Rating: 
Summary: a good book although a bit long winded
Review: I bought this book out of meny recomenditions, It was a pretty good book do to the fact it did have alot depression but it got pretty lame listening to her whine about boyfriends and what not.Basicly it read like a teenage girls diary.
Rating: 
Summary: Great description of depression as a child,teen,&young adult
Review: I could not put this book down. I felt like I was reading my own biography. I highlighted all the parts in the book that described how I feel, and there were lots of them. The highlighted parts are like a journal of my feelings when I go back and reread them. Prozac Nation is very funny at times; Elizabeth Wurtzel has a funny sense of humor. Reading this book made me feel better because it made me feel like I am not alone in my suffering from depression. Hopefully Wurtzel's descriptions of her experiences with this disease will make people realize that it is a disease and not something that people can just "snap out" of. Because no matter what Wurtzel tried to do, she just couldn't "snap out of it". Anyone wanting to know what it really feels like to be depressed as a child, teenager, and young adult should definitely pick this book up.
Rating:
Summary: The Truth About Depression
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel hits the nail on its head when it comes to the truth of depression and youth in America. Prozac Nation shows everyone that thinks that depression is just a cry for attention that it's not. It is a disease and that kills the youth in America. Youth in America are just trying to find a way to express them selves, all they want is for some one to reach out and catch them because they are falling and all we do is shove some pills down their throught and tell them will be "ok." But it is never just "ok" they need help we all need help. Look out your window see the kids with the Prozac smiles and broken hearts. Elizabeth Wurtzel tells the truth about depession in Prozac Nation.
Rating: 
Summary: A good look at depression although it was a bit repetitive
Review: I enjoyed reading this book. I found it to be well written and entertaining. The only problem I had with the book was that she was constantly telling us about how smart and good she was and how she was in harvard and won awards and had articles published. After the first telling of her holiness, it soon became redundant and seemed irrelevant to the story, even though te fact that she was an intelligent girl was an important apsect of this book.
Rating:
Summary: What is so brillant?
Review: I have never suffered huge bouts depression, so I may be a little unfair when saying that the author of this novel presents the apparantly everyday occurance in a very tedious manner. This book has merit, and at times it immensly striking and hugely saddening, but really, the self absorbed nature of the writer bored me almost to the point where I put the book down in disgust, only to pick it up again, simply because leaving a book unfinished leaves me with my own feelings of incompletion. I am not a prude, but depression does not justify holding a party for the loss of your virginity, or asking people not to pick on you, 'because you've just had a miscarriage'. A miscarriage from a pregnancy you neither knew about, and lets face it, would be unlikely to follow through with, and child you could not possibly care for. Depression, or being the first woman on Prozac, does not justify writing a repetitive self indulgent tedious book about the hardships of depression (which apparantly so many experience for themselves) nor does it give you the right to contridict the entire book's apparant message and claim that any 'ole depressive shouldn't be given prozac, a drug supposedly reserved for the truly depressed. The others should grin and bear it, the very thing you whinged about having to do it for appoximately 200 pages too much.
Rating: 
Summary: Disease, by-product, or ...?
Review: Clinical depression is a difficult topic. Only recently has it been examined as a disease -- i.e., something which can be clinically separate from the person himself. That people have been depressed in the past is no mystery. Winston Churchill comes to mind, surely not a man lacking for a purpose and a direction in his life -- two things which are often snidely recommended to depressed people as a way to get them to "snap out of it." Given that depression is at least partly chemical, and can often be treated well with certain drugs, it's questionable how useful this advice is. That doesn't stop Elizabeth Wurtzel from trying, however. "Prozac Nation" smells of a project embarked upon by the writer to "snap out of it" -- something into which she invested her energy to keep from sliding back into the pit. Good for her, but the result is a turgid book that caters wildly to the (largely presumed) psychically flagellant fetishes of its audience. This book is not so much about depression as it is about the behavior that accompanies it. There's little or no attempt at genuine analysis; it's simply a relived wallowing of the experience. Rather than try to show how depression makes people do specific things, she attempts to force empathy from the readers by subjecting them to a verbal fusillade designed to reproduce the experience in them. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't always work unless you've been depressed yourself -- in which case it's less insightful and more a case of preaching to the choir. Worse, her fantasies about death and suicide are cast wholly in terms of media showoff -- she imagines herself profiled in "New York" magazine after she offs herself -- which in itself makes her motives for writing the book slightly fishy. It's the last problem which makes the book really fail on a basic conceptual level. Wurtzel isn't satisfied with simply portraying what happened to her -- she takes contradicting stances on it, pooh-poohing it as media-manufactured teen-angst B.S. gone haywire, and then defending it as a part of her identity. Which is it? Unless her identity IS media-manufatured teen-angst B.S., which is in itself ugly enough. I wanted to like this book. I really did. It's written with flair and energy, and it held my attention. But it is, in its own way, remarkably dishonest about depression: it assumes that the only thing worth talking about in depression is the depressive episodes themselves, and that people who parade their depression (except for Elizabeth Wurtzel, of course) are attention-getting phonies who need a kick in the pants. The final chapters are too little, too late in this regard: they muse about drug cocktails as being the Answer to a life which has for some people become unliveable. Nowhere does it cross her mind that her problem is no longer personal or medicinal, but social, and she stops short of writing something really interesting. I suspect that would have required another, better book.
Rating:
Summary: If you want to really understand what it's like
Review: Though some may dismiss Wurtzel's memoir as whiny or self-absorbed, this is the most accurate and vivid representation of depression that I have ever read. She is brutally and bravely honest in depicting the depths to which she sank and in doing so, reassures a generation that there is a way out. However, I did find the Afterword about her views on the nation a little out of place. Though it's called "Prozac Nation," it's really just a story about a young woman dealing with "the black wave" of depression. Read the book. Skip the Afterword.
Rating:
Summary: This one really spoke to me...
Review: Wurtzel sure spoke to me in this memoir, not because I, personally, suffer from depression (at least not of this magnitude) but because, underneath all that depression she is a regular college kid trying to make it in the big, bad world. Out of all the memoirs concerning mental illness that my brain has consumed, this is the only one that doesn't contain one iota of self-pity. And yet, it is informative and illuminating. I don't think I've connected with somebody (especially someone I've never met) so much in years. A good, smart excursion into the harrowing world of depression. Oh yeah, and I'm not being coy... but this is not exactly a work for the emotionally unstable.
Rating:
Summary: A brave book!
Review: I think Wurtzel does a fabulous job in showing the non-depressed person what its like to be depressed from the inside out. Once i started the book I was absolutely hooked (partly because i had a book review due the next day in my General Psychology class) but at any rate I think it was completly gutsy to expose herself like she does- sacrificing herself on the alter of truth.
Rating:
Summary: This book is raw and true, expressing things I could not
Review: This book may be hard for the non-depressed to get through, but is so ppowerful and important for those who are depressed. Her writing rings true of what I have felt in my brain for so very long. It is an important and powerful book and I recommend it to anyone who does not understand why they feel so down, not because it will tell you why, but because it decreases the isolation a depressed person feels. I could not find the words to explain to my husband how I felt... so I had him read this book.
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