Word: prozac
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...That's Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, A Memoir in a nutshell--a better place for it, in fact, than in the bookstores or on your shelf. Marketed as an object lesson in depression among the young, privileged, and talented, this book by '89 grad Elizabeth Wurtzel is more useful as an object lesson in how much the New York publishing industry sucks. How did this chick get a book contract in the first place? Why was she allowed to write such crap? (For example: "When I was with Abel, I felt like ice cream in a bowl...
...Prozac Nation's press packet we encounter the following description of the author: "Witty, intelligent, and hip (nose ring, tatoo [sic]), Elizabeth Wurtzel is definitely not a Gen-X slacker." Beyond the silly assertion of nose rings and tattoos as indexes of hipness, this statement reveals what is meant as the book's selling point: that it's not just losers without jobs who are depressed, that the world is such a tough place that it would depress anyone, even a cool Harvard student. Hey, I buy it. I've been depressed too, and with many of the same symptoms...
...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...