Word: prozac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...press packet, she says that when she looks back on her days of depression. "I see myself as more pure, more raw, more instinctive, more in touch with all the evil of the world, more emotional and more attuned." She cites a New Yorker cartoon depicting Marx on Prozac declaring. "Sure! Capitalism can work out its kinks!" This, presumably, is the Prozac nation which the book title promises to reveal: a culture of blithely unconcerned, and thus morally and politically suspect, druggies...
...Wurtzel herself has been on Prozac for years: she started taking it in 1990, when it was first being distributed. In her case, she said during a reading and question-and-answer session in the Adams House Senior Common Room last Sunday, it was that or eventual suicide, as she suffers from Atypical Depression, or Dysthymia That Wurtzel's brand of depression has a clinical name confers it a medical validity that complicates what seems to be the point of her book, which is that in this society any aware person should be depressed. During her appearance in Adams, Wurtzel...
This confusion is a major flaw of the book. If Prozac Nation is meant to reflect a condition in which many of us privileged college students find ourselves, if it's supposed to provoke the realization that we're not alone in our misery, what about those of us who are really bummed out, but not "Atypically Depressed"? In that case, Wurtzel seems to suggest, it would be wrong to seek relief in anti-depressants, as they would take the edge off our disgust with this cruel world...
Inasmuch as Prozac Nation sets out to make broad or generalizable points about the nature of society, the family, youth culture, politics, or whatever, it fails roundly. As the memoir of Wurtzel's troubled coming of age it might have some sort of appeal, if only a prurient and very limited one, especially to those familiar with the Harvard-specific sites of her antics. But even the interest that inheres in a peer's extravagances is undercut by the fact that Wurtzel is neither a good writer nor an appealing individual. She comes off as an irritating, solipsistic brat. Wurtzel...
...purpose other than alternately to bore us and make us squirm. Perhaps it's meant to be inspirational--Wurtzel did a lot of crazy stuff, but she pulled through and she's not ashamed--but instead it's pathetic. Most of us will have to swallow a lot of Prozac before we're able to swallow this...