Photograph Source: Cover art for the book Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, the newly published book by Laura Delano, is scaring the hell out of establishment psychiatry and its Big Pharma partners, who in recent years could count on the mainstream media to ignore books and films that cost them status and business. However, the mainstream media, including the New York Times, cannot simply ignore a book published by Viking, owned by Penguin Random House, especially a book authored by an articulate Harvard graduate and relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So, the NYT has attempted to marginalize Delano and Unshrunk in another way.
A significant genre in the publishing industry consists of memoirs focusing on psychiatric treatment. An Internet search provides lists such as “50 Must-Read Memoirs of Mental Illness” that include titles such as William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, the latter two turned into films. There are some well-written memoirs that convey what it feels like to be really fucked up; and a few of these books are critical of psychiatric drugs (Styron in Darkness Visible states: “A final cautionary word, however, should be added concerning Halcion. I’m convinced that this tranquilizer is responsible for at least exaggerating to an intolerable point the suicidal ideas that had possessed me before entering the hospital”).
Delano does a superb job in conveying why she got fucked up and how she experienced it, and she is more expansive than Styron and others in her appraisal of psychiatric drugs (coupling her experience of being prescribed a large array of psychiatric drugs with the latest scientific research on them). What makes Unshrunk unique is that Delano moves into territory that truly threatens establishment psychiatry and its Big Pharma partners. Having been disempowered by these institutions for fourteen years—“The simplest way to put it is that I became a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven”—Unshrunk is the story of how Delano regained control of her body and her life, which could not have happened without her delegitimizing the authority of establishment psychiatry.
In reaction to Delano’s challenging the authority of establishment psychiatry, NYT reporter Ellen Barry, in a lengthy feature story, attempted to marginalize her (shortly after, the NYT published a tamer brief review of Unshrunk, written by non-NYT book author, which only accuses Delano of being “reductionist”). The job of the NYT, long made clear by Noam Chomsky, is to protect the status quo and the ruling class by marginalizing anyone who seriously challenges it and its enabling institutions. Barry does her job, insidiously demeaning Delano’s discoveries, her independence from professional authorities, and her valuing mutual aid; and Barry distorts the radical thrust of Unshrunk. I’ll return to Barry’s NYT feature on Delano, but first a look at the preface of Unshrunk in which Delano makes her message clear:
“I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not, and it wasn’t because I was misdiagnosed. I wasn’t improperly medicated or over medicated. 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.”
In 1996, Delano was thirteen when her journey into the mental health system began. She was the incoming president at a prestigious middle school, an excellent student who would eventually get into Harvard, and a natural athlete who would eventually become a nationally ranked squash player. Looking back at herself, she now recognizes that “it was the praise of adult authority figures that I most craved,” however, this created confusion. At age thirteen, she began to self-reflect as to whether all her good grades and accomplishments were simply a “performance.” She questioned whether “My whole life’s been fake,” and asked “Have I just been brainwashed by them?” The thirteen-year old Laura then had enraging insights: “they controlled me. They controlled all the girls. They convince us we have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, perform a certain way, I thought. We’re just puppets.”
Acting on her new insights, Laura told her parents she wanted to quit Greenwich Academy, and she pleaded with them to let her live with her grandmother in Maine, but her parents opposed this. To which Laura responded, “I hate you! I hate my life! Fuck you!” In previous eras, before the dominant societal narratives were being written by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex, Laura would have been seen as having “teen angst” or, less patronizingly, having an “existential crisis.” However, Prozac had hit the market by the late 1980s, and commercials for Prozac and other SSRIS began flooding the airwaves in the mid-1990s; and in 1996, for upper-class parents such as hers, it would have been “irresponsible” not to at least send the belligerent Laura into therapy. And so it began.
Delano’s next “crime” was to not get along with her first therapist, the consequences of which was that she got declared “too serious a case for therapy alone” and in need of “a more substantive intervention.” That meant a psychiatrist, a serious mental illness diagnosis, and serious psychiatric drugs. Laura had not yet lost her fighting spirit, so when her new high-status psychiatrist asked her if she had ever heard of bipolar disorder, Laura recalls, “What I wanted to say was Yes, I have, and FUCK YOU.”
Eventually, however, Laura gets dispirited, stops fighting her labels and treatments, and becomes “treatment compliant.” What follows are several more prominent but clueless psychiatrists, culminating with one of the biggest bigshots in establishment psychiatry, John Gunderson, “the father of the borderline personality disorder diagnosis,” who had been chair of the DSM-IV diagnostic bible taskforce that ushered in the borderline label in 1994. Since then, damn near every attractive young female psychiatric patient who has committed the “crime” of saying FUCK YOU to an authority figure eventually gets a borderline label to go along with other diagnoses. Delano encountered Gunderson at the Borderline Center, which he founded and directed, at the highly prestigious McLean Hospital (patients here have included Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, Ray Charles, John Nash, Susanna Kaysen, and David Foster Wallace). McLean Hospital is just one of Delano’s many nonproductive and counterproductive hospitalizations.
Over a fourteen year period of her life, Delano was prescribed the following psychiatric drugs: the antipsychotics Seroquel, Geodon, Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Abilify; the mood stabilizers Depakote, Topamax, Lamictal, and lithium; the antianxiety drugs Klonopin and Ativan; the insomnia drug Ambien; the narcolepsy drug Provigil; the substance abuse drugs Antabuse and naltrexone; and the antidepressants Prozac, Effexor, Celexa, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, and Lexapro.
After years of receiving the best care that establishment psychiatry has to offer, Delano’s life had become more fucked up than ever. At age 25, desperate and hopeless, she made a serious suicide attempt that owing only to great luck didn’t kill her. Not too long after she got a second chance at life, Delano began to recognize that not only had her psychiatric treatment not helped her, but it had made her more fucked up; and that not only had the drugs physically damaged her, but that establishment psychiatry’s entire paradigm of how to view emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances had disempowered her, taught her she has no control over her choices, and subverted her capacity to have a meaningful life.
One of my favorite scenes from Unshrunk—hopefully, if there is a film version, it will be included—takes place in a Borderline Center therapy group when Laura is beginning to recognize the harm done to her by establishment psychiatry. Laura listens to a fellow patient self-disclose her selfish and hurtful behavior while justifying it by stating that she had no choice because “I’m borderline, right?” Laura responds, “I’m sorry, but I call bullshit. What, you really think you had no choice? Don’t blame it on being borderline.” For this, the group therapist gave Laura a scolding, but at this point, such reprimands were just more fuel for Delano’s radicalization.
Delano continued to lose faith in establishment psychiatry and began to gain faith in her own intuitions and critical thinking. She then discovered journalist Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010), a book replete with scientific research that counters establishment psychiatry’s narrative about serious mental illness. Whitaker, for example, uncovers a groundbreaking National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study—buried by establishment psychiatry—that found among patients diagnosed with serious mental illness, in the long term, the non-medicated have far greater functioning than the medicated. Anatomy of an Epidemic validated Delano’s own intuitions and critical thinking that establishment psychiatry’s paradigm and treatments are routinely turning acute emotional crises into chronic debilitating conditions.
However, Delano’s new insights were not the end of a steep uphill battle to get her life back. She recognized that not only had the psychiatric drugs fucked her up, but that unwise withdrawal from them had fucked her up as much or even more. She had first-hand experience of crazy-making establishment psychiatrists routinely labeling the symptoms of drug withdrawal as mental illness relapse. She came to take seriously the reality that if one is not extremely careful in getting off these drugs, there is a good chance one can get seriously fucked up, at which point, establishment psychiatrists will label one’s withdrawal reaction as a mental illness relapse. All this then make one vulnerable to a “treatment resistant” designation, which in establishment psychiatry’s standard of care means the option to treat with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), commonly called electroshock.
The good news is that from all she experienced, Delano ultimately found meaning, purpose, and a new life. Since establishment psychiatry had long denied and then downplayed the seriousness of psychiatric drug withdrawal, it had absolutely nothing to offer Delano in her efforts to safely get off these drugs. Unshrunk documents that it took until 2024 for the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the UK professional guild of psychiatrists, to publish a page on its website providing information about scientifically judicious tapering; and the American Psychiatric Association, the guild of U.S. psychiatrists, has yet to provide any such information.
Given this void, Delano went about self-educating from whatever science was available, and by learning from her peers who had struggled with this same issue. For those interested in the science behind safe withdrawal, I strongly recommend Delano’s Unshrunk chapter “Pharmaceutical Trauma,” along with viewing videos by dissident UK psychiatrist Mark Horowitz (such as Antidepressant Withdrawal Effects and How to Safely Stop Them).
Ultimately, Laura got a life that she is proud of. She not only shed her psychiatric patient identity and slowly tapered off all of her psychiatric drugs, she began to connect with the growing activist community of ex-psychiatric patients and dissident mental health professionals. Laura married a fellow activist Cooper Davis, and together they launched Inner Compass Initiative, which provides information and support for that large group of individuals who want to reduce or eliminate their psychiatric drugs, but who lack any useful information and support from their doctors.
This brings us to NYT reporter Ellen Barry’s attack on Inner Compass Initiative, and her claims about the dangers of nonprofessionals such as Delano and Davis. Barry tells us how establishment psychiatrists “warn that quitting medications without clinical supervision can be dangerous” and that how without professionals, patients “can worsen and kill themselves.” Barry neglects to add that Delano had in fact been treated by prominent psychiatrists who had told her nothing about drug dependence and tolerance and the dangers of abrupt stoppage; and having had this professional clinical supervision, Delano experienced needless physical and psychological suffering. Barry also fails to mention that in Delano’s later treatments by a prominent psychopharmacologist who, while acknowledging that tapering was required, evidenced no knowledge of the science behind judicious tapering; and so treatments included immediately cutting a benzodiazepine dosage in half, abruptly stopping a benzodiazepine over a few weeks, along with claiming that a “gradual taper” from her lithium would take only four weeks. All this is to say Delano’s attempt at going off medication with professional medical supervision had been highly dangerous; and that such tapering only became safer when Delano took charge of her education, and discovered the science of judicious tapering.
Barry gets especially vicious in her painting a picture of Delano and Davis as making money by recklessly—because they are not medical professionals—creating higher risk for suicide. She paints this picture with quotes from establishment psychiatrists, even though Barry is well aware that it is these professionals who first denied and then minimized the dangers of psychiatric drug withdrawal; and even now, at least in the U.S., have no guidelines that incorporate the current scientific knowledge on withdrawal. Barry quotes an establishment psychiatrist who states that it takes the skill of a licensed practitioner to distinguish between drug withdrawal and relapse of the underlying condition, but Barry makes no mention that for decades, such practitioners have been labeling all suffering following drug withdrawal as relapse of the underlying condition; and such labeling has created chronic psychiatric patients.
Then Barry further denigrates Inner Compass Initiative, perhaps libelously so, with her claim that it cites “misleading” studies. Barry offers the example of Inner Compass Initiative citing studies that mislead readers into believing that people who take antipsychotics fare worse than people who never take them or stop them. The fact is that in 2013, even the then NIMH director Thomas Insel, citing several studies, including the randomized controlled study that the Inner Compass Initiative cites, stated that for some people diagnosed with schizophrenia, “remaining on medication long-term might impede a full return to wellness.”
The next journalistic malpractice committed by Ellen Barry is her hatchet job on journalist Robert Whitaker and his Anatomy of an Epidemic. Barry makes no mention that Anatomy of an Epidemic won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Association book award for best investigative journalism. And she makes no mention that Whitaker is a winner of the George Polk Award for Medical Writing, and winner of a National Association for Science Writers’ Award for best magazine article; and in 1998, co-wrote a series on psychiatric research for the Boston Globe that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Barry tells us that Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic “for Ms. Delano. . . was an epiphany”; however, at the same time, Barry disparages Anatomy of an Epidemic, stating: “In the book, Mr. Whitaker proposed that the increasing use of psychotropic medications was to blame for the rise in psychiatric disorders. In scientific journals, reviewers dismissed Mr. Whitaker’s analysis as polemical, cherry-picking data to support a broad, oversimplified argument.” Barry provides no source for these reviewers who trashed Whitaker, so Whitaker wrote Barry to ask what her sources were.
In response to Whitaker, Barry stated that her sources were book reviews written by psychiatrists, two book reviews in journals published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the third book review in another establishment psychiatry publication. Whitaker describes the NYT deception about the reality of Barry’s sources this way: “The New York Times article didn’t tell of book reviews by psychiatrists writing in psychiatric journals, but rather told of a scientific consensus derived from reviews in scientific journals.” When Whitaker makes it clear to the NYT that their sources used to discredit Anatomy of an Epidemic were not peer-reviewed articles from unbiased scientists, Barry’s editor, Hilary Stout, tells him: “We stand by the language in the article.”
Clearly, the NYT has learned nothing from its Judith Miller disaster in which her sources were high-ranking government authorities who lied to her about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After no WMDs were found, Miller famously defended herself: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” Maybe Barry and Stout, in the NYT/Miller tradition, believe that their job isn’t to assess whether or not establishment psychiatry is practicing self-preservation rather than science, but rather their job is to report to NYT readers the assertions of establishment psychiatry about establishment psychiatry.
All of this is why truth-seeking, courageous journalists such as Molly Ivins and Chris Hedges quit the NYT. A major role of the NYT in the neoliberal shit show is to marginalize serious critics of the status quo so as to benefit the ruling class. Long before Ellen Barry and Hilary Stout, the NYT had been conducting these nasty marginalization operations. In 1965, one day after Malcolm X’s death, a NYT editorial stated this about him:
“An extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . Malcolm X had the ingredients for leadership, but his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence . . . set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes. . . . Malcolm X’s life was strangely and pitifully wasted.”
Ellen Barry’s least original attempt at marginalization makes use of a tactic that establishment psychiatry, Big Pharma, and their allies in the mainstream media have long used: the diversion from legitimate criticism via connecting the author of a critique with a group abhorrent for much of the general public. Establishment psychiatry and its mainstream media supporters have commonly responded to psychiatry critics by associating them with the Church of Scientology; however, Delano anticipates this bullshit, and she makes clear her rejection of both establishment psychiatry and Scientology because their underpinnings are similar: “Unquestioningly accept whatever they tell you to do, because they know better than you know yourself.”
So, Barry turns to another polarizing critic of psychiatric drugs, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eliciting from Cooper Davis an agreement with RFK Jr.’s position on SSRIs’ adverse effects (a position backed by prominent scientific researchers, including physician and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, Peter Gøtzsche). The problem that establishment psychiatry critics such as myself have is this: though RFK Jr. happens to be correct in some of his claims about psychiatric drugs, RFK Jr. appears to be a man who has lost his integrity (if in fact he had any) by such recent behaviors as backing off his lifelong stance on bodily autonomy and a woman’s right to choose abortion and instead, in recent Senate hearings, equivocating on this issue by repeatedly quoting Trump on it; and claiming a passionate concern for the environment but joining what appears to be the most anti-environment administration in recent history. So RFK Jr.’s opposition to psychiatric drugs is as embarrassing as is Scientology’s opposition. Congratulations, Ellen Barry, maybe next you can try to shame vegetarians by reminding NYT readers that Hitler was a vegetarian.
Barry offers other distortions and false claims that, given her NYT worldview, might actually be her misguided attempt at helping Delano by re-caging her in the neoliberal zoo for safe viewing.
Specifically, Barry tells us that Laura has “tempered her language” since her earlier activism days when “she protested outside annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association, denouncing the use of four-point restraints and electroshock machines”; and that Delano in her memoir “assures readers that she is not ‘anti-medication’ or ‘anti-psychiatry’ and quotes Delano as saying, “I know that many people feel helped by psychiatric drugs, especially when they’re used in the short term.” Barry strips away the context of what Delano is saying.
What Barry omits is that Delano immediately then explains why she does not define herself as anti-psychiatry: “I find it counterproductive to orient myself ‘against’ anything.” Delano is saying that while establishment psychiatry has been a damaging and disempowering force in her life, it feels healthier for her to be pro-empowerment, pro-critical thinking, and pro-bodily autonomy rather than anti-anything. And given her respect for dissident psychiatrists, it makes no sense to say she is “anti-psychiatry.”
Similarly, with respect to Delano’s beliefs about psychiatric medications, her position is the same as dissident psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, whose book The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008) was hugely important for Laura in getting her life back. In this book, Moncrieff documents how psychiatric drugs do not cure any underlying diseases but simply affect our feelings and behavior in the same sort of way that alcohol and recreational drugs affect them; and Moncrieff acknowledges the possible short-term benefit of a tranquilizing drug to calm a highly agitated person and prevent hospital or prison incarceration. Delano and Moncrieff’s view on the reality of psychiatric drugs is actually more enraging for establishment psychiatry than an “anti-drug” position.
Barry also may well believe she is helping Delano with the following elevating conclusion about her: “She also provided something the ex-patient community had lacked: an aspirational model.” However, contrary to Barry’s claim that the ex-patient community had lacked an aspirational model prior to the arrival of Delano on the scene, Laura discusses in Unshrunk one of her heroes, ex-patient activist Judi Chamberlin, author of On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System (1978). Chamberlin, before Laura was even born, championed informed choice, rejected professional monopolization, and advocated for nonhierarchical mutual aid and peer support.
When I read Barry’s attempt to elevate Laura over the rest of the ex-patient community, I cringed because if one spends any time with Laura—and it appears that Barry spent significant time with her—it doesn’t take long to see that Laura is uncomfortable with the fact that her blue-blood background has gotten her extra attention.
If Barry had not been so intent on elevating Laura in the ex-patient community so as to elevate her NYT story, Barry would have easily discovered that Laura is connected to fellow activists around her age who survived establishment psychiatry and who had, prior to Laura’s prominence, become prominent figures in the activist community. There is ex-patient Sera Davidow (see The Sun interview with her), who is majorly responsible for the creation of the Wildflower Alliance, a grassroots peer support, advocacy, training organization, and home to one of the few peer-run respites in the United States. There is ex-patient Noël Hunter, who became a clinical psychologist, and is the author of Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services (2018), and founder and director of MindClear Integrative Psychotherapy.
There are other “aspirational models” in their twenties and thirties, including ex-patient Mollie Adler, who in her popular podcast Back from the Borderline has gone so far as to compare the sexual grooming that she experienced as a teenager with the “systematic grooming” of her entire generation by a mainstream media that promotes the narrative created by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex.
Finally, it is important to understand that Laura Delano, Sera Davidow, Noël Hunter, and Mollie Adler, all of whom I know personally, have been radicalized by their own psychiatrization and by their own efforts at making sense of what happened to them, and that only later were their intuitions, insights, and critical thinking validated by books by such as Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic and Moncrieff’s The Myth of the Chemical Cure.
