Blocked and Reported

Premium: Unshrunk with Laura Delano

February 22, 2026

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  • The inaugural meeting of the Blocked and Reported Challenging Books Book Club focused on Laura Delano's book, *Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance*, which details her 14-year experience within the mental health system. 
  • Laura Delano received a Bipolar Disorder diagnosis at age 14, which she attributes to the mid-1990s trend of medicalizing normal adolescent angst (anger, despair, cutting) into psychiatric illness, a diagnosis she later realized allowed her to escape personal responsibility. 
  • Delano argues that psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia lack reliable biomarkers, asserting that behaviors labeled as mental illness are often complex responses to trauma, environmental conditions, and societal pressures, rather than discrete, inherent diseases. 

Segments

Podcast Preview and Book Club Launch
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The Blocked and Reported Challenging Books Book Club was inaugurated with Laura Delano’s book, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, as its first selection.
  • Summary: This segment serves as a preview for premium subscribers, detailing the launch of the book club focused on challenging literature. Full access, including segments where the host lost Wi-Fi, requires joining at blockedandreported.org. The book club’s theme was established as ‘challenging books’ upon meeting the author.
Author Bio and Book Summary
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(00:02:45)
  • Key Takeaway: Laura Delano founded the Inner Compass Initiative to help people make informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses and is a leading voice against the medicalized mental health industry.
  • Summary: Delano’s book chronicles her 14-year relationship with psychiatric diagnoses and medication, contextualizing her personal journey within the broader history of psychiatry’s medicalization. The book weaves in research about the drugs she was prescribed to contextualize her experience as part of a larger system, not an isolated mistake.
Teenage Crisis and Self-Injury
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(00:04:55)
  • Key Takeaway: Delano began self-harming (cutting) at age 13 as a way to release intense, pent-up anger against societal expectations and pressures, later using it to feel something when medicated.
  • Summary: She was first psychiatrized at 14 after experiencing an existential crisis stemming from growing up in an affluent, performance-driven environment in Greenwich, Connecticut. Cutting initially served as a non-suicidal release mechanism for anger, mimicking peers, and later became a way to counteract medication-induced numbness.
Bipolar Diagnosis and Validation
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(00:12:52)
  • Key Takeaway: Delano received a Bipolar Disorder diagnosis within an hour of her first psychiatric meeting because her anger and irritability were pathologized as mania, a common occurrence fueled by industry-funded studies in the mid-1990s.
  • Summary: The diagnosis provided a sense of comfort and validation, reframing her behavior as sickness rather than personal failing or a healthy response to an inauthentic environment. This diagnosis allowed her to lean into ‘patienthood’ as a way to assert agency by focusing on treatment, which paradoxically led to increased dysfunction.
Responsibility and Psychosis Language
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(00:18:29)
  • Key Takeaway: Medicalizing extreme behavior as ‘illness’ allows individuals to escape responsibility, though Delano acknowledges that genuinely psychotic individuals may not be fully responsible for their actions.
  • Summary: The language used to discuss psychosis, such as viewing public erratic behavior as ‘untreated illness,’ distorts the reality that such incidents often result from systemic failures, trauma, neglect, or drug use. When removing or tranquilizing severely symptomatic individuals, society should call it removal or incarceration rather than ’treatment’ to maintain straightforward conversation.
Scientific Basis of Psychiatric Diagnoses
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(00:23:05)
  • Key Takeaway: No reliable biomarkers have ever been found for psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, making the concept of a discrete, measurable disease state unscientific.
  • Summary: Twin studies attempting to prove a genetic component for schizophrenia have never been successfully replicated in scientific literature. While biological mechanisms cause psychosis (e.g., brain tumors), the idea of a discrete disease like schizophrenia, analogous to diabetes, is currently unproven according to agencies like the NIMH.