All right. I'm with Laura Delano, everybody. Welcome to Walkins, welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here, Bridget.

It's so good to see you again. Now we've met in person. Now we are doing this virtually. I wish we could have done it in person because I always prefer it. I think the interviews are just better with no time delay on laughing and jokes and whatnot. But I'm excited to still

talk to you. I think you have a book that is out that is really capturing the zeitgeist of this

movement with Maha, just a, and as you and I were talking about even before we logged in and and started

recording this probably would have come about anyway so everybody who's listening

her book is called unshrunk a story of psychiatric treatment resistance everybody

should go click and buy it and read it but tell us a little bit about what inspired

you to write this book my inspiration came i think just from recognizing that my the 14 years i

spent growing up as a psychiatric patient basically through my teens and 20s were, what

it would happen to me during those years was far more common than I originally thought.

When I left all of it behind in my late 20s, by which I mean I decided I didn't want to be on these

medications anymore. I didn't want to identify with any of the diagnoses that I'd been given.

I was so overwhelmed and disoriented by what had just happened in those previous years and also by where to go from there

because I'd grown up psychiatrised, as I like to put it.

And it wasn't long before I realized that, yeah, what happened to me is about much more than just me.

This is about our culture's, you know, deep, deep relationship to quick fixes. This is about

this spiritual, you know, this kind of eternal spiritual quest to understand what it means to

suffer and to go mad and to break down. And I knew I needed to take what I'd been through and turn

it into something that might help someone else. And I think, of course, too, to make sense of what

it happened. So I knew I would write a book one day, but it wasn't until about five years ago that

I actually set out to do it. And what was it like writing the book for you to have to go back and relive a lot of

that? One of the cool things about this book is that you have all of your like psychiatric records

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