Laura Delano | Unshrunk

“If you’d told me back then that I’d one day decide to face my agonizing emotions, twisted thoughts, and relief-seeking impulses without translating them into symptoms to be treated with prescribed pharmaceuticals, I’d have called you crazy. If you’d told me that I’d eventually decide to leave behind that I had serious mental illness, the only framework for understanding my emotions and behaviors that had ever made any sense to me, I’d have been offended, convinced as I was that the only way for my pain to be properly acknowledged was through its medicalization. And if you’d handed me a memoir like this, I’d have glanced at the book jacket and handed it right back, outraged at the mere insinuation that my fourteen years of self-destructive madness might never have needed meds in the first place, or been symptoms of a brain disease at all.

The simplest way to put it is that I became a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven. The best way to describe what happened next is that I decided to leave behind all the diagnoses, meds, and professionals and recover myself.” Laura Delano