"Stay strong & courageous!" This was the message Laura Delano wrote when she signed my copy of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (2025) at the Brownstone Institute event in Connecticut on April 23rd.

As a physician, I have spent years helping patients discontinue medication - particularly psychiatric drugs. The process is far more difficult than it should be. I've encountered significant barriers: gaps in medical training, institutional resistance, and a clinical culture that rewards prescribing but offers little guidance on how to stop. This void in psychiatric care is not just a clinical inconvenience - it's a public health issue.

After reading compelling articles by Jeffrey Tucker and Maryanne Demasi, I was eager to explore Delano's perspective as someone who has lived inside the system. My intuition was right: what she describes in Unshrunk resonated deeply with what I have witnessed both personally and professionally - a system that locks physicians and psychiatrists into rigid protocols favoring long-term medication, while neglecting adverse effects and failing to offer a viable path to true recovery.

Delano's memoir is both deeply personal and widely relevant. She traces her journey through over a decade of psychiatric treatment - beginning at age 13 - highlighting not just her experience, but a system that medicalizes distress, pathologizes adolescence, and discourages critical inquiry. Her eventual path to healing takes place outside the medical establishment, a decision I understand well from my own experience.

There are few roadmaps for those seeking alternatives, and Delano's story powerfully illustrates both the risks and possibilities of forging one's own way.

Unshrunk is also a broader indictment of modern psychiatry and raises uncomfortable but necessary questions: Why are so many young people being placed on psychiatric drugs? What constitutes informed consent when patients are rarely told how difficult it can be to stop? These questions are especially urgent in light of the findings from the recent MAHA report, which details the scale and consequences of overmedication in psychiatry.

Delano does more than tell her story. She compels us to reconsider the assumptions underpinning psychiatric care today. Unshrunk challenges the medicalization of normal life experiences and makes a compelling case for transparency, education, and patient empowerment. Most importantly, it advocates for real knowledge around psychiatric drug tapering - knowledge that remains disturbingly scarce in mainstream medical practice.

A Story That Resonates

Jeffrey Tucker, chairman of Brownstone Institute, opened the evening with a compelling introduction. Reading eloquently from the first chapter of Unshrunk, he set the tone for what was to come: a powerful narrative about distorted self-perception, ego doubt, and the fundamental question of how we come to know what is true. Delano's story takes readers deep into the internal world of a teenage girl navigating adolescence in the privileged, yet often stifling, culture of America's upper class.

When Delano took the stage, she spoke with conviction and clarity. Her voice carried the weight of experience. The story she told was gripping - raw, vulnerable, and unflinchingly honest. I found myself holding my breath at times, struck by how deeply her journey echoed my own thoughts and observations as a physician. But her story is not just her own.

It reflects the lived experiences of countless others who have suffered under the weight of psychiatric labels and medications - many of whom never find the words, or the audience, to share what they've endured.

What makes Delano's account so powerful is not only the depth of her suffering but her ability to look back with honesty, insight, and compassion. She examines her years as a psychiatric patient with a clarity that gives voice to many who have remained unheard.

Her journey begins like so many others: the existential doubt...