Laura Delano Book Launch: Unshrunk
Schedule
Tue Mar 18 2025 at 05:00 pm to 06:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
GastroPark | West Hartford, CT
Join River Bend at West Hartford's GastroPark on March 18th at 5pm to celebrate Laura Delano and the launch of her new book, Unshrunk.About this Event
Join River Bend at West Hartford's GastroPark on March 18th at 5pm to celebrate Laura Delano and the launch of her new book, Unshrunk. We are thrilled to help Laura launch this powerful memoir of mental health.
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 more informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal. She is a leading voice in the international movement of people who’ve left behind the medicalized, professionalized mental health industry to build something different. Laura works with individuals and families around the world who are seeking guidance and support for the withdrawal journey and life post-psychiatry. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children.
ABOUT GASTROPARK
GastroPark believes that food unites, empowers, and celebrates our community.
Our indoor/outdoor foodie playground is a place where the whole family can enjoy an ever-changing selection of local food trucks and a great selection of cocktails, craft beers, and wine.
Free parking is available at GastroPark. If you can’t find a parking space make sure you park in a space that is off the street or you can park across New Park Avenue at the Elmwood CTfasttrack Station.
Where is it happening?
GastroPark, 637 New Park Avenue, West Hartford, United StatesUSD 0.00 to USD 34.55
