Prozac Nation

fluoxetine Nation tells the story of Elizabeth Wurtzels childhood, her troubled relationship with her father who leftover her and her draw and refused to accept his responsibilities to his family, her move to Harvard, and her amiable decline leading to several corset in hospital and a self-annihilation attempt. Finally, by and by trying many distinguishable psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and medications, she tries fluoxetine and it helps her rise above her despair. In the Afterword to Prozac Nation, written for the paperback interpretation in 1995, Wurtzel asks the question that go forth generate occurred to many of her endorsers.What on earth makes a woman in her mid-twenties, thus knocked come to the fore(p)-of-the-way(prenominal) of no particular outstanding accomplishment, need the audacity to write a three-hundred summon volume about her feature vivification and nonhing more, as if any oneness else would actually turn back a shit? (p. 354) She gives a do gged answer, the crux of which is I demanded this reserve to dare to be completely self-indulgent, unhesitant, and forthrightly in its telling of what clinical first gear feels bid I wanted so very frightfully to write a book that felt as bad as it feels to feel this bad, to feel depressed.I wanted to be completely true to the recognise of slumpto the thing itself, and not to the mitigations of translating it. I wanted to portray myself in the center of this mental crisis precisely as I was difficult, demanding, impossible, unsatisfiable, self-centered, self-involved, and above all, self-indulgent. (p. 356) Wurtzel certainly succeeds in her localize to portray herself as capricious and self-preoccupied. Indeed, harmonize to her own description, she seems so impulsive, self-preoccupied, needy in relationships, and manipulative that readers will probably curiosity whether slack is indeed Wurtzels roughly basic fuss.Its very bid to speculate that Wurtzel has just as o ften claim to a diagnosis of minimal reputation disorder as she does to depression. Wurtzel says that her psychiatrists gave her a diagnosis of atypical depression, and DSM-IV-TR tells us that personality disorders may be more unwashed in those with atypical depression. Of course, so far if I were a psychiatrist, which Im not, would be ridiculous to offer a diagnosis based on an autobiography.What is score, however, is that Wurzels culture of telling around general truth about clinical depression is not accomplished. Reading Prozac Nation is a very different give birth from nurture other memoirs of depression such as Tracy Thompsons The Beast and Martha Mannings Undercurrents because Wurtzel manages to rear such a mixture of contrary feelings in her reader, while other authors of depression memoirs provoke far out-of-door more reproducible sympathy. By the end of the book, one feels far more sympathy for Wurtzels mother and her friends than one does for her.Normally, I count myself as able to identify and empathize with populate who suffer from serious mental illnesses, only I have to confess that, given the way she describes herself, unless she has changed dramatically, Id exhort her friends to run a mile alternatively than put up with her manipulation. Note that one gets a similar impression from Wurtzels second memoir, More, Now, Again, (reviewed in Metapsychology April 2002) in which she becomes given to Ritalin and cocaine, and spends most of her time fiction and hiding her addiction from her friends, mother and publisher.In Prozac Nation, Wurtzel several generation suggests that she was addicted to depression and makes clear that her self-defeating behavior was often willful. What makes it so hard to sympathize with her is that that her problem seems to be her personality, rather than some tribulation she has to overcome. To be more precise, Wutzel describes herself sometimes as the agent of her predicament, and other times as th e victim of it, and its unclear for the reader what reasons there are for these switches.She manipulates people cosy to her for instance, she tells calls her therapist at all times of the day and night, and then tells her therapist that if she does not listen to her problems, her (Wurtzels) blood will be on her (the therapists) hands. Sometimes even her crying seems like a overturn action. But at other times she feels immobile, and cant get out of bed. Consider, for example, how she feels after her brief romance with a man called Rafe, uring which she was miserable, clingy, and insecure, and she explicitly ignored his petition that he spend time away from her, since he needed to be with his family, who had their own needs. I couldnt move after Rafe left me. Really. I was stuck to my bed like a piece of chewing chewing gum at the bottom of somebodys shoe, branded with the underside, adhering to someone who didnt want me, who kept stamping on me but tranquil I wouldnt move away. (250) Wurtzels alternating acceptance and denial of her assurance bemuses the reader, and ultimately makes Wurtzel a less plausible witness to her own mental states.Far from conditioned exactly how it was for Wurtzel, even though it is clear that she was desperately unhappy for most of the time, readers will be confused and exhausted by her narrative. Far from undermining the work, these features are what make Prozac Nation so distinctive, standing out among other memoirs. It is a tour de force, and a powerful evocation of Wurtzels experience, although its not so clear whether that experience is depression, borderline personality disorder, or some other mental disorder.