Prozac Nation
by Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth WurtzelEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-10-01
ISBN: 1573225126
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Book Reviews of Prozac Nation
Book Review: Excerpted from http://kachinacrowe.journalspace.com
Summary: 5 Stars
Prozac Nation:Young and Depressed in America says everything we've wanted to say. Elizabeth Wurtzel in 362 pages has managed to put together all the paradoxical points of illogical logic that is the nature of depression. And, I'm just going to relate my entire review to me, because I can. The book is a good read, challenging because Wurtzel isn't just "a woman in her mid-twenties, thus far of no particularly oustanding accomplishment, [who had] the audacity to write a three-hundred page volume about her own life and nothing more." (355) In the years since the publication of Prozac Nation in 1994, the book became a major motion picture and Wurtzel published several other books. Prozac Nation chronicles her sickness from her formative years. It begins however in something like the present: like many, Wurtzel had opted to try life without lithium and has failed miserably -- she is carried away to her own bed. The book then goes back in time to one of many summer camps she was sent to -- camps where she took her first overdose of allergy pills, threatened her parents, and ultimately escaped to the Jersey suburbs. She sees her first therapist young, but treatment is stopped because her estranged father refuses to foot the bill. This is an incident that happens frequently and for much of the book Wurtzel sees the root of the problem in her father who walked out on her. Her life goes on and so does her depression dragging along with it the fervent belief that someday she will bottom out and someone will help her.
"It seemed that we were still operating with the same old rules: Once you feel desperate enough to be institutionalized, there is help available, and insurance to cover the cost; until then, you're on your own, kid."
The book sails through her years in high school, making a "Jesus Christ" out of boyfriends and constantly being pitted between her mother and her father. Wurtzel compares depression to an addiction and later in the Epilogue, Prozac Nation, examines duplicitous nature of depression. Depression can be a symptom of a sickness or a symptom that becomes a sickness: years of chronic dysthymia (mild depression) can create a chemical imbalance or a chemical imbalance can cause years of dysthymia. She describes chronic atypical depression like hers as:
Depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it is impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
Wurtzel knows shes bad off, but can't explain it to others: she went to private New York high school and got into Harvard. Like many she finds that short a suicide attempt, help is meaningless advice and occasionally a rest in the Harvard infirmary. Wurtzel starts Prozac when it is approved by the FDA but still has suicidal day dreams. At the threat of being committed to a mental hospital, she locks herself in a bathroom and takes an overdose of Mellaril landing her again in the hospital. This is the bottoming out she spent her life searching for, but in an ironic twist she also sees the light at the end of the tunnel -- Prozac has provided her with the perspective to see the little things in life that there are to live for.
The end of the book is largely about the Cult of Depression and how Wurtzel went from being a "freakishly depressed person" to "downright trendy." As Prozac becomes the second most prescribed medication and 6,000.000 people are taking it for problems from mild malaise to full blown depression, depression appears to have become the common cold of generation X. Wurtzel expresses her frustration -- having spent an entire lifetime proving to the system that she needed help, that she wasn't just sad it seems that Wurtzel is looking forward to another lifetime asserting that her depression is not trendy.
"Every so often, I find myself with the urge to make sure people know that I am not just on Prozac but on lithium too, that I am a real sicko, a depressive of a much higher order than all these happy-pill poppers with their low-level sorrow. Or else I feel compelled to remind people that I've been on Prozac since the F.D.A. first approved it, that I've been taking it longer than anyone else on earth..."
Wurtzel lightly touches on the prescription of SSRIs to young adolescents her fear that the early prescription of psychopharmological drugs robs us of the "faith in the mind to cure itself."
I read Prozac Nation in two days. Some passages made me cry, because the sentiments felt so familiar and other times I was struck by the astuteness of Wurtzel's observations about the daily battle with depression. She quotes Heraclitus saying "how can you hide from what never goes away," and later lifts a line from <u>The Sun Also Rises</u> explaining the slow sudden surprise of full blown depression; that it comes, "Gradually then suddenly." She discusses her fears that Prozac will rob her of her personality, that through it all depression had been an overwhelming aspect of her general character -- where will she be with out it?
Without her depression Elizabeth Wurtzel has been a prolific and productive writer. <u>Prozac Nation</u> has the broad time span of <u>Prozac Diary</u> (Lauren Slater) but some how is not as angry. Wurtzel expresses her sentiments as an outsider, without being quite as far from the fold as Susanna Kaysen in <u>Girl Interrupted</u>. <u>Prozac Nation</u> is a clever book, a fast read and often times funny through it all. I give this book a five out of five. Five what you say?
Little green and white pills.
Summary of Prozac Nation
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation still manages to be a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.
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