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Blocked and Reported · Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Premium: Unshrunk with Laura Delano

February 22, 2026·26 min·2 clips
The host argues a bipolar diagnosis let her avoid responsibility, and Delano agrees it became self-fulfilling.
The preview starts as housekeeping. The host sets up the conversation as a premium feature, a Challenging Books Book Club session, and a Substack Live that somehow made it through a Wi-Fi failure. Then Laura gets the floor. She talks about early teenage despair, before psychiatric language had become the default way to describe every young person in trouble. The host presses, but gently. Was this depression, a crisis, or the kind of adolescent gloom that shows up before anyone knows what to call it? Laura does not let the label settle too easily. A psychiatrist put the language on her, she says, and that was when she began seeing herself through it. The exchange gets funny in a bleak little way. Jankos, simples, Delia's ball chain necklace, baby tees, and borrowed rebellion let them talk about pain without turning it into museum glass. Then the harder parts come back. Laura describes feeling trapped, thinking about death, and acting out at home in ways that were beyond ordinary moodiness. The host keeps pulling drama and diagnosis apart. That tension is the point: the conversation does not romanticize teenage suffering, but it also does not let medical categories swallow the whole story. Near the end, Laura rejects the idea that psychiatric illness can always be traced to trauma or environment. Individual lives are messier than that. Then the preview does what previews do. The host turns back to the bipolar diagnosis and the first treatment recommendation, and the paywall drops.

As heard by us

A skeptical, personal conversation about adolescent despair, diagnosis, and the limits of one-size-fits-all psychiatric explanations.

Laura Delano's conversation with the host is a pointed entry into the new Challenging Books Book Club, centered on Unshrunk and the question of how teenage distress becomes psychiatric language.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a tense, skeptical conversation about psychiatric labels and identity, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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