The memoir of one woman’s experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medications, and her journey to discover herself outside the mental health industry.
She tells her own story, and she tells it powerfully ... Delano’s story is compelling, important and even haunting, but plenty of readers will chafe at her lack of interest in those who have actually been helped by these medications ... One wonders...whether Delano is looking at the treatment of mental illness, and mental illness itself, through a particular lens, one that can feel reductionist in its own right ... She does not pretend to be cured; she does not claim that her mind is an easy or comfortable place to live ... But she makes a more universal point.
This very personal memoir has the potential to become a potent political manifesto ... Unshrunk will give [Trump and Kennedy] even more ammunition ... Delano’s description of her life off meds, liberated from the 'mental health industry,' isn’t exactly a portrait of wellness ... Delano has considerable skill as a memoirist. Her early chapters describing the alienation of a smart, sensitive, hyperaware teenager in an emotionally inhospitable universe cover Holden Caulfield territory in a new and highly engaging way ... Her account captures a number of ugly realities ... And yet, as the latest volume in a more-than-half-century-old strain of anti-psychiatry literature, Unshrunk is limited and highly predictable ... There’s much more accurate information, and deeper insight, available in the work of other sophisticatedly critical yet less polemical authors ... Like many mental health memoirs, Unshrunk suffers by sharing its author’s symptomology: In this case, it’s a study in black-and-white thinking.
What makes Unshrunk so valuable is not that Ms. Delano’s mental-health struggles are unusual. Just the opposite: Her experience is depressingly commonplace in 21st-century America ... Although her experience has left Ms. Delano skeptical of biological psychiatry, her descriptions of the psychiatric literature are reasonable and well-informed.
