Laura Delano > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy,”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Withdrawal, for many people, looks like a more intense version of the very symptoms for which they were prescribed their psych meds in the first place. For others, it looks like the sudden onset of a terrifying, new mental or physical illness.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“In Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker presents a very different argument. He sees these dramatically increasing numbers of disabling psychiatric conditions as a curious “medical puzzle” because they correspond directly to the dramatically increasing numbers of people on the very medications we’ve been told are effective ways of treating mental illness. I quickly saw how relevant this puzzle was for me: If psychiatry had such effective treatments, wouldn’t I have started to feel relief somewhere along the line? Despite spending so many years relying on pills and prescribers and therapists and programs and locked wards, I’d never actually felt lasting positive change of any kind.”
― 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

“We’re not actually doing anything with our lives,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere. It’s like this is our job, to come here, sit all day, and talk about the same stuff over and over. All these silly little dramas in here between us are just a big distraction from the real world.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“chemical—whether it’s alcohol or caffeine or heroin or an antidepressant—disrupts neurotransmitter function. If that exposure is fleeting, the disruption may well be too. But things get more complicated when the exposure continues regularly for longer than a few weeks, sometimes even just a few days. What was initially a fleeting disruption may become a more substantive, lasting one, prompting the body, in its quest to maintain homeostasis, to change its structure and functioning in response. This now-artificial homeostasis is a sign of physical dependence: the body has changed itself so substantially that it now depends on that medication, in a purely physiological sense, to maintain this readjusted state of internal balance. In other words, whereas a medication is initially disruptive to a body that’s never been exposed to it before, once that med has been taken regularly for long enough to cause physical dependence, it’s the med’s removal that becomes the disrupting force.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Whitaker poses what he calls a heretical question: Is it possible that psychiatry’s medication-based standard of care is actually causing people to become psychiatrically disabled? Is it possible, in other words, that the treatment is making people sick?”
― 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

“What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t for many years, was that Provigil is essentially a potent form of speed.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“Hers is a story of a possible iatrogenic process at work, of an otherwise normal person being made chronically sick by diagnosis and subsequent treatment. And thus we have to wonder: Do we have a paradigm of care that can, at times, create mental illness?”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“What a radical concept to consider, that a meaningful sense of purpose came not from trying to figure myself out but instead from shifting the focus off myself altogether.”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“When Benjamin began to reduce my lithium, a rancid, rotting stench started emanating from my sternum area. No matter how hard I scrubbed at my chest with soap or exfoliated it with a washcloth or coated it with astringent, the odor returned within minutes, leaving me nauseated by my own aroma. (Whether others could smell me I wasn’t sure, as I didn’t let anyone get close.) The lithium reduction also brought on tender, painful boils the size and firmness of peas that burst forth on my chest, neck, and cheeks. I’d spend an hour in front of the mirror, squeezing and pushing and inserting sewing needles into them to see if they’d empty out, which they never did. The bright lights and clinking carts and trilling cell phones at the grocery store made it feel like I was on acid. My heart often seemed to skip beats. I was so overly sensitized to stimuli that the clicking sound of a closing door or blurry flash of a bird flying by was enough to make my chest pound violently, put the taste of metal on my tongue, and set off tunnel vision. 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

“As long as I take those three pink lithium-carbonate capsules every day, I can function,” explains Jaime Lowe in a 2015 New York Times Magazine piece titled “I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium.” (In the article, she maps out the geological, medical, technological, and cultural history of lithium, interweaves her own story of taking lithium for twenty years, and grapples with the fact that she’s recently learned the drug has irreversibly damaged her kidneys.)”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

“(Many people have had similarly dangerous experiences in short- and long-term addiction facilities; one of the common pieces of wisdom shared among people who’ve come off their psych meds is to avoid these facilities at all costs.)”
― Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance