An Evening with Author Laura Delano in Conversation with Theresa Brown

Laura Delano joins us for a conversation about her book, UNSHRUNK. Following the talk, there will be time for Q&A with the audience and book signing. We hope to see you there!

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About the book:

The powerful memoir of one woman’s experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medications, and her journey to discover herself outside the mental health industry
At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death.
Delano’s initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga. For the next thirteen years, she sought help from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a prescription cascade of nineteen drugs. After some resistance, Delano accepted her diagnosis and embraced the pharmaceutical regimen that she’d been told was necessary to manage her incurable, lifelong disease. But her symptoms only worsened. Eventually doctors declared her condition so severe as to be “treatment resistant.” A disturbing series of events left her demoralized, but sparked a last glimmer of possibility. . . . What if her life was falling apart not in spite of her treatment, but because of it? After years of faithful psychiatric patienthood, Delano realized there was one thing she hadn’t tried—leaving behind the drugs and diagnoses. This decision would mean unlearning everything the experts had told her about herself and forging into the terrifying unknown of an unmedicated life.
Weaving Delano’s medical records and doctors’ notes with an investigation of modern psychiatry and illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk questions the dominant, rarely critiqued role that the American mental health industry, and the pharmaceutical industry in particular, plays in shaping what it means to be human.

About the author:

Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and the founder of Inner Compass Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps people make informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. She is a leading voice in the international movement to offer patients an alternative to the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry. Delano works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support during their withdrawal journeys and in their post-psychiatric lives. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children. Her book, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, was published in March 2025.

About the conversation partner:

Theresa Brown, PhD, RN, New York Times’ bestselling writer of The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives, is the author most recently of the award-winning Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient, an exploration of her breast cancer treatment in the context of her work as an oncology nurse. Her new book, 4 Nurses, on finding hope in health care, will be released Fall 2026. Brown has written extensively for the New York Times and also for CNN.com and the American Journal of Nursing and has been interviewed on the NPR programs “Fresh Air” and “Here & Now,” and appeared on “Hardball,” and MSNBC live. Brown has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and inspired by her kids, left academia to become a nurse, a career change she has never regretted.

Event Venue

Riverstone Books, 5841 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, United States

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