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Summary: This book really helped me understand my depressed friends
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation is amazing. It really helped me understand some of the people in my life who suffer from depression. Perhaps her greatest writing comes in the afterword, where she examines the effect of Prozac on America and American culture. She suffered for so long with depression that she felt as though she had nowhere to turn. She wanted to kill herself because she couldn't handle being depressed without knowing the cause. By the end of this book, the reader feels as though they are related to Elizabeth - perhaps like an older sister, wanting to guide her through the pain. Through the anecdotes she tells you both want to hug her (to tell her things will be okay) and strangle her when you read of some of the things she did. In the end, this book picks up on a high note and leaves the reader feeling ironically upbeat after reading of her depression.
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Summary: Hits the Nail on the Head
Review: As someone who has experienced the excruciating feelings and craziness of depression (and its close cousin, obsessive-compulsive disorder), I must say that Wurtzel's candid, no-apologies-offered writing hits the nail on the head. Naming the misery as she does--calling it what it is--takes the edge off the pain, the embarrassment, the feelings of aloneness. Feeling like I'm losing my mind -- literally -- is one of the loneliest, scariest experiences I've ever known. When you've got company, it means a lot; one crazy person doesn't feel quite so isolated when she knows someone else shares that craziness. If you haven't experienced this degree of depression and anxiety, I'm not sure how well you could really appreciate this book. Continuous references to death and darkness and emptiness begin to grate on your nerves, I imagine. Depression, in my experience, is really all about reality without hope. In this respect, it's a blessing and a curse --a gift because it enables the afflicted to see through life's props and lies with amazing clarity, a curse because it is so weighty and powerful that it shuts out the light and promise that really is present. Wurtzel tells the reality part of it like it is. She doesn't moralize, doesn't worry about offending--she just wants to get it out there on paper, which she does. Sometimes I think this is just what the doctor should order (and some of them do).
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Summary: A look into the mind of a depressive
Review: I see that a lot of people are upset by this book. One of the reasons is that Wurtzel comes from a privaleged upbringing, goes to Harvard, etc. and people think she's complaining or whatever. Take it from someone who has, and still is, suffering from depression - that stuff doesn't matter. Depression is a disease - it's something "off" with your brain. I think the people who are making these comments should open a psychology book.
I've also read that some people don't think this is an accurate portrayal of depression - that's it's "too much." Everyone's depression manifests itself in different ways. I think you should be respectful of Wurtzel...she was brave enough to share her story, and her depression happened how it happened. Hers is one story of many who are depressed, and I felt honored to get a look into her life.
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Summary: Angry-making and inauthentic
Review: I was deeply aggrivated and annoyed by 'Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir', in which Elizabeth Wurtzel claims to speak for an entire disaffected nation when she is only embarassing herself. Though I am the first to understand that those with depression deserve allowances, Wurtzel STILL strikes me as immature, petulant, and bogusly self-mythologizing. The book feels like it was written the night before in a desperate attempt to BS the teacher. There are many memoirs of depression I'd recommend instead. A classic is William Styron's 'Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness'; I myself didn't like it that much, but I read it ten years ago, and Styron is a very famous writer, and it is widely beloved. If you'd prefer the story of someone young at the time of suffering, I was deeply moved by Susanna Kaysen's 'Girl, Interrupted', her story of her time in McLean mental hospital in Massachusetts. It described the feeling of time slowing down, something I didn't think could be put into words. It's also excellent on the stigma that patients suffer. Don't think less of it because it was made into a movie. Finally, I haven't read "The Bell Jar," but I should mention how important Sylvia Plath has been to many depressed girls I've known.
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Summary: This book practically saved my life.
Review: Reading Wurtzel's book is like having a friend's shoulder to cry on. ...More therapeutic than psychotherapy, and a helluva lot cheaper. Thank you, Elizabeth Wurtzel, for so eloquently and wittily putting this oft-misunderstood pain in such sharply written focus. Depression can be unimaginably debilitating, yet Wurtzel still lets us laugh a bit, at her own expense - and that sure cuts through a lot of the loneliness and despair that permeates the life of a Depression sufferer. Just knowing that someone else is able to help you "vocalize" the agony is a comfort, and Wurtzel speaks for many of us in this brutally honest memoir. If you suffer from Depression and are having difficulty explaining its power over your life to your loved ones, make them read this book. "Here! THIS is my pain." Insightful, revealing, funny, tragic and, most of all, a godsend to folks like me. I'm gonna give Wurtzel a big hug if I ever meet her. Apparently actress Christina Ricci has optioned the film rights to this book and plans to make a movie from it. But don't wait for the movie. Buy the book for yourself or for someone who needs to learn about how deadly Depression can be.
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Summary: unpleasant but authentic
Review: This book is, as Wurtzel points out at the end, a very good portrait of what depression - clinical depression - looks like. It is hard to separate her depression from the personality she would have had without problems with mental illness. Many depressives do not have her narcissism (thank god) and they feel that they don't deserve good things happen (which Wurtzel seemed to accept as her just due). But she does do a good job evoking the hopelessness and unpleasantness of depression. I should know; I've experienced depression firsthand. What annoyed me is that Wurtzel seemed completely unable to appreciate the help she was given - it seemed like people were literally lining up around the block to help her. You don't have to be free of depression to express gratitude or at least do the courtesy of saying thank you - something the author was apparently never taught. Even if you don't feel well, there's something dangerous about letting your mood problems justify your horrendous treatment of others. Wurtzel seems to regard people as disposable, but in her case it didn't seem to matter, there was always someone she could cajole into holding her hand. From her other books, apparently she still can't get her act together for more than a little while. This is unfortunate. Is she, like Lauren Slater, going to make a career out of problem memoirs?
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Summary: A must-read for any young woman battling depression
Review: "One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live." Elizabeth Wurtzel relates her battle with depression on a personal level, and her story helped me more than any unpersonal self-help book about depression that I've ever read. Her use of prose to express her feelings mirrored the thoughts of a depressed person so well, and merely knowing that other people have the same thoughts was very healing. I would recommend this book to any young woman dealing with depression.
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Summary: Humbling experience
Review: Not to sound un sympathetic, but I needed Prozac by the end of this book. Elizabeth Wurtzel does such a job on her readers, and is so well read that her illness oozes from the pages into the readers mind. She is obviously a very intelligent woman and this book was full of emotion. I can't help but wish her the best.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious
Review: I very much disapprove of Elizabeth Wurtzle's Prozac Nation. I read the book after scanning several must read book lists. I am still unsure as to why the book showed up on so many lists. I have never felt more denigrated while reading a piece of literature. If there was one thing Elizabeth Wurtzle succeeded in doing, it was alienating her readers, alienating those suffering from depression or anxiety from herself. She made it seem as if you need to go through some test, to attempt suicide, before gaining the right to access to a drug like Prozac. As a 22 year old one month shy of graduating college, a veteren of depression, vicitm of divorce, and patient to Zoloft, I believe that I am qualified to say that this novel was no more than a pretentiouse, over-written sob story that wasn't about depression at all, it was about a snobby, Harvard girl's attempt to find self-worth. In Wurtzle's epilogue she admits to her need to find "Prozac one-upmanship", tell me when depression became a contest. The last thing a reader needs, especially a depressed reader, is to feel inferior to the voice they go to in order to find comfort and company, and unfortunatly this is all that Wurtzle gives us, 350 pages later. I suggest Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" any day over this hollow diary entry.
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Summary: Balance
Review: One amazing thing about this book is the author's sense of balance. As a clinically depressed 20-nothing, I felt driven by the author's amazing balance of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. This is truly a high-fidelity look at life in depression.
The book's not perfect, I didn't understand the author's new-found love for life after the Cambridge incident. Seems like the story started after the incident and she's still throwing herself in to the abyss. She does make attempt to explain her inconsistencies, but why mention how grateful she is to be alive if she doesn't seem to feel that way at least half the time. Enough with the criticism.
This author is on point about the discovery of sickness within oneself. The later the realization comes, the more sick one is likely to be and thus it is so much harder to deal with. Wurtzel lays herself out in all humility. This story is not self-serving, it is a gift to the same humanity which unknowingly does its best to make her and the rest of us miserable. I don't know what else to say; there are so many good reviews of this book. I guess I must reiterate that you need to absorb (or be absorbed by) this book as soon as possible. It is AMAZING!
As a side note, this book has invaluable function when used to enlighten the friends and relatives of those who are clinically depressed. Much more than a psychological textbook, this book will communicate the nearly immutable nature of a depressive's frame of mind. It's not an excuse, its an acknowledgement of the barriers between depression and happiness.
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