{"id":24106,"date":"2025-03-17T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24106"},"modified":"2025-03-17T12:23:40","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T12:23:40","slug":"the-ex-patients-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24106","title":{"rendered":"The Ex-Patients\u2019 Club"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise.<\/p>\n

At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.<\/p>\n

Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt still does go to the place of \u2014 what if the doctors are right?\u201d said Daniel.<\/p>\n

On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been \u201ca professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.\u201d During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time.<\/p>\n

Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, \u201cUnshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.<\/a>\u201d Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument \u2014 living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong.<\/p>\n

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On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise.At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse?\u201cIt still does go to the place of \u2014 what if the doctors are right?\u201d said Daniel.On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically.Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been \u201ca professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.\u201d During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time.Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, \u201cUnshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.\u201d Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument \u2014 living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24108,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24109,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24106\/revisions\/24109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}