After years being medicated for mental health problems, one patient began to suspect the cause of her suffering could be found in the drugs themselves.
Excerpt – she [author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance” Laura Delano] encountered Robert Whitaker’s 2010 book, “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” The question Mr. Whitaker asked was simple: How is it possible that rates of mental illness have skyrocketed in parallel with the development of so many supposedly groundbreaking psychiatric drugs? Mr. Whitaker’s book forced Ms. Delano to pose a question that had never before occurred to her. “What if it wasn’t treatment-resistant mental illness that had been sending me ever deeper into the depths of despair and dysfunction, but the treatment itself?”
The decision to try life without psychiatric medication was not easy. Ms. Delano navigated the struggle in a state of anxiety that often veered close to panic. She worried that she would kill herself, that she would fall apart, that the doctors were right and her condition really was incurable, manageable only by pills and therapy. She also struggled to understand her inner life in a language other than that of biological psychiatry. So accustomed was she to conceptualizing her thoughts and behavior as symptoms of psychiatric diagnoses that it was difficult for her to imagine they could be described any other way.
[..] Her experience is depressingly commonplace in 21st-century America, as are the “solutions” she was offered. Yet only rarely are these struggles described with such insight and self-awareness. Ms. Delano writes with a natural feel for the rhythm of a well-crafted sentence. She could have chosen to write a polemic against the mental-health system, but she didn’t. “There is no ‘antimedication’ or ‘antipsychiatry’ moral to this story,” she writes. “I know that many people feel helped by psychiatric drugs, especially when they’re used in the short term.” Although her experience has left Ms. Delano skeptical of biological psychiatry, her descriptions of the psychiatric literature are reasonable and well-informed.
By the time Ms. Delano finished writing “Unshrunk,” it had been 14 years since she last took a psychiatric drug. By almost any measure, her life since then has taken a dramatic turn for the better. Today she is a happily married professional, the mother of a child and stepmother to another. Does this mean that Ms. Delano was misdiagnosed or mistreated? She insists that no, she wasn’t. Nor was she overmedicated. Everything that was done for her was done properly and by the book. Her psychiatric treatment was well within the standard of care—yet she has been far better off after deciding to reject it. As she writes, “I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not.”
Full article, C Elliott, Wall Street Journal, 2025.5.15