Prozac Nation - Young And Depressed In America (original 1994; edition 1995)

I think the only reason I like this book is because I read it during a particular period in my life-- that is, when I was deep in the throes of depression, needing an understanding companion, though ultimately the book only really served to satisfy my own self-pitying. ( )

I read this a decade ago. I learned a valuable lesson about what makes a gentlemen should I ever need it. A nice guy pays for your abortion but a gentlemen will take you to the clinic as well. I haven't need this wisdom but I've imparted it to others. The saddest thing I found about this book was Wurtzel's belief people only sympathise with drug addicts but can't understand depression. I'm not sure if this is true with everyone but she later became an addict. I wonder if people knew what to do with her then or if she still found that people often don't relate or sympathise with others pain even with a reason to put a name to.It seems to me that drug addictio. only makes peoples lives so much harder to deal with. Relatives I know who added drug addiction to their depression still had the depression to deal with. ( )

Prozac Nation is the story of Elizabeth Wurtzel's life, and how she dealt with her atypical depression in the days before Prozac-and how the drug, once on the market, was able to help her live a somewhat normal life. The book covers her life from her early childhood with divorced parents, religious schooling and her life at Harvard, including studies, relationships and her partying.

While I understand that the author's struggle with depression was not due to her life circumstances (really, I only truly understood this in the last chapter, when both we and the author learn she has atypical depression, and not depression simply because her parents divorced etc), I sometimes felt the book was a little too verbose and could have been condensed. I struggled to make it through the epilogue, which in some ways was interesting (very dated, it sums up the grunge culture of the mid 90s). A good book for anyone who has ever been depressed or known someone with depression, but somewhat of a struggle to get through at times. ( )

Sad, depressing. good read though ( )

This well-written memoir chronicles the teenage and college years of Wurtzel’s life, which she spends primarily in a funk of deep, unshakeable depression. If you have not felt this kind of depression (and I haven’t), it is easy to become impatient with the author midway through the book. She seems to have everything that a lot of us want: a burgeoning career as a feature writer for newspapers and major magazines like Rolling Stone (and this is while she is still in college); a scholarship-funded education at Harvard; an endless supply of endlessly patient friends. Even her tragedies are minor: a distant father, a failed short-term relationship. So why is she constantly whining and self-obsessed and so full of pain? Wurtzel herself even comes out of her funk from time to time to wonder, “Why am I so depressed? What do I have to feel bad about?”

It is this impatience with the narrator that is the real brilliance of this book, and as we find out in the last chapter, Wurtzel has deliberately portrayed herself exactly as she felt, both to depict how it feels to be severely depressed and to let us readers know how it feels to know the severely depressed. And we do, believe me.

By the end of the book, we have been through the wringer with Wurtzel, and we are glad to see her find salvation in drugs (although she is careful to explain that while anti-depressants have saved lives, they are in danger of becoming over-prescribed for the most minor cases of the blues). So yes, this book is uncomfortable to read, and we may occasionally want to yell at Wurtzel to snap out of it already, but when it is done, we know just what hell she went through – because we went through it with her. ( )