Unshrunk A story of psychiatric treatment resistance

Mental health advocate Delano chronicles her struggles with mental illness and psychiatric drugs in this thorny and impassioned debut memoir. She describes how her unstable moods and the suffocation she felt as a teen in upper-crust Greenwich, Conn., led her to become "a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven." During those years, Delano was diagnosed with multiple conditions, including bulimia, bipolar disorder, and cutting disorder. As her list of therapies and medications grew, she continued to spiral, culminating in a nearly successful suicide attempt in her 20s. After that episode, she decided to cease treatment, believing that psychotropic drugs like Prozac, Lamictal, and Lexapro were causing her more problems than they were solving. Fourteen years later, Delano is now an advocate for patients with what she calls "chronic pharmaceutical trauma." She renders difficult episodes from her past with gravity and grace, makes a convincing case that big pharma holds disproportionate lobbying power in contemporary psychiatry, and paints a resonant portrait of a culture devoted to papering over difficult emotions. Still, some readers may balk at her hard-line stances against medication. Though not every argument lands with equal force, this is a potent reconsideration of a pressing social issue. Agent: Liz Parker, Verve Talent & Literary. (Mar.)

Finding herself--off of meds. At 13, Delano was put on her first too-potent psychiatric drug because she was experiencing what was (to her, in hindsight) mere teen angst. What followed were decades of psychiatric drugs that were given to counteract effects of other drugs, which were given to counteract effects of still other drugs: the classic "cascade of prescriptions." She quickly became one of the 80% of 59 million Americans on psychiatric meds long-term. Only after years of brain-fogging drugs-upon-drugs, punctuated by years of hospitalizations, did she stumble into an Alcoholics Anonymous group, which focused on taking responsibility for one's own life. That simple notion, along with the common fellowship of people helping each other without professionals--and without pharmaceuticals--led her to wonder if her worsening mental health was due not to her lack of response to drugs, but to the drugsthemselves. Against advice, she began tapering off all of them. As she did, she researched. She read Robert Whitaker'sAnatomy of an Epidemic, Viktor Frankl'sMan's Search for Meaning, John L. McKnight'sThe Careless Society, and Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. "The words of these men ignited a fire in me to feel, to just sit and feel, for how beautifully they articulated the art of leaning into the darkness of being alive." She also began mentoring others. Off all drugs, she had a "holy shit" realization: Her problem really was "the meds" all along. She founded a nonprofit organization and now runs a psychiatric drug withdrawal consultancy. She concludes: "I don't need to 'figure myself out,' to force a change in my day-to-day reality. I trust fully in my own process--in this intelligence within me, within each and every one of us…that sits deeper than thought, that knows where to take us each from here….We're built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We're meant to feel it all, and bear it all, together." A courageous, insightful, beautifully written book challenging major tenets of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.