As I read this, I couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly it was I disliked so much. Is it that she paints her life as one big black hole that keeps her stuck to her mattress, but somehow manages to have a hundred friends, take dance lessons, get into Harvard? Is it the CONSTANT name-dropping, literary and otherwise? The whining? The "no one suffers as much as I do" line?

I work in this field. Depression is a very real, very serious problem. But even my commitment to the gravity and importance of this issue could not make me see this book as anything but a theatrical, self-indulgent tantrum.

The only line that I thought was interesting in this book was something to the affect of "we don't really know what the brain is going to look like 40 years from now since I have been taking pills my whole life." The rest of the book was full of holes and I didn't particularly like the author. The author says multiple times how she wished she had a drug/alcohol addiction because it would be easier to cure. However, the author fails to notice that she has those addictions and more...she is a cutter, sex addict, drug addict, alcoholic. The author claims she didn't attend middle school through high school and as a result she failed all her classes; but some how she ended up at Harvard for college. The author is very self absorbed and makes it sound like she is only depressed because things did not got the way she wanted them to go, so mainly if things didn't revolve around her she got depressed. I would not recommend this book because I feel it displays a false reality of what depression really is.

"There was never enough money for anything..." Really? No money for anything but private schools, an apartment in the upper west side of NYC, summer camp for a month each summer, dance lessons, cruises, Betsy Johnson dresses, and private therapy five days a week. This book starts off as an insult to the truly poor and middle class. She then goes on to trivialize the depression of others. No one at Harvard has as black of days as she does and, later in the epilogue, the implication is that while she is truly in need of her drugs most others on Prozaz are mere depression dilettantes. Then there is the name and brand dropping. And the jobs. So sorry you had to worry so much about getting a summer job because the Chicago Tribune turned you down even though you had previously written for a Texas paper, Seventeen, and won a prestigious writing award. Too bad you ended up working at a coffee shop where you were obviously too smart for menial labor. Every so often Wurtzel steps back to remark on how shallow she seems; however, these few redeeming moments do little to mitigate the self-congratulatory tone of the book. I have no doubts about the truth and depth of her depression, unfortunately she turned it into a self-indulgent cliche.

It has taken me 18months to read this book. It is exhausting.

I picked up this book when my husband was diagnosed with depression and prescribed Prozac. I remember growing up in the 90's, all the contoversy surrounding anti depressants and the 'yuppy' sickness that was affecting generation Xers. This book was recommended as an insight into depression and the lifelong battle to manage depressive behaviours.

Wurtzel has been sat on my shelf for several weeks, cast under my bed for months and I even considered returning her to her original owner. There was nothing that motivated me to read on. Every triumph she had in her life she did not recognise, every opportunity that presented itself to her wasn't enough. I was angry, fed up, jealous and at times outraged by her seemingly selfish behaviour and in the end I just gave up. She was too exhausting and I just knew by the final chapter she would not become any easier to get along with. So I shelved her.

But that's just it. It mirrored my relationship with my husband. I had the opportunity to go, stick it out, burn out with him or take it very slowly. The relationship I had built with her book also mirrored her own relationships. I began to recognise the dispair, vulnerability and isolation of her depression. With just one chapter to go, I was not prepared to become another let down in her life, someone who has given up on her.

I can empathise with depression. I thought I could before Reading this book. Now, my empathy is more comprehensive. The parody of it all? It wouldn't ever have mattered to her if I had stuck with her to the end of the book or not, depression is a solitary mental health state, the whole world can be willing you on and all you can see is the darkness.

When I decided I wanted to read this book, I didn't really know anything about it. Somehow, I had decided that it was going to be a mix between a memoir and a sociological look at how antidepressants are prescribed with little to no consideration of a patient's actual pathology. Oh, how wrong I was...

Prozac Nation is just another whiny LiveJournal-esque blog about how horrible life is... just because. But when we're going to take a break from this oh-so-agonizing can't-put-my-finger-on-it pain, we're going to blame it on a broken marriage. That sounds about right, doesn't it? Of course, this won't stop our author from crying for 'Mommy', well past the age of legality. Elizabeth Wurtzel can't make it through one page with out using about five Capital Letter Nouns to illustrate how intelligent she is, and isn't it a shame to see it all going to waste? Italicized rants are thrown in for the hell of it, without any rhyme or reason for the font change. In short, she is exhausting, repetitive, boring and a whole slew of other synonyms for atrocious that, maybe if I was as smart as the author, I could bore you with for 300-plus pages.

I vaguely knew about this book from online recommendations on depression, I’ve seen it being mentioned on a couple of lists too.

I was feeling a little down so, for me, it helps me when I read/hear about people going through the same or similar things as I am going through because I feel less alone and hopeless.

Memoirs are easy to review for me, there is no storyline to follow, worldbuilding, characters and such only memories so if you like it great, if you don’t then it’s not your thing. I haven’t read many of them, I read one by Lily Collins, Lily Allen and I think one more but I can't remember.

Reading this book felt very true to life.
There were so many quotations that hit me in the gut.
When I was 14 I was convinced that I had depression. I really believed that it was the only explanation for my sadness and loneliness at the time. I got that at 19 going on 20 that I really didn’t have depression then, I was just sad and lonely at the time and wanted something to blame for the state I was in.

I had some issues the year I went to college, it was in a different city than where I lived all my life. I lost one of my long-time friends at that time, and it hit me hard. She didn’t die, we just stopped being friends. I was in a poor state, I didn’t really eat much, didn’t sleep until dawn or slept through the entire day and woke up at evening hours. I started drinking. I had an ongoing physical relationship, I sought comfort in anything, and living was a chore to me. I didn’t get the much needed help then because my family doesn’t really believe in mental illness unless it’s critical. I was really unhappy at the time.

n  Point being that even today, a lot of the things Wurtzel talks about in her memoir are still considered the norm today.n
A lot of people still don’t take mental health seriously, or they banalize it. They either mistake sadness and loneliness for depression, bash on medication or consider you crazy and weak because you just can’t get over it. They blame alcohol or drugs for your depression even though you wouldn’t need any substance if you didn’t have depression. These were only some of the topics she discussed in her book.

This was a raw and honest book about depression that the author had, atypical depression, and her struggle with it. As I believe people should read and educate themselves on topics they do not understand, I would recommend this book to anyone dealing with depression or if someone in their family is dealing with it or in their friend circle. To anyone who really wants to know what goes on in the mind of a person dealing with this mental illness.
It is hard to get through but it does pay off reading it. 4/5.
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A pretty important book. Review to come.

The secret of a great memoir is to not only let someone into your skin, but to be selective in what you say so that they don’t get totally bogged down.... say, so overwhelmed by the minutiae of your depression that it makes them want to kill themselves. I’m being glib. Sort of.

Let me save you this read. The author suffers and suffers and suffers. Meds and therapy don’t work—though she mostly dismisses the therapists. Her family (who has created most of her suffering, she suggests) doesn’t know what to do and finally Prozac saves her.

And then she spends some time waxing philosophically about how everyone now is on Prozac, even if they haven’t really suffered (not as she did) and they haven’t done any real work (though she doesn’t seem to have done a lot of work to recover) doctors give it out like candy (because doctors don’t try other things and they don’t want to do any real work) so the whole country is on her miracle drug without deserving it and what does that say about us as a country?

As Ramona Quimby once said, I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

A postscript: the more I think about this, the more I realize that the author lacks empathy. Her childhood explains that (though I know people with worse childhoods who do have empathy.) So, it is all about her because she has no realization of what her illness does to her family, especially her mom, what it costs her friends to stand by her, or the doctor who actually helps her, and then she has no empathy for other depressed people. (One way this really differs from other books about mental illness is that she doesn't tell the story of other patients and show compassion toward them.) And no empathy for cats (or their humans) who might actually need Prozac to stop their suffering because you know vets prescribe happy pills for cats, too. Except no vet prescribes a pill for a cat unless the cat is suffering and it's the only way or the vet is a sadist who knows the humans who have to get their cat to swallow a pill will suffer immensely too. *drops mic*

I really can't grasp how anyone is capable of saying her description of depression was dramatic and self centered; Especially considering the disease it self is so self centered to begin with, to feel so alone, and to feel like no one understands is part of depression. I'm a college student, made most of the same mistakes she has, and was diagnosed with depression 5 years ago. I've read plenty of books on depression and I've never come across a book that so easily described my feelings. What makes her books fantastic is her bluntness and how unconcerned she is with the opinions of others. I always found a lot of comfort in her ability to admit that she feared being cured of the illness, she felt defined by it- I related so much to that, depression stops being a part of you and becomes all of you if you let it, and when you know nothing else, you don't want to let it go. Wurtzel captured every emotion I've ever felt with depression- the anger, the sadness, the inability to function, and being infinitely exhausted. Granted, maybe everyone doesn't suffer the same depression, because not everyone's minds work alike- but this is how it happened for me, and maybe those of you who didn't like the book didn't suffer through the depression the same way, or at all.

“...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt."

I wish I had read this book when I was younger. Wurtzel manages to express the ideas that I've always wanted to see validated, such as the fact that despite depression being commonplace, each person has their own unique story to tell. Her insights on depression are something that I didn't think I needed until I read it, and I'll never forget how well she portrays such an insidious disease that is often prone to misunderstanding:

"That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key."

"I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the only thing that justified my existence at all was my agony."

"Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad that it has no redeeming value? It cannot be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within."

A certain amount of narcissism is to be expected when reading a memoir but I still expect a pearl of wisdom, a deep insight that I can apply to my own life, a universal lesson applicable to humanity at large, or something like that. Alas, most of this book lacked anything resembling the latter. For the most part, the book is a telling of various messed up situations/behavior the author was involved in while she was depressed. Though she has my sympathy, it didn’t make for very enjoyable reading. To her credit, in the prologue and occasionally throughout the book (written in italics), she made excellent, poignant observations. Unfortunately, it is too little, too late; had the book been mostly that, it could have been a 4-5 star book for me.

Rating: 4 stars

"Prozac Nation" by Elizabeth Wurtzel is a memoir of a young woman suffering from depression. I've read it years ago and it left a strong impression. It's as raw and heavy but also so insightful and beautifully honest as I remember. It's one of those stories that you keep thinking about even after it's finished and back on your bookshelf. And also you can keep finding something new after reading it again and again.

[LTU]
Įvertinimas: 4 žvaigždutės

Elizabeth Wurtzel "Prozako karta" - tai jaunos merginos memuarai apie jos kovą su depresija. Esu skaičiusi šią knygą paauglystėje, pamenu paliko didelį įspūdį. Antrą kartą skaitant ji tokia pat atvira ir skaudi, bet tuo pačiu įžvalgi ir labai gražiai parašyta, kaip ir atsimenu. Tai viena iš tokių knygų, apie kurią dar mąstai ir padėjęs atgal į lentyną, ir atrandi kažką naujo, skaitydamas darkart.

I have a hard time with this book, the same way I do with a lot of confessional memoirs. I have enormous sympathy for the condition she was/is in; I have a whole lot less for her generalizing her experiences. Others say that it's unfair to hold Wurtzel's attractiveness, her privileged background, her intelligence, and her lifestyle against her. Except she shoves it in our faces. The premise is that "This can happen to anyone!" What's disturbing is the little, tiny unsaid "(even someone like me)" that hovers over the whole work. Whether it's meant or not, it reifies all those other things; the implication is that her fall is especially tragic because she had farther to fall. I don't buy it, any more than I buy her marketing herself as a poster child for depression and addiction. But I do understand that if she tried harder to get over herself, she would likely have fewer issues...and less to write about.