Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
From Publishers Weekly –
Twenty-six-year-old Wurtzel, a former critic of popular music for New York and the New Yorker, recounts in this luridly intimate memoir the 10 years of chronic, debilitating depression that preceded her treatment with Prozac in 1990. After her parents’ acrimonious divorce, Wurtzel was raised by her mother on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The onset of puberty, she recalls, also marked the onset of recurrent bouts of acute depression, sending her spiraling into episodes of catatonic despair, masochism and hysterical crying. Here she unsparingly details her therapists, hospitalizations, binges of sex and drug use and the paralyzing spells of depression which afflicted her in high school and as a Harvard undergraduate and culminated in a suicide attempt and ultimate diagnosis of atypical depression, a severe, episodic psychological disorder. The title is misleading, for Wurtzel skimps on sociological analysis and remains too self-involved to justify her contention that depression is endemic to her generation. By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention.
My thoughts –
Overall I thought this was a pretty decent memoir, and from everything I know about depression, a pretty accurate portrayal of the disease. I was a psychology major in college so these types of books are always very interesting to me, and I was no doubt interested in Wurtzel’s story just as I anticipated I would be. Having worked as a suicide hotline volunteer for two years, I recognized most of her symptoms and experiences as legitimate, true feelings of depressives and suicidal individuals. At the same time, the book felt redundant to me at times, and I sort of feel like she could have told the same story in half the pages, and it would have still been as worthwile and important. I do think hers is an important story to tell, and I’m glad she did. I’m sure when the book was published it made a lot of people feel better and more at ease about their own depression, perhaps making people feel that they were not completely alone and that other people had gone through the same thing and come out alive and happy in the end. The title “Prozac Nation” is somewhat misleading, in my opinion; Wurtzel only talks about prozac at the very end, when she discusses not only its merits but also the fact that six million Americans are currently (or were, when she published the book) medicated with the drug. Generally, however, I did enjoy this memoir and I think it is a worthwile read, especially for people who know someone suffering from depression, as it gives quite an insight as to what goes on in the depressive mind.
Book Addiction 