I can't believe I'm just now reading this. But I remember picking it up in a bookstore in the mid-'90s, reading a little of it, then putting it back on the shelf. I imagine I thought she seemed whiny and entitled, and that hasn't changed: one of the first thoughts I had when I started reading this book a few days ago was, "Wow, she's incredibly self-centered and annoying." But I found the book to be compulsively readable (although, to be fair, I usually find memoirs by depressives to be compulsively readable, as I, too, am a depressive). And then I had the thought that, well, depression makes you rather self-centered and annoying, which Wurtzel actually mentions in the epilogue. I think her personality was such that maybe she was perhaps more annoying than the average depressive (whatever the "average depressive" is), but you know what? Props to her for being honest about it. She could have chosen to not reveal certain things that she did or said so that she would look better, but her aim from the beginning, she said, was to reveal as honestly as possible what it's like to be as screwed up as she was. I still think she was entitled and annoying, but I also admire that she revealed so much about herself and what she experienced. She and I were born the same year, and although I wasn't a fan of hers, I was sorry to hear she died earlier this year, and glad to hear she finally found lasting love and got married a few years before she died. One eerie thing: she actually mentions at the beginning of the book that she's worried she'll end up dying of brain cancer caused by all the psychotropic medications she had to take, and she did end up dying from brain cancer, although it wasn't caused by her medication. It was caused by metastasized breast cancer.

One more thing: after finishing the book, I went back and read the first chapter again and was struck by how good her writing was. It was so good that I didn't actually notice how good it was the first time.

I found this book in the little free library in my neighborhood, so it was a completely random-chance thing that I ended up reading it when I did.

This is probably the only book I hated that I rated 3-stars, which requires a lot of explanation. Every page I turned, I wanted to slap this girl even more than the last. The incessant whining from this privileged, white, Harvard-educated girl drove me crazy. Hundreds of pages, each one listing a new reason she hates her life, her mind, and herself.

Both her parents were clearly dealing with their own demons, but still obviously loved her. She was surrounded by friends who supported her the best they could. Boys threw themselves at her, even when she was at her lowest lows, and stuck with her for a lot longer than I would have. She went to Harvard, which was astonishingly patient and flexible with her. When she got bored, she hopped on a plane for Europe. Rough life.

It often seemed like she was just acting out to get attention, complaining that no one was taking her seriously that she has a real problem and not just the blues. I think a big motivation, both for her depression and for this book, is to show that she was depressed before it was cool to be depressed, like her depression was some kind of fashion statement. She was one of the very first Prozac users, which she seems almost proud of.

She gives her doctors a lot of credit, more than they deserve. She admits that most of them are basically drug pushers with medical degrees. She was a drugee, and these doctors were only too happy to support her in her rush to use pills to solve all her problems. When her life wasn't perfectly happy, she'd just take more. Her doctors responded by just giving her different drugs. She and her doctors didn't try to address the underlying problems: her beliefs, her lifestyle, and her other drug problems.

I realized a lot of my hateful reaction to this book was personal. When I was depressed, I didn't have parents, Harvard, plane trips to Europe, relationships, friends, flexible teachers, or even doctors. All I had was darkness, poverty, loneliness, anger, and hatred. A lot of the reason I hated this book is because I resented her for having it so good, while being even more whiny than I was. I wonder if her privileges are a contributing factor to her depression. Would I have been just as bad if I wasn't forced out of bed by sheer necessity for survival, or if I had more people to listen to my whining?

One reason I'm giving this book 3-stars is that it's very well-written. The prose and turn-of-phrase made such a frustrating book interesting to read.

The biggest reason I'm giving this book 3-stars is because of her honesty. In the Afterword she said: "I wanted to portray myself in the midst of this mental crisis precisely as I was: difficult, demanding, impossible, unsatisfiable, self-centered, self-involved, and above all, self-indulgent. As I found myself saying to not a few people who would tell me they found the book angering and annoying to read: Good. Very good: that means I did what I had set out to do. That means you'd felt a frustration and fury reading the book that might even be akin to the sense of futility experienced by most people who try to deal in real life with an actual depressive."

Then she went on to agree with pretty much every gripe I had. In other words, I'm supposed to hate the book. That made a lot of sense. How could I enjoy reading about misery? If I liked the book, and I found her likable, then she didn't do her job right. A good book about depression can only be a bad book about depression. Depression isn't pretty, and depressed people are annoying and whiny. I admire her honesty, but I still don't admire her. She seems like a piece of work. Depression cured, but from what I've read about her, she's still damn whiny. She even wrote a whole book glorifying whiny women, called Bitch.

Prozac Nation is an extremely honest account of Elizabeth Wurtzel's struggle (which doesn't seem like a strong enough word considering the depths she sank to) with depression between the ages of eleven and twenty. The detail in which she describes her despair, her hopelessness, her inability to cope with life itself was excellent and her story was told SO vividly. I can't begin to describe just how strongly she detailed her illness and I was just blown away by her ability to do so.

I think that anybody who's willing to put their own experience of a mental illness out there in print is very brave, and some of the reviews on this website are enough to see why. Yes, Wurtzel's memoir is self-indulgent but of course it's going to be. It's an account of one of the loneliest and most isolating illnesses there is. This woman was drowning in her own misery; is it any wonder that she was so lost in her own head? I applaud her honesty throughout this memoir; the thoughts and experiences she opens up about aren't pretty and she had guts to do so, something which was already evident from the way she managed to survive all of the hellish years she did.

What a self obsessed drama queen. I know that people are angry at reviews like this saying that she is mentally ill (no question about that) and the book is honest (some questions about that) and that depression is ugly (no argument with that) and therefore this book is good because it is real. And she admits that she was in love with her depression and her hysteria and her narcissism (a term she doesn't use). But I just didn't like her.

I know a lot of mentally ill people and most of them are depressed. Very few have had manic episodes. There is no doubt in my mind that Wurtzel is a manic/depressive. Especially given that bizarre trip to London where she had nowhere to stay and expected everyone to provide her with five star hotel and butler service for free and cried the whole time and the people she is with say why did you come here and the reader says yeah why did you go there to cry exactly. But she wants to be the best depressive there is. She is upset at the epilogue because so many other people are also depressive. They can't be in as much pain as she was, she's sure of it unless they tried to commit suicide. Of course this is really unfair and more crazy talk. There is all kinds of pain and it is not a contest you can win.

She doubts that depression is biological (even though there is a lot of mental illness and depression in her family. Her father can barely get out of bed to go to sofa in the book anyway) because she wants some drama in her life to have sparked her depression but the science is increasingly against her there. She feels like life owes her something because she is (was) beautiful and brilliant and she should have been the best writer in the world -- I mean didn't she get into Harvard after all? She mentions writing prizes and awards and brilliant books she wrote at the age of six skipping what I read in Wikipedia (check it out) that she was fired from the Dallas Morning News for making up quotes. Maybe that was later in her brilliant career, after the book was published. I didn't compare dates.

She blames society for so many things. Her parents got divorced during a culture of people getting divorced because of the sixties which is society's fault somehow. She miscarries when she didn't even know she was pregnant and the doctors in the hospital said would probably have had an abortion if she had had a choice (and she admits that she probably would have). But isn't abortion part of a breakdown in society? So the fact that she would have had a choice and probably would have taken the choice, the existence of this choice is another sign of the breakdown of society? Come on. In a New York Times humor column she is asked about Penguin suing her for the return of an advance on a book she didn't write about teens and depression. She said the lawsuit is another sign of the breakdown in society. Wow seems like when things don't go her way society is to blame.

Mental illness is terrible. It makes people do terrible things that alienate the people around them. Her sexual promiscuity which turns shockingly close to prostitution in England is clearly a product of her severe mental illness. Her fits, tantrums, abuse of her friends and boyfriends in attempts to turn them into parent figures who will care for her are the product of severe mental illness. And yes meds are better now and therapy is better. There is more than prozac now. There is cognitive behavioral therapy. And so I feel sorry for her, but I still don't like her.

She says she never was a drug addict even though she did a lot of drugs and it seems like everyone she knew says that she was a drug addict. Once again, Wikipedia mentions that she regretted taking heroin and she had an addiction to Ritalin. She says drug addicts have so much support she wishes she had been a drug addict so she would have been taken seriously and had support. But it sounds like, reading the book and the article, she had more in common with them than she admits in this book at least. And that tone again: that my problems, my addiction to depression, is so much harder than your addiction to drugs. You at least are taken seriously and have so much support tone. I think drug addicts could enlighten her about their struggles and pain. The my mental illness is so much worse than your mental illness theme was just nauseating.

Also the suicide attempts all committed very publicly where she was going to be found immediately using medications she knew deep down were not going to kill her. Yes they were real cries for help and perhaps she would have graduated to more dangerous attempts, but they were so very dramatic and she plays them up so luridly.

I am sorry I read this book. I thought it would be more about the state of the nation and prozac instead of a self indulgent celebrity bio that read like a very very long People Magazine article. At least I know to avoid anything by Elizabeth Wurtzel in future.

I was mildly disappointed with Prozac Nation from the beginning, thought this is partially my fault. I had the impression in mind that the book was going to be a Michael Moore-esque criticism of the over=prescription of Prozac in America. When I realised it was a memoir I thought it would still be a similar theme, with a personal story attached. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Prozac Nation was a chance for a whiney privileged Jewish girl from New York to complain about why her life wasn’t fair.

Prozac Nation was not particularly well written. I disliked the way she sometimes wrote past-tense, sometimes in present, and I didn’t see the point in some conversation having speech marks and some not, with no rhyme or reason as to why she’d chosen to write in that particular way in that particular part. The lengthy passages in italics downright annoyed me: they weren’t flashbacks, they weren’t diary or journal entires, they were just parts of the linear story that happened to be told in italics. And it was annoying. The dialogue was also completely unrealistic. I find it impossible (not even just hard – impossible) to believes that in the throes of hysteria and mania, she’s able to communicate as eloquently as she writes she did.

There are multitudes of contradictions throughout the book: How did she manage to pass middle and high school when she (apparently) skipped so many classes? How did she keep up with classes when she was in such a depressive state? How was she admitted to Harvard after having such a poor track record at school? Colleges like Harvard go back as far as middle school to see consistency in grades and attitude, not just final results. How did her mother afford to pay up front for her entire education when she waxed pathetic for half the book about how they were so poor and couldn’t afford electricity bills? For that matter how did they pay for the litany of high-profile therapists she went to, with no insurance footing the bill? How did she possibly keep up with a Comparative Literature course at Harvard when she was too depressed to get out of bed, let alone study – if, as she claims she was depressed at all. The blurb claims college was “marred with a series of suicide attempts”. The only actual attempt on her life she makes is after the Prozac she finally talks about 20 pages from the conclusion has already started working, and her therapist has just told her she’s taking her seriously, something she whines about no one doing for most of the overly long book. In the epilogue she mentions another suicide attempt. I don’t call this a “series”. She states constantly that she wishes she had a drug and alcohol problem, so she has something to grasp onto and work against. Does she not see that she HAS a drug and alcohol problem? Finally, I’d really question whether Elizabeth is even as depressed as she says she is, if she’s capable of travel, producing “amazing” essays and papers, winning journalism awards and landing dream jobs at famous newspapers.

I will make only brief mention of the tenuous relationship with her mother – over and over again she complains about how ridiculous her mother is and yet at 25 she still calls home whining to mommy when things are just a little too hard.

I really wanted to feel sorry for Elizabeth. Depression sucks, plain and simple. And I won’t criticise her for her repetitive descriptions because I know how depression feels. It’s not something you can come up with a bunch of pretty ways to describe, it’s repetitive, and a lot of the time it isn’t even painful – it’s dullness, hard and incessant dullness. But she is such a difficult person to feel sorry for. She’s arrogant, self-righteous, whining and contemptuous. She whole book smacks of “but why did it have to happen to ME”. As hard as depression is, she needs to get the hell over herself, and stop being such a brat. That’s all she is, bratty about everything. Even when she’s going through extreme depressive states, it’s not enough for her to lock herself away – she has to be out and about, travel interstate and overseas and ruin everyone else’s time as well as her own. I couldn’t believe how selfish she was, constantly making suicide threats and telling people her blood was on their hands when she died, and never once took charge of her mental or physical health, never once took responsibility for her own thoughts and actions. EVERYTHING was somebody else’s fault – right from being depressed to feeling well again. At times it read like she didn’t want to get better at all, she wanted something she could hold against everybody forever. I was absolutely disgusted at her complaints about the amount of people who use it at the time of publishing, when she complains that none of them have ever felt her REAL pain, none of them have been on it as long as SHE has. Seriously, bitch, get over yourself; you are not the only person who’s ever been depressed. You haven’t suffered as much as others. Your case is NOT the worst in the world. Get. Over. It. And yet, I have this niggling thought in the back of my mind, that she’s not depressed after all…

I’m not really one for conspiracy theories. I admit, I enjoy listening to and reading about them, but as for forming my own or believing them, I generally draw the line. This being said, I am highly suspicious of this book. Elizabeth simply doesn’t read like she’s truly depressed. Manic-depressive, bi-polar, MAYBE. Big maybe. But she’s talented from a very early age, and says time and time again she’s a gifted writer, and for that matter manipulator. I don’t think this is a confessional memoir. If it is, I have more to say about it, but I don’t believe that’s what the book is. The last couple of chapters read like a promotional pamphlet for Prozac, and I think Elizabeth is just a poster child for the brand. Sure she has a couple of gripes about how over-prescribed it is, but the whole book reads like some propaganda tract. She spends ten years depressed, and magically, within weeks Prozac has cured her.

With so many inconstancies, and the book’s fairy-tale (but not really! “Oh look, I still feel down sometimes! I wish I didn’t have to take drugs” Ugh) ending where her whole life is just magically working out, I’m incredibly suspicious of Elizabeth’s motives, and highly suspicious this book isn’t just Prozac propaganda.

I’m not being overly harsh just because I don’t like her. I don’t like her, but that’s aside from the fact, that Prozac Nation had too many inconsistencies for me to ignore, and for the simple fact that Elizabeth DIDN’T DESERVE the chance to write the book. Somebody with truly debilitating depression who suffered and actually learnt from their experience deserved the chance. Not her. Highly unimpressed with the book, with her actions in general, and her story.

“Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I’m always missing someone or someplace or something. I’m always trying to get back to some kind of imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.” Elizabeth Wurtzel

So I’m reading Prozac Nation right now, and the first thing that has become evident to me is that it is not, contrary to my expectations, really about Prozac at all. I had it in my head that it was some kind of ideological expose on the sad state of our pop-a-pill, medicatedly numb populace, but apparently I was thinking of some other book. Instead, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation is a very long memoir of yet another “gifted” girl’s depression.
tThe second thing I am realizing is that perhaps I shouldn’t be reading this right now, when I have already spent the last 5 days in my bed in my own depressive state. My roommates haven’t seen me for 2 days. I listen to them vacuuming the hallway or letting the dogs out or cooking dinner and hope they will not knock on my door and make me face them in my despondency, and blessedly, they don’t. I am permitted to continue hiding, and finish 3 other depressing novels before picking up this one. Probably a bad idea—like the summer I spent with the curtains drawn reading Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Girl Interrupted, this is essentially just wallowing in it.
tAnyway, I am having a little trouble deciding how to feel about the book. First of all, in my memory, I have associated Wurtzel with the feminist culture wars of the early 90s—a member, along with Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia, and Katie Riophe, of the then new breed of anti-feminism. In those years, I was still riding the wave of old-school radical feminism, studying Caroline MacKinnon, quoting Andrea Dworkin, and not shaving my legs. At the time, I believed Wurtzel et al were trivializing the cause; these pretty feminists with their nude book covers and appeals to pop culture were reducing the earlier generation of feminists to prudish caricatures who hated sex as much as they hated men.
tFor all I know, I might be wrongly associating her with this crowd, confusing her with someone else—a hazard of reading a book that was once a cultural touchstone 15 years after its publication. Who has the time now to go back and look up the critical reviews and discussion? And yet, I want to know, what did other people think of this book? What did the NY Times and publishing circles say about it? Do other people think it is as whiny and self-indulgent and repetitive as I do, even while it speaks so directly to my own experience with the weltschemrz of depression? I don’t know if I respect it or hate it, and I want to know what others think now, and what others thought then. You just can’t let years go by before you read something or you miss out on the conversation. But according to Wikipedia, it seems the consensus is, yes, others do find Wurtzel as self-absorbed as I do, as indicated by a 2002 interview with the author in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, entitled, “That's enough about me, now, what do you think of me?"
ttIt is impossible not to notice Wurtzel’s ego. I can’t count the number of times she describes herself as “full of promise”. She complains about her parents sending her to camp when she was young, “I was special! I had promise! And instead they threw me away and tried to make me ordinary! They threw me away with a bunch of normal kids who thought I was strange…” She insists in the sick competition of the victim that wherever she is, surrounded by the pain of others, “no one’s desperation came close to matching mine”. And then it bugs me how she makes all these grandiose pronouncements all the time, and all I can think is, “you’re fucking twenty five! What do you know about anything?!” Like how she insists time and time again that she doesn’t have a substance abuse problem, complaining after months of boozing and pill popping and tripping, “why the hell does everyone always think the problem is drugs?” I mean, maybe depression drives her to drink and use drugs, but it doesn’t mean it’s not still a problem. And anyway, how can you believe, at 25, that you really have all the answers and make such insistent, unquestioning edicts about what is true and what isn’t? Where’s the humility? Has she found it yet, after battling cocaine, heroin, and Ritalin addictions in the years after Prozac Nation’s publication?
tBut then, all of this is the nature of the beast really, for depression is nothing if not narcissistic. If her descriptions of her suffering seem repetitive, it is only because that is how it feels. I mean, I feel like I have nothing to say but the same old words every time depression rears its ugly head in my life again and again. Nothing could be duller than the redundant passages in my diary over the past 30 years of oh how very depressed I am. I am sure that everyone in my life is just as tired of hearing about my perpetual sadness as I am tired—so very, very tired, of feeling it. Whatever one might say about her, she absolutely hits the nail on the head, describing depression as “pure dullness,” involving “a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” I, too, want desperately to learn “how to live in a world where the phone company doesn’t care that you’re too depressed to pay the phone bill.” I look to therapy and Prozac to equip me with the emotional resilience necessary to life, for without it, I “can’t go with the flow, can’t stand steady while the boat rocks and rolls…. Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.”
tAnd yet, what bothers me most about this book is that essentially, I am jealous. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard every time she complains of her terrible pain and ruined life, while writing yet another well-received piece of published literature. Yes, I am jealous that she was published in Seventeen magazine before she was even 17, won a Rolling Stone College Journalism Award, had a job with the Dallas Morning News, and wrote for the New Yorker. Why can’t I be so prolific in the throes of depression? I can barely update my Myspace profile. Here she is writing essays about feminism and Madonna and Edie Sedgwick, interviewing Poison and Tesla and the Butthole Surfers, and attending Willie Nelson’s 4th of July picnic, all while supposedly suffering so greatly. And yes, I am envious of her Harvard education, cushy hospitalizations, and her twice-weekly intensive therapy sessions—she went to Patti Smith’s therapist for Christ’s sake! What I wouldn’t have given for such attention and validation of my suffering. And the way she owns her depression, wears it like an eccentric sweater, a quaint, if slightly oddball character trait. Why can she unabashedly break down in tears on the bathroom floor in the middle of a party, as opposed to me, hiding my depression under a cloak, so deathly ashamed of my tired old grief and emptiness?
tI’d like to ask her if she has, as the media blurbs on the cover of the book attest, really come back from the dark side. Has she actually found the magic medication combination that allows her not to suffer so greatly? And if so, can she tell me the secret? Or does she still find herself now, 20 years later, as I do, in remarkably the same position as she was in as a teenager, even after the years of Prozac? After 6 years of the wonder drug, I no longer think it is working. I don’t want to live my life in a medicated haze, but I also don’t want to experience these dehabilitating and crippling bouts of depression anymore. So bring me the Prozac nation, or whatever pill will make me happy. Please. And then publish my memoir.

Kas domisi depresija, sunkiais išgyvenimais ar turite šeimos narių su tokia problema labai rekomenduoju. Nuostabios mintys, žvilgsnis gilyn į žmogaus sielą iki pat dugno...

This book is just so important and powerful in showing what it's really like living with depression. Truly raw and brutal, but so insightful and beautiful. Trigger warning for anyone with depression, suicidal thoughts or self harm or any mental disorder should know that this book is definitely brutal and honest, so be aware of that.
But I honestly tabbed SO many things because I could relate to it so much. What a memoir. I don't think I'll ever, ever forget it.

I love how people somehow think depression is about being privilegied or not. It's a chemical imbalance, and it happens regardless of money, status or skills.
It's not like having the blues which you can shop your way out of!

3.75 Stars (Rnd ⬆️) — I’m extremely partial to “girls/men/animals interrupted” & this novel has one of the more ambiguous of those such characters. A memoir of a 27yr Old woman that spirals down the ever blackening-gape that comes with demons fed by a strict diet of narcotics and psych drugs.

But the real demon here is the narcissistic mindset that is allowed to prosper and spread inside the psyche of those with mental illness whom fall to substance abuse. It is this demonic-trait that escalates and prolongs the agony of the patient until there is literally nothing left to feed upon.

Wurtzel is able to endear herself to the reader despite the horrific & confronting anecdotes of a life in deep deep depression & squander — perhaps because she is able to engage the reader in the “behind-the-curtain” narrative whereby one can’t help but feel privy to a most private life that fills the voyeuristic-void in our dark passenger subconscious.


Either way, this novel was able to become a part of a larger movement that helped begin the societal informative process on newly created levels of participation — which has helped lead to the slow yet staunch progress into understanding — albeit on a mediocre level — the perils and hopelessness felt by those in the grip of mental illness.

It felt real. I remember reading Picoult's 'Handle With Care' and feeling annoyed about how the teen character self-harmed and had eating problems and it felt fake, because you could really feel that it was thought up, but in 'Prozac' all the mental health problems and behaviours felt real, however irrational the decisions Wurtzel made were. Also reading this book reminded me of my teenage years when I found comfort almost solely in music and books and those parts really spoke to me. You can disagree with her world view and lifestyle and call her egocentric or whatever but I think it's a good glimpse into understanding depression (which makes people egocentric) and I'd also add BPD a.k.a. borderline personality disorder (which makes people dramatic) - if you're berating her, you're also berating to some extent the traits that various mental illnesses give to people. The problems that she's faced may be specific to USA and its healthcare system and in general could be called first-world-problems, but it's still a good read. Ah, but what annoyed me in this Lithuanian translation by Aušra Simanavičiūtė was how fucked up the translation of names was, really inconsistent. I think 4 stars is sufficient.

I remember reading reviews on this book and thinking, this is going to be one horrible book. I wasn't even going to read it, until I wanted new reading material.
Needless to say from the four stars I gave it, I thorougly enjoyed it. I didn't feel as if she was the most relatable character other than the fact that she was depressed. She does have it much easier than most people with these same issues...but it just goes to show you how depression can hit anyone. I remember she said in the book how she didn't feel as if she had the right to be depressed. I feel as if that is how most people feel when they are depressed: that they don't have that right since their life is so much more easier. That's why most people don't get the help they need. And reading this book will show others that getting up and changing scenery won't change how you feel. For Elizabeth tried that many times and didn't feel happy at all when she left where she was to get "away". There's no getting away from what is inside your mind.
I would tell you to ignore the other reviews, but I really think others should read it and read positive ones and then give the book a try. It's not as bad as others say it is, at least to me. And you might find yourself actually enjoying it.