Unshrunk: A Memoir That Upsets the NYT and Which Freethinkers Will Love

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Bruce E Levine writes a rebuttal to the New York Times review of Laura Delano’s book Unshrunk in Counter Punch.

“Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, the newly published book by Laura Delano, is scaring the hell out of establishment psychiatry and its Big Pharma partners, who in recent years could count on the mainstream media to ignore books and films that cost them status and business. However, the mainstream media, including the New York Times, cannot simply ignore a book published by Viking, owned by Penguin Random House, especially a book authored by an articulate Harvard graduate and relative of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So, the NYT has attempted to marginalize Delano and Unshrunk in another way.

In reaction to Delano’s challenging the authority of establishment psychiatry, NYT reporter Ellen Barry, in a lengthy feature story, attempted to marginalize her (shortly after, the NYT published a tamer brief review of Unshrunk, written by non-NYT book author, which only accuses Delano of being “reductionist”). The job of the NYT, long made clear by Noam Chomsky, is to protect the status quo and the ruling class by marginalizing anyone who seriously challenges it and its enabling institutions. Barry does her job, insidiously demeaning Delano’s discoveries, her independence from professional authorities, and her valuing mutual aid; and Barry distorts the radical thrust of Unshrunk.”

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22 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for this Bruce. You untangled the Gordon knot. And a lot of the problem is no good solid systems just her and there efforts that work or sometimes don’t work. The show The Pitt in the last episode an almost throwaway line. Seeing the actual carnage after a maker shooting both parties at and all levels of staff traumatized one person asks a fix well isn’t psych here and the doc said no. This represents the folly of the years after WWII to divide the human psyche from the body and visa versa. It’s a terrible mess and very few people able to understand and or talk about. And barriers and obstacles and just more hurt and harm and few professionals able to do the 12 step A A framework for taking responsibility, admitting one’s errors and making amends.

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  2. I enjoy reading this rebuttal by Bruce Levine a lot! Thank you!

    “Bruce E Levine writes a rebuttal to the New York Times review of Laura Delano’s book Unshrunk in Counter Punch.”

    New York Times published two pieces about Laura’s book Unschrunk, one by Ellen Barry on March 17, 2025 being a feature story, and the other by Casey Schwartz on March 20, 2025, being a book review. Bruce’s rebuttal here is to the Ellen Barry’s feature story article, not to Casey Schwartz’s book review.

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    • I’ve been following this story closely. It strikes me that Delano has a great command of the facts and speaks succinctly about the problem as she sees it. Given the harm that psychiatry has caused me, I can’t bring myself to turn the other cheek as she does. As a result, she comes across as a kind and gentle person. I think her haters would really look stupid if Delano found herself in a debate with one of them.

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      • As one who has met Laura in real life, I will say Deleno is a kind and generous person, and agree “her haters would really look stupid if Delano found herself in a debate with one of them.”

        But that may be because, I too, am a truth telling psychopharmacology researcher … who found the medical evidence that the antipsychotics can create both the positive and negative symptoms of “schizophrenia,” via both anticholinergic toxidrome and neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome.

        But I do understand the big Pharma funded mainstream media is now starting to behave, seemingly, as bad as the scientific fraud based, big Pharma deluded, “mental health professions.”

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  4. Hey, if free thinkers would love reading any book at all, memoir or otherwise, then I’d hate to see what an enslaved thinker would look like. Anyway, as Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “There is no such thing as freedom of thought. It’s pure nonsense.” We can confirm this for ourselves by noticing that all thought is socially conditioned. True imagination, that fire or magma of imaginative images, is pre-linguistic but because language and concepts condition the brain they increasingly condition imagination by the same sense of reality and the laws of movement. Radical, free imagination implies a thought-free mind, and is the origin of all that is truly creative. It is natures way and that of the whole cosmos. Anyways, stop picking cat fights with the NYT because they have more puff in them then you and will never concede until all their dug in trenches of defensive conclusions have been exposed and exploded away, and who can be bothered to do that eh? Those who are so boring they read books. Books are for when you’ve run out of ashtrays or toilet rolls, not for reading or even less ‘killing time’ (which is in the same class as committing suicide because committing suicide is the supreme form of killing time).

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    • Books are alive in the same way that you and I are alive, and by accessing the writings of “dead” thinkers we act on the past simultaneously by allowing them to act on us presently when we re-create their original discoveries in our own thinking processes. It is literally a method of resurrection. Reading is a door of access to time travel outside the ordinary (habitual) passage of seemingly discrete chronologically-‘arranged’ moments; reading is a dharma door just as much as entheogens or sleep deprivation can be depending on set and setting.

      Imagery is only one form of imagination, anyone can have pre-conscious sensory experiences or extra-sensory experiences of any type because the doors of consciousness are infinite. You might want to read up on synesthesia, which it surprises me you don’t know about considering how often you blubber on about “hallucinogens,” which is a misnomer because the real hallucination is the before/after dualism in relation to the entheogenic catalyst of relatively unusual “states” of consciousness. (Discussing states of consciousness is improper terminology because it implies a static existence of a discrete alteration to a singular dialectical process so it’s meta-redundant.) Terrence McKenna agreed with you that words are like water which doesn’t wet the ducks’ feathers.

      I think you’re more right than wrong about the natures of thinking and imagination but still guilty of errorism, bhagavante.

      By the way, completing suicide won’t kill time; only your body’s relationship to time as you know it. Read the Katha Upanishad if you want a guide that will teach you how to destroy time.

      Who can be bothered to do that… you and I both, apparently. Your panoramic perspective has a few blind spots.

      You’re a skillful writer and if you read more books it will help you cultivate your talents.

      As Alan Watts said, the teeth can’t bite themselves o mahasattva, great unconditioned one.

      Pax

      Disclaimer: This comment is a bunch of horseshit. I stand by every word.

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      • Actually, all your comment is based on the assumption that thought has value. It does, but it has a negative and destructive value, destructive of natural freedom. This is definitely a fact. Nothing you write here is a fact at all I’m afraid, and that is a fact. I wish it were otherwise.

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  5. Thank you, MIA! I very much enjoyed reading Bruce’s finely tuned rebuttal to Ellen Barry’s passive-aggressive attempt at discrediting Laura’s hard-won knowledge born of her own equally hard-won LIVED EXPERIENCE.

    I have to admit I found myself more amused than angry at Barry’s particular brand of seemingly erudite clownshit. It must be because I’ve learned to expect as much from seemingly erudite clownshit publications.

    The fact of the matter is it really doesn’t matter how or what some “journalist” writes in some publication (no matter how well-known) because Laura’s the one who wrote a book WHOSE TIME HAS COME even though there’s no shortage of “journalists” more than willing to undermine and belittle her personally just for having the courage to tell a story that NEEDS TO BE TOLD.

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  7. To be honest, I didn’t know the “NEW YORK TIMES” was so bad. I had gotten from my fathers books by Harold C Schonberg about the classic composers, and thought heh…… But reading this article, what they said about a whole list of things, and then other stuff not even mentioned that I know aren’t going to be reported correctly just about anywhere…….

    I wouldn’t read the New York Times about ANYTHING political or scientific or medical, unless I wanted to read just one viewpoint, to see what THAT was, and would never find it having perspective… wouldn’t read it but for that one viewpoint ideology etc. Just to see what those people are saying, but I wouldn’t believe that I then knew in general…….

    But that’s the way in general with such publications. Has been for years and for years. History itself. What’s in the books.

    Most people are SO filled with fear thinking they have to know, have an opinion, have filled their brain with set input, or they aren’t safe, they wouldn’t know what’s going on to begin with, only see what they are told to believe.

    In general it’s not believed that sacrificing a goat or a virgin is going to bring safety, that this will appease God, and yet why was this ever going on. I don’t think it was even about “God,” it was a means to traumatize people, to put fear in their lives and gain control. On the other side it was that they think they need these “authorities.” So and such is powerful because it will terrorize people into behaving. etc. etc…..

    Now it’s more ideas like a “chemical imbalance,” or “terrorism,” or other “enemies,” and how much are such things produced in order to brainwash people? Mind control 101, make people think they are under attack and you can control them.

    Watch the News. Read the New York Times. And you have both factions of enemy and hero changing places on the other side so both can profit off of the gullibility of people.

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      • Birdsong, I have an “important” message. Apparently, the Universe agrees with us regarding fear. Because when I clicked on this story, the listed number of views was 666. NOW it is 667. BIG CHANGE to let go of fear…… JUST IMAGINE had I not agreed with you?

        That said. It remains unbelievable to me, not only how people behave, worshiping fear as a necessary tool for getting what they want, as if that doesn’t separate them from their “enemy” and in doing so limits their concepts from even knowing what they are aiming for. From not seeing themselves in their enemy, and how they invest in fear to keep that going, and kill themselves, potential, harmony and piece to keep such :justice” going to creating incredibly corrupt dark pockets in this “discipline” they say they think they need to implement this fear. You can NOT tell them they don’t know what they are doing, and you can’t tell them about the dark pockets controlling everything consequently. They would say those are conspiracy theories…

        As I said: “Watch the News. Read the New York Times. And you have both factions of enemy and hero changing places on the other side so both can profit off of the gullibility of people.”

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        • Just to make sure you know I was completely joking regarding 666. Me and a really good friend were at one time making a whole book, like you would have on a coffee table, with jokes about 666. For example, put three sixes sequentially down three steps, and I called it “the descent of the beast,” and we had one in a perambulator. Still have it around here somewhere.

          Unfortunately, my friend at one time was put on some sort of neuroleptic. She had moved into a new place, and thought she was being a bit florid, and unfortunately went you know where and got a you know what, and you know what. I think the only affect it had was that in the long run she couldn’t sleep did she not take it. She then had a heart attack just before covid. I think she was then already 78. I didn’t even know because her family did nothing but send her body for cadaver use at the local University’s medical department. I had been having really deep dreams, then heard she had passed on, and then heard her voice rather funny: “I guess I’m dead now,” or so. When we had talked about this she was an adamant atheist. She would say that she would become part of the earth, the sun etc. She is someone I had no sorrow for, because I knew she had a good life, despite everything, and she always did things her own way, completely. And she was a really really good friend… actually I have seen her since, I forgot.

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          • Birdsong, I had to laugh. There seem to be a lot of people that think there’s harm in seeing there’s more to physical life and death than meets the eye when it actually does meet the eye. I mean it’s one thing when it remains invisible but when it actually starts animating itself in the physical as well then people really start having problems don’t they? Then it’s schizophrenic or conspiracy theories or whatever…… They especially have problems wheln it shows to exist but they can’t control it to their money ambitions or territorial disputes or need to dominate and control people. And even worse than that, when it’s not going to control people with fear to their morals and limitations, people have big problems. Can’t exist. As if miracles are from the devil or something…..

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        • Very interesting comments and I totally get the same number experiences as do so many, and the meanings are made obvious in context. And I totally agree with your sober observation that you wouldn’t ever believe anything they wrote about science, politics or society or medicine or anything else. Do we see that Robert Whittaker is beginning to understand the broader social problems that frustrates progress in psychiatry? Because he’s not blindly informing the mental health community about the facts – he is at least now realizing the broader structural problems that prevent reform in the field, in this case the media, but I say he needs to step back and consider these problems in relation to the state of society and humanity and the world right now. Because it is only in seeing these problems as one whole that our action can be intelligent and effective in relation to it, because psychiatry is not an isolable entity or thing: psychiatry, psychopharmacology, psychological services and so forth are all structures within social and economic and intellectual reality and these structures are like the sinews in our body – they only make sense in relation to the whole body, and any dysfunction is only truly grasped as part of the whole dysfunction we call society or the social-historical process which incudes our socially conditioned intellectual life. And implicitly I see that you are examining these problems in relation to the problems of the whole of life, hence immediately negate the validity of a fight with the NYT because this very fighting is indicative of the undue credibility you gave to them in the first place. Perhaps intellectually shaming them would have value in the context of a social reality which merely required reform, if such a social reality has ever existed, but I’m afraid it is destroying itself and must destroy itself, otherwise there is nothing left of the Earth let alone our lives which have become petty, superficial, confusing, insecure and destructive precisely because of all these problems in our social and intellectual reality and consciousness.

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