Unshrunk Quotes

“They convince us we have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, perform a certain way, I thought. We’re just puppets.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Klonopin’s label now clearly states that “the continued use of benzodiazepines, including Klonopin, may lead to clinically significant physical dependence” and that “abrupt discontinuation or rapid dosage reduction…after continued use may precipitate acute withdrawal reactions, which can be life-threatening.”)”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“couldn’t fathom how it was possible that so many of us could be prescribed psychiatric drugs for so many years based on essentially zero scientific evidence for long-term use.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“How far we are from our primal nature, how much our current way of life has disconnected us from ourselves.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“This was a wholly organic, commonsensical process: I bought no self-help books and sought no practitioners, protocols, supplements, products, or formulaic practices to teach me. Instead, I looked inward and listened.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I was coming to understand that I was still her. That little girl who believed in the possibility of anything was me.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I’d spent most of my life assuming that discomfort was a problem to be fixed, numbed, or run away from—that I needed to do something whenever I felt sad or anxious or angry or headachy or otherwise uncomfortable: seek out some kind of professional help or service, take pills, eat something, buy something, get drunk, scroll through a newsfeed, distract myself with television.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“For thousands of years, we wrote poems and plays and made music and comedy and art out of our suffering that we shared with one another in community; today we take it to a doctor and the pharmacy under the false premise that it can and must be obliterated.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“we’re growing ever more unwell in mind, body, and spirit, and the business of health is thriving.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“according to the American Psychiatric Association, a mother “still” grieving the loss of her child more than two weeks out now meets the criteria for a major depression diagnosis and antidepressant treatment?”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy,”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“the art of leaning into the darkness of being alive, instead of denying it.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“opportunities to get out of my own head and be there for someone else.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“The experience infused not just my every square inch but all that I could see, hear, taste, smell, touch; all that I believed and valued and thought about. Withdrawal hijacked my reality without my realizing”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“So much of the withdrawal experience is unspeakable: there are simply no words in the English language that come close to capturing its otherworldly nature.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“The best way to sum up this phase of psychiatric drug withdrawal is that the simple fact of life happening around me was enough to send my central nervous system into full-blown panic mode.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“That at least one would rethink how he approached the next struggling young girl who sat herself down before him and, before pulling a prescription pad from his drawer, consider that there might be an alternative way to help her make sense of her pain.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I was struggling to understand how I’d ever grown so distrustful of myself that I was willing to turn my identity, my biochemistry, and my life over to the mental health industry.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I could see myself so clearly in Spanky’s testimony: the regret that comes from realizing your fear and self-doubt led you to comply with an institutional authority that took you far away from who you truly were.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“For nearly half my life, I’d been under the influence of drugs that had impaired the parts of my brain needed to process, comprehend, retain, and recall information, the parts that fueled logic and reason and forethought. The parts of my brain that housed my consciousness, that made me a thinking being, that made me me.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Plagued with regret, I considered the questions I’d never thought to ask the many doctors I’d seen over the years: How would you define a chemically balanced brain versus a chemically imbalanced brain? Can you present me with a brain scan or lab result showing proof of my alleged pathology? How can you be so sure that I’ll be mentally ill for the rest of my life after spending only an hour with me? Have you ever met with a drug representative or received gifts or income from pharmaceutical companies? Upon what specific data are you basing your decision to put me on this particular med? Does this combination of meds you have me on have any evidence base? Would you put your daughter on this drug you’re telling me I need—and would you take it yourself?”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Had any of my former prescribers ever taken the time to understand how briefly the meds they were doling out to me had actually been studied in humans, or to look closely at the actual outcomes upon which these drugs were declared effective in the first place? Had they even read the drug labels at all? At first, overwhelmed by bitterness and rage,”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“There are profound public health consequences to this glaring disconnect between the short-term evidence base for psychiatric drugs and the long-term relationships most of us go on to have with them. Besides the risk of long-term, disabling withdrawal symptoms caused by physiological dependence, there are the many possible adverse effects induced by all classes of these drugs, some of which might occur after short-term use and others after taking these drugs for months or years. These include (and are certainly not limited to) metabolic syndrome, diabetes, weight gain and obesity, fatty liver disease, parkinsonism, glaucoma, kidney disease, dementia, autoimmune conditions such as lupus, ventricular arrhythmias and other major adverse cardiovascular events, and sudden cardiac death.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I have yet to meet a long-term taker of these drugs who knew this prior to starting them; I certainly didn’t.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“In actuality, the length of a psychiatric drug efficacy trial is typically about six to eight weeks.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“The more I read, the more I could see that the personal mess I’d gotten myself into with psychiatric drug dependence and withdrawal was actually a complex, politicized, society-wide mess in which many millions of people had gotten lost.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“more than half had ties to pharmaceutical companies through research funding, consultancies, and paid speakers’ bureaus, including 100 percent of the DSM-IV Work Group members for the “Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders” and “Mood Disorders” categories. Little has changed since then: nearly 70 percent of the Work Group members of DSM-5, the current edition as of 2024, have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“I know I’m not the only one who missed the memo on the mythological nature of chemical imbalances and mental illness biomarkers. In one American survey, 92 percent of people interviewed said that they “had previously seen or heard depression described as being caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’ or ‘imbalance of chemicals in the brain’ ” and 85 percent “viewed chemical imbalance as a potential cause of depression.” This message was heard most often through television, which makes sense, as the United States is one of only two countries in the world that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescribed drugs. (Who can forget that sweet, sad, sighing Zoloft blob from the 2000s, with the gentle voice in the background explaining that “while the cause is not known, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain” and that Zoloft “works to correct this imbalance.”) In 2022, drug companies spent almost $8.1 billion targeting Americans through advertisements.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“What will it take for our society to begin questioning the collective assumption that the industries that have made trillions off our worsening pain—among them health, hospital, pharmaceutical, biotech, and tech—are the very ones we should trust to provide us resolution?”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Fight the stigma of mental illness!” we’re told by industry-funded advocacy campaigns designed to turn more people into lifelong consumers, as though our society hasn’t already completely accepted—even encouraged and praised—the practice of thinking and talking about oneself as psychiatrically sick.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance