Laura Delano is the author and narrator of Unshrunk. She grew up very well off, an outstanding student, and a competitive squash player. But at 14 years old, she began having mental health problems--struggling with her feelings and anger towards her family. She saw her first psychiatrist who labeled her as bipolar and started her on a mood stabilizer and antidepressant. And so for the next thirteen years, Delano's life was a parade of more psychiatrists, more prescribed drugs, more symptoms, repeated stays in hospitals, thoughts of suicide, and one serious suicide attempt.
Delano's family was able to give her access to some very good psychiatric resources. She also managed to graduate from Harvard and go to a debutante ball in the middle of all of this. But her mental, and then physical health was such a struggle, that Delano did not want to live anymore. Doctors told her she had "treatment resistant" bipolar, which meant the drugs weren't helping her, and she needed more.
After being put in a Borderline Personality Group Therapy class, Delano met another woman who convinced her to go to AA meetings. These meetings helped Delano get sober, and she started taking a more active part in her care. She read all of the information she could get about the drugs she'd been prescribed. Most of them were FDA approved because the drug's efficacy had been shown through six-week trials. (And sometimes this efficacy was only marginally better than the placebo effect). There were no long-term trials, and they had never been tested on children, including the ones she had been prescribed as a child. She also read about some of the debilitating side effects, many of which can cause new mental or physical issues.
Delano decided to get off of her meds, but there was also very little information about safely getting off psychiatric medications. These meds can affect every system in the body, and she'd been taking them for years. Lithium is the go-to drug for bipolar, but there is a very fine line between the amount of drug that is therapeutic and the amount that is toxic. In addition, getting off bipolar medication too fast can trigger a larger manic episode than never taking it in the first place. Delano found her best information on various online forums from other patients who had used trial and error to very slowly wean themselves off.
In the end, Delano was able to wean herself off all of her medications, stay sober, be a part of a healthy relationship, run a business, and raise her children. She says that her brain is certainly not always healthy, but she is better now at dealing with negative thoughts and emotions. Delano is not against all psychiatric drugs for all people, but she thinks they are pushed too quickly without adequately informing the patients of the real risks and other options.
I appreciated that Delano telling her own story really showed how difficult dealing with mental health problems can be. Some people are under the illusion that psychiatric drugs are some kind of panacea. If anyone has mental health issues, they just need to get on their meds. But it's not that simple. Delano was compliant with her meds and trying everything, desperate to get better. Instead, she kept spiraling down. I could see why she was hopeless.
In the end, though, like most psychiatric books I read, I found it kind of depressing. I'm glad that Delano was able to figure out what worked for her. But she is very smart, determined, and has a large amount of support and resources. Also, what worked for her, isn't necessarily going to work for someone else. There are plenty of people whose psych meds are incredibly helpful to them. What it comes down to in the end, is we don't really understand mental health very well.
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