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Summary: Thought-provoking Story of a Journey through Depression
Review: As the opening line states: at the age of ten, Wurtzel was described as "full of promise", but pretty soon, depression took over, a seriously debilitating, yet oft misunderstood disease, one that led her to struggle and survive, for the next decade, through an internal hell. Through high school and Harvard, through bitter confrontations with her parents and numerous relationships and jobs, still the "black wave" followed her relentlessly. Wurtzel's book is irritating at times, heartbreaking at others, but always you feel, as with depression, that there is no let-up for her, no short, sweet salvation to lift her spirits. She falls in love, or with the idea of love, and this temporarily helps, but when the relationship ends it seems to tip her already precarious emotional state over the edge even further. Finally, she is prescribed Prozac which seems to help. As she says: "the black wave, for the most part is gone" but now Wurtzel, as do Eli Lilly and Company, the manufacturer that profited from Prozac, fears that all the media attention surrounding the drug has trivialised the very serious nature of the disease that this was designed to treat, and that is clinical depression. Food for thought.
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Summary: It helped me to understand depression .....MY depression
Review: I am only 16 years old and ran across this book in my school's library. I was suprised to find such a moving piece of literature there. I could be considered to have suffered depression for the past 4 years of my life. I cried when reading this book because it felt like it was written about me, for me. Prozac Nation described and explained every emotion that I had been feeling, yet never had the vocabulary to express it. I recomend this book to anyone and everyone. It will take you into a different world inside of yourself that you never even new exhisted.
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Summary: so emontional and moving
Review: This book made me cry. I really felt that I was part of the story, like I was the one who was depressed. Any book written this well will make you feel that your part of the action, that your the main character. I read the book in about four hours, non stop. it is really brillent.
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Summary: A profound insight in to the honest use for Prozac
Review: Prozac Nation provides a profound insight in to depression and all that it means to be depressed. The book takes you through the life of the heroine day by day and you actually feel that you are there with her. Real life situations are discussed and highlighted which provide the back drop for the psychological problems that are so very apparent from the beginning. The overwhelming purpose of this book, as far as I am concerned, is that depression is a debilitating and very serious condition.. Prozac is in the top 10 of most commonly prescribed drugs in the USA, and England. This is not right as severe depression is not that common. Prozac is being used as a "feel good" drug by the masses, whhich cheapens the true profile of depression. I feel that reading this book validates the real benefits that the drug can give truly depressed people. Those looking for a "quick fix" or weightloss...should look at taking much less extreem measures and stop abusing Prozac and cheapening the depressed state.
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Summary: Prozac Nation is the grunge complaint put to prose.
Review: Prozac Nation, contrary to its title, offers no sense of political or social perspicacity. It is no manifesto. But happily, as the author herself reminds us, it is intended as a memoir (and perhaps chic malfeasance), not literati. Its reputation as a "controversial" piece of work is thanks to the (commendable) resistance of readers to thehistrionics and auto-holocaustic style. In point of fact, it's a direct result of that deliberate affectation to high-decible delivery which diminishes the (important) sense of honest misery which would have vindicated the depression as a topic. Rather, through eclipse by the author's distracting intention to be shocking and inexplicable to man and science, Prozac Nation just comes off annoying. True depression is a cycle of chronic disinterest and sadness, not dynamically self-fascinated. Wurtzels' own depression, which I don't doubt, was probably made worse by her delusions of complexity and sickness-envy, the true source of her treatise on herself. There is as much innate relationship between the nihilism and depression any more than there is an innate self-importance about sensorimotor navigation. Perhaps the author's excitement at having something to engage herself with betters her sense of true representation. Personally, I resent the image she would give all depressives by her contention that she is how it really is. It isn't all the way she made it sound, thank God -- I'd rather be just depressed. Tendentiously, what she successfully underscores is not a prodigious summits of disturbance but mere emotional adolescence. Together with the fluent writing (really very lovely in places) and the fact of the finished (published!) book, she is her own worst disproval of the image she works so hard to convey. Wurtzel clearly possesses the talent and wherewithal to have transcended her focus of herself, if she could find an interest and a cause to do so. Alienated readers may feel, like me, that such solipsistic indulgence is cheap. The effects are insincerity, insolence, and a feeling of contrived emotional-blowtorch special effects. If her goal had been, say, to illustrate the fail-making effects of depression, and to telescope in upon the very real horrors the minds of depressives are so apt at creating, by credibility of her own experience, for others who cannot know first hand, I have no doubt she could have done so. Pity. As it is, I wanted to take Prozac Nation back to the store and smack the clerk who sold it to me.
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Summary: Still Haunting Me Weeks Later
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel takes you into the mind of a young, depressed person who is fed up with faking happiness. From her first suicide attempt as a child at summer camp (which nobody takes seriously) to a manic episode in Dallas, Wurtzel's memoirs truly portray how it feels to live with depression. I finished this book in two days, and even though several weeks have passed, the book still haunts me. It's one that I will want to read again, slower this time. She's truly a gifted writer.
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Summary: A book to make you understand.
Review: The first thing you will notice about this book is how much Elizabeth Wurtzel and her personality totally agravates and annoys you. However, this is what the life of a person suffering from depression is. They will be the first to tell you that why they feel the way they do, react the way they do, and express themselves they way the do makes absolutely no sense. This book, however, will allow you, if you allow yourself, to put yourself in her shoes and gain some sort of insight into the suffering of this individual, and that the pain is real.
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Summary: Not Quite A Victim
Review: Wary of the tide of "I suffered and since I'm still alive, you should praise me" books at the time of Prozac Nation's publication, I resisted it until now. Past grudgingly impressed, I devoured the thing in two days- that's how engaging her prose is. That's how vividly and unapolgetically Wurtzel chronicles her very acute depression. She doesn't play victim; she fearlessly tells about stealing boyfriends, about the unreasonable and overwrought kinds of commitments she demands from people (feeling out of control and inappropriate, but unable to stop specializing in "false intimacy"), and, most consistently, how often she feels she can't get anyone to take her seriously, to understand that her crisis is nt imminent, but immediate. Particularly relevant (and fairly unexamined elsewhere, to date) is the way she self medicates- gulping Ecstacy, amphetamines, alcohol, and anything else she can find. Her compulsion is not to be confused with drug addiction, for which she "lacks the germ" that makes use abuse, but it is no less desperate; the pattern of behavior is actually quite common among this younger generation, and her account of it may help draw the distinction between those for whom drug addiction is the problem, and those for whom use provides escape from a different malady. The only real complaint I have with the book comes at the end; Wurtzel reveals her depression is diagnosed as "atypical", meaning she feels constantly miserable and agonized, yet remains extremely functional. That's the unbelievable part. She pulls the reader into the most convoluted and wreteched folds of her pain (and thanks to her deft writing, replicates the reluctance to truly leave that pain) so fully, and enmeshes one so entirely in her mindset, that she neglects most of the concommitant details that woud support her functionality. She says she feels constantly on the verge of bottoming out, and the reader feels the same way, but as a result spends little time with biography or history that would support her existence outside of her depression as a managing, capable person. A small point, it unfortunately lends some sense of incompleteness at the book's end.
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Summary: For anyone who has ever had or known someone with depression
Review: This book made me feel like, "Finally someone who understands how I suffer." For some reason, Ms. Wurtzel's book has come to be seen as a symbol of all Gen X woe, which I really don't think it is. Clinical depression has nothing to do with your "generation." Anyone of any age who has had some experience with clinical depression would appreciate this book. The people who don't like it usually find Ms. Wurtzel to be too "self-absorbed." Rightly so. Anyone who feels like dying every second of every day tends to be a little absorbed in his or her own life. I read this book awhile after I was diagnosed with clinical depression and really related to Wurtzel's problems. Though I've never had a drug habit, I could understand why someone with these feelings would (personally, I prefer to eat too many cookies). Her book was both enlightening and witty. Every now and then when I'm feeling really low and alone, I read a few pages of it just to remind myself it's not just me.
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Summary: A definate teaching book
Review: This book teaches you so much about depression and how someone can face it. Elizabeth Wurtzel shows
you where she's been and how she brought herself back. For someone suffering through depression this book can show you
that other people have lived through it, and come back strong and happy. For anyone else the book shows you what sufferers
go through. Ms. Wurtzel describes superbly the depth of this disease that ravages our country and others. She takes you into the world of depression, her world. A definate
must read book for anyone, no matter who they are.
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