiatric drugs in constant panic: Can I really survive without my meds? What if it was a terrible decision to think I don’t need them? What if I’ll never be stable? What if I actually do have bipolar disorder and it gets far worse? What if those doctors were right and I can’t manage on my own? What if I kill myself? I was unsure of truth and delusion, right and wrong, and where I even belonged, but in the eye of that storm—at the culmination of this disintegration of self—I realized there was a force pushing me forward: curiosity. If I don’t actually have a chronic, serious mental illness that requires me to take meds for the rest of my life, what could my life become?

It’s been fourteen years since I last took a psychiatric drug or looked in the mirror and saw a list of psychiatric symptoms looking back—and not because I no longer experience intense emotional pain and paranoia and debilitating anxiety and unhelpful impulses, which I still very much do. Right now, were I to go through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, I’d meet the criteria for several of its diagnoses. But here’s the thing: I no longer view this textbook as a legitimate or relevant source of information about myself, nor do I have any use for the various diagnoses it would tell me I have. While a lot in my life has changed for the better as a direct result of healing my brain and body from psychopharmaceuticals, much of what happens in the space between my ears is as dark and messy as ever. (In some cases, more so.) When it comes to the inner workings of my mind, the primary difference is that I’m no longer afraid of what I find there.

I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not, and it wasn’t because I was misdiagnosed. I wasn’t improperly medicated or overmedicated. 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. This book—these pages, this story, my story—is a record that has been unshrunk.

Delano, Laura. Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (pp. xi-xiv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

***Medical disclaimer: This newsletter was created for informational purposes only and has no ties to any drug company. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this newsletter. ***