by Laura Delano
First published 2025
Laura Delano chronicles her thirteen-year journey through America's mental health system after receiving her first bipolar diagnosis at fourteen. Despite maintaining academic excellence and athletic achievement, she accumulated multiple diagnoses and nineteen different medications from top psychiatrists and hospitals nationwide. Delano initially resisted but eventually accepted her supposed lifelong, incurable condition and the pharmaceutical treatments doctors insisted were necessary. Her symptoms continued worsening until physicians labeled her "treatment resistant." Through careful examination of her medical records, doctor's notes, and research on prescribed medications, Delano questions whether her deteriorating condition resulted from her treatment rather than despite it. She documents her decision to abandon psychiatric drugs and diagnoses entirely, requiring her to reject expert opinions about her identity and navigate an unmedicated existence. The book challenges the mental health industry's dominant influence on human identity and examines the pharmaceutical industry's role in defining psychological normalcy.
Genres: mental-health, autobiography, social-issues, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: challenging, critical, intimate, investigative, thought-provoking
Tropes: personal-journey-of-discovery, systemic-critique, unreliable-narrator-of-authority
Setting: United States
Period: 21st century
Paperback
Content warnings: drug-use, medical-trauma, mental-illness