Prozac Nation Elizabeth Wurtzel

Posted on 30-04-2021 by admin

Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

A memoir of a depressed, heavily medicated young woman who identifies with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other tragic figures—and fantasizes about being profiled as a tragic suicide in New York magazine. Born in 1967, Wurtzel grew up in New York City, the precocious only child of divorced parents. At six, she wrote her first book. At the age of 11, she carved up her legs with razor blades. Study Guide for Prozac Nation. Prozac Nation study guide contains a biography of Elizabeth Wurtzel, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

Genre: Memoir

Wear, Delese

Date of entry: Apr-08-2002
Last revised: Mar-22-2010

Summary

Prozac Nation is Wurtzel's memoir of her depression, which she traces from the age of 11 to her senior year in college in chapters marking different phases or manifestations of her illness. The book situates her illness squarely within her family dynamics where she found herself the 'battlefield on which [her] parents' differences were fought,' and describes in excruciating detail her inner life that at any given time was marked with a 'free-flowing messy id' to nihilism, numbness, rage, and fear, ultimately leading to a suicide attempt. The last few chapters chronicle her slow 'recovery,' due to her conflicted relationship with psychopharmacology and an extraordinary psychiatrist.

Commentary

Content and style are fused in Prozac Nation as the author textually enacts her depression, resulting in a book that wears the reader down with its self pity, despair, and an endless struggle simply to live--an experience much like living with a chronically depressed person, which makes the book work. Wurtzel uses extraordinary language to describe her depression--always running from a huge black wave about to crash over her; feeling like 'the walking, waking dead'; having skin like 'thin gauze bandages.'

The chronology is also effective, with each chapter focusing on a very specific time in her life beginning at age 11, 'full of promise,' when depression hit her not as a 'sudden disaster' but as 'accumulated data.' With each subsequent chapter, Wurtzel discloses the intensity and enormous variations of depression, along with the differences in treatment styles in this 'pre-Prozac' period.

The suicide attempt, which readers keep expecting in each chapter, finally occurs toward the end of the memoir: 'I am doing exactly the thing I don't want to do, committing the act I believed I was above: making a wimpy attempt that is bound to fail.' With her failure comes euphoria, however, as she discovers she has survived an 'attempt on [her] life,' which she characterizes as 'the purest and most deliberate act of hatred [she] has ever committed.'

The final chapters provide intriguing, knotty questions about psychopharmacology as Wurtzel on one hand characterizes Prozac as a national joke, trendy, a silly drug for crybabies, cosmetic pharmacology for the U.S., which is in 'one big collective bad mood'; and on the other, as a drug that literally saves lives. Her writing complicates the issues surrounding psychopharmacology and therapy, and her attempt to 'write a book that felt as bad as it feels to feel this bad . . . to be true to the experience of depression' hits the mark.

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Book Review

Prozac Nation
Young and Depressed in America:
A Memoir

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

(Riverhead Books, New York, 1995)

reviewed by Douglas A. Smith

I read this book because a psychologist told me it would convince me psychiatric drugs such as Prozac help people. After reading every word of all 368 pages of this book, I can tell you it did not. Furthermore, the author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, did not intend for her book to convince people of anything. In a 1995 Afterword published after the original 1994 edition of the book, she says 'Prozac Nation is, as far as I'm concerned, a memoir with no particular thesis or point, nothing in it championing any cause ... telling only a small personal tale of one girl's mental hell' (p. 355).
The author's detailed description of the circumstances that caused her dispair makes clear the causes were entirely events in her life, not biological abnormality such as the mythical, elusive 'chemical imbalance' on which many people foolishly blame their so-called depression. Primary among the causes of her deeply sorrowful feelings were being in the crossfire of her battling, divorced parents, and loss of her relationship with her father after custody was granted to her mother. Her relationship with her mother as she grew up wasn't good either. For example, she says that although she absolutely hated summer camp, 'my mother sent me here [to summer camp] for an eight-week reprieve from single motherhood' (p. 14).
Her self-esteem was probably harmed by her father telling her, when she was about ten years old, that once her mother became pregnant with her, she 'wanted to have an abortion, that she'd gotten as fas as the gynecologist's office and was all set to have a D and C, and that he physically restrained her to prevent the process. Later, when I told my mother about that conversation, she began to cry and said that the opposite was true' (p. 28). Each parent claiming the other didn't want her was shortly before the onset of her so-called depression.
She summarized her upbringing as follows: 'My parents are divorced, I grew up in a female-headed househould, my mother was always unemployed or marginally employed, my father was always uninvolved or marginally involved in my life. There was never enough money for anything, my mom had to sue my dad for unpaid child support and unpaid medical bills, my dad eventually disappeared' (p. 33).
Other causes were disappointments in life that make anyone extremely sad, such being rejected by a boyfriend she loved after a long relationship with him. Her description of her life is a classic and undeniable example of despondency or 'depression' being caused by what she experienced in life rather than by some as-yet-undiscovered biological cause of depression (or some known cause, of which there are none).
What's more, she says 'To ask anyone how he happened to fall into a state of despair always involves new variations on the same myriad mix of family history. There is always divorce, death, drunkenness, drug abuse and whatnot in any of several permutations' (p. 34). Of course, to family members of those mired in a state of dispair or so-called depression or other so-called mental illness, such as members of the misnamed National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), this is horrible news. They prefer to believe so-called mental illness including depression is caused by a 'chemical imbalance' or other physical illness that, as they often say, 'is no one's fault.'
Another cause of her despondency or so-called depression is what I sometimes call the curse of high expectations: She says 'I somehow managed to win the school Brochos Bee, the Jewish equivalent of a spelling bee, five years in a row. ... as a child I was completely convinced that I could do anything on earth I wanted to' (pp. 39-40). Much of her story is about the time she was a student at Harvard University, one of the most selective and perhaps the most prestigious insititution of higher learning in the USA if not the world. High expectations make anyone more likely to feel disappointed or sad, even very sad, for the reason shown in the following 'equasion':

happiness = success
expectations Looking at this 'equasion' you can see that if your expectations are low, say a value of 1, then with success equalling a value of 10 your happiness equals a value of 10. But if your expectations are high, say a value of 100, with the same success your happiness equals a value of only 0.1.
She does present the following theory - repeat, theory - of how her despondency could be biological and be helped by a so-called antidepressant drug: 'In the case of my own depression, I have gone from a thorough certainty that its origins are in bad biologiy to a more flexible belief that after an accumulation of life events made my head such an ugly thing to be stuck in, my brain's chemistry started to agree. ... What many people don't realize is that the cause-and-effect relationship in mental disorders is a two-way shuttle: It's not just an a priori imbalance can make you depressed. It's that years and years of exogenous depression (a malaise caused by external events) can actually fuck up your internal chemistry so much that you need a drug to get it working properly again' (p. 345-346). She of course offers no scientific evidence to sustain this belief, and she acknowledges, as honest advocates of the concept of biologically caused (or biologically sustained) depression must, that 'There's no way to know any of this for sure right now. There isn't some blood test, akin to those for mononucleosis or HIV, that you can take to find a mental imbalance' (p. 345).
She also acknowledges that when her life went well, her despondency or so-called depression lifted without any help from psychiatric drugs or other supposed psychiatric therapy: 'Every so often there's a reprieve, like when Nathan and I first fell in love, or when I first started writing for

Elizabeth Wurtzel Dies

The New Yorker' (p. 10). Speaking of her first sexual expereince when she was only 12 years old she says, 'I do nothing at all but sit there and take in the sensation because it feels good, it is the only thing that has felt nice to me at all in so many months, maybe even years. I have never had a feeling quite like this before ... And I can't imagine what I've done to deserve anything so nice. And I feel blessed. I feel that if God has given me this capacity for pleasure, then there must be hope. ... This physical contact brings me such happiness that I want to tell everybody I know about it ... as if only I am privy to it' (p. 59). She also says 'When I was in the worst way with my depression, I found solace in music, in Bruce Springsteen, in Joni Mitchell, in Bob Dyan, and in so many other fleeting bits of rock 'n' roll, from Pink Floyd to Flipper to the Joy of Cooking to Janis Joplin' (p. 359).
From the title of the book one might assume she ends her story saying her despondency or so-called depression was miraculously cured by Prozac. However, that really isn't what her story reveals. Although she does claim that 'Prozac was the miracle that saved my life and jump-started me out of a full-time state of depression' (p. 343) and that 'Proazc [is] a pill that doesn't make you happy but does make you feel not sad' (p. 340), she simultaneously admits that the drug didn't really work for her. Like a true believer, convinced by psychiatry's propaganda and the drug companies' advertisements claiming benefit for those who take psychiatric drugs, she says 'I filled my prescritions, and believed that was enough. ... it seemed, that with occasional lapses, drugs really were the answer' (p. 346).
She found out otherwise: She says that because she was no longer taking Mellaril, 'I felt like hell in the beginning of my Prozac days' (p. 301). She says, 'Yes, I think, any minute now ... the insight will come. Clarity. The truth will set me free, and all that. Of course, it never happens. Years of therapy, and it never happens. Psychotrotropic drugs, and it never happens' (p. 313). Her only ever suicide attempt was shortly after she started taking Prozac. She says, 'The secret I sometimes think that only I know is that Prozac really isn't that great' (p. 343). She says that she's been taking Prozac 'since the F.D.A. first approved it' (p. 342) and 'I am not just on Prozac but lithium too' (ibid). She says 'lithium ... is a draining, tiring drug to take' and that 'At times, even on both lithium and Prozac, I have had severe depressive episodes, ones that kept my freinds in a petrified all-night vigil while I refused to get up off the kitchen floor, refused to stop crying, refused to relinguish the grapefruit knife I gripped in my hand and pointed at my wrist' (p. 345). She also says: 'But then, as I found myself ruining relationships, alienating employers and other people I worked with, and falling all too frequently into depressive blackouts that would go on for days and would feel as desolate and unyielding as the black wave scares I'd spend much of my pre-Prozac life running from, I realized I needed therapy' (p. 346). In other words, Prozac - and lithium - weren't the answer after all.

Prozac Nation Book Pdf

In summary: When Elizabeth Wurtzel's life went well, she was happy. As Sigmund Freud said, two of the most important aspects of anyone's life are