This is probably the only book I hated that I rated 3-stars, which requires a lot of explanation. Every page I turned, I wanted to slap this girl even more than the last. The incessant whining from this privileged, white, Harvard-educated girl drove me crazy. Hundreds of pages, each one listing a new reason she hates her life, her mind, and herself.Both her parents were clearly dealing with their own demons, but still obviously loved her. She was surrounded by friends who supported her the best they could. Boys threw themselves at her, even when she was at her lowest lows, and stuck with her for a lot longer than I would have. She went to Harvard, which was astonishingly patient and flexible with her. When she got bored, she hopped on a plane for Europe. Rough life.It often seemed like she was just acting out to get attention, complaining that no one was taking her seriously that she has a real problem and not just the blues. I think a big motivation, both for her depression and for this book, is to show that she was depressed before it was cool to be depressed, like her depression was some kind of fashion statement. She was one of the very first Prozac users, which she seems almost proud of.She gives her doctors a lot of credit, more than they deserve. She admits that most of them are basically drug pushers with medical degrees. She was a drugee, and these doctors were only too happy to support her in her rush to use pills to solve all her problems. When her life wasn't perfectly happy, she'd just take more. Her doctors responded by just giving her different drugs. She and her doctors didn't try to address the underlying problems: her beliefs, her lifestyle, and her other drug problems.I realized a lot of my hateful reaction to this book was personal. When I was depressed, I didn't have parents, Harvard, plane trips to Europe, relationships, friends, flexible teachers, or even doctors. All I had was darkness, poverty, loneliness, anger, and hatred. A lot of the reason I hated this book is because I resented her for having it so good, while being even more whiny than I was. I wonder if her privileges are a contributing factor to her depression. Would I have been just as bad if I wasn't forced out of bed by sheer necessity for survival, or if I had more people to listen to my whining?One reason I'm giving this book 3-stars is that it's very well-written. The prose and turn-of-phrase made such a frustrating book interesting to read.The biggest reason I'm giving this book 3-stars is because of her honesty. In the Afterword she said: "I wanted to portray myself in the midst of this mental crisis precisely as I was: difficult, demanding, impossible, unsatisfiable, self-centered, self-involved, and above all, self-indulgent. As I found myself saying to not a few people who would tell me they found the book angering and annoying to read: Good. Very good: that means I did what I had set out to do. That means you'd felt a frustration and fury reading the book that might even be akin to the sense of futility experienced by most people who try to deal in real life with an actual depressive."Then she went on to agree with pretty much every gripe I had. In other words, I'm supposed to hate the book. That made a lot of sense. How could I enjoy reading about misery? If I liked the book, and I found her likable, then she didn't do her job right. A good book about depression can only be a bad book about depression. Depression isn't pretty, and depressed people are annoying and whiny. I admire her honesty, but I still don't admire her. She seems like a piece of work. Depression cured, but from what I've read about her, she's still damn whiny. She even wrote a whole book glorifying whiny women, called Bitch.
Haha, so many people hate her for being so self-absorbed and whiney and I agree, she is - but I love her for it. I think it's honest; it's a fair depiction of what a lot of people feel when they're depressed and I thought it was powerfully written. Maybe I need to read it again now that I'm older but I do remember loving it several years ago. I'd like to add that there's another review on this website that slams this book for being whiny and that Wurtzel should 'just get over it' because there's people out there who have suffered more and are more entitled to being in emotional pain than she is. Er, wrong. Pain isn't something that is on a scale, you can't compare pain between people. The reviewer implies that depression and mental illness isn't real pain and that you have to be a war victim to know what real pain is. Bullshit. I've suffered from anxiety and depression and I've also suffered 'real' trauma as well and I'd give up everything to not have to deal with depression or anxiety ever again. Suffering from mental illness does not equate to *just* being whiny, self-pitying or attention seeking; it may look like that's all depressed people are on the outside but those things are just the scabs on a deeper, festering wound. You can't often tell that someone has cancer just by looking at them and you can't assume how they feel so why would being mentally ill be any different? If a cancer patient "whined" about how rough they were feeling you'd hardly berate them for doing so. Being stoic might be an admirable quality to some but to others, the pain that can be caused by psychic anguish is unbearable and they can't help but be visibly distressed, to speak of their discomfort, to ask for help or attention.I myself have never experienced anything worse and keeping quiet about my issues only led me straight to almost killing myself.Also, most people don't become drug addicts or alcoholics for the ~glamour~. These are real problems, just as real as anything else going on out there. Sure, some people that suffer from these problems may be privileged people. They may have, from what looks from the outside, to be 'easy' good lives. Doesn't change how fucking devastating mental illness can be. It's too variable to be able to compare one person's experience to another's. Whether you think Wurtzel herself is self-indulgent, whiny or attention-seeking is debatable. People with depression can read that way. People with depression can be downright unbearable but it's often not their fault. I don't know, it's so complicated.
What do You think about Prozac Nation (1995)?
Written by an ivy league school attending New York Jewess the author shows all the most annoying traits of that demographic. A good example of which is she likes to claim she lived in poverty but yet she somehow managed to pay tuition at Harvard!!! Not to mention afford all of those shrinks that she dealt with throughout her life. In this book she gives a personal recollection of being "depressed" during her childhood and college years. The only thing about her being "depressed" is she really doesn't seem like a textbook case of depression to me. She much more resembles a narcist with a personality disorder and a bit of a substance abuse problem than a depressive if I am to go by the behavior recounted in the book. But I guess feeling too bad to get out of bed, being miserable 24-7 and having no energy to do anything but stare at the walls wouldn't make for a very interesting read now would it? Another thing I have to point out is if your as crippled by depression as the author of Prozac Nation liked to claim to be how in the world did she manage to make it through those classes at Harvard and graduate? Come on man give me a break. This all begs the question to me what is the real purpose of this book? On one level I have to be suspicious of whether or not this book was written as propaganda in order to normalize taking drugs, or at least approved drugs, to solve all your problems. She does more or less get magicly cured when her shrink puts her on Prozac close to the end of the book. The powers that be are totally pushing mind control drugs like Prozac onto the masses in order to make them happy compliant slaves like in Huxleys Brave New World. Huxley, who hobnobbed with the highest rungs of power, even came out and said that the world elites had plans to use drugs to do just that. Also Wurtzel did attend Harvard which is a hotbed for CIA activity and Tavistock Institute type of social engineering, propaganda and mind washing. But if this book isn't an effort at psychologicly conditioning and propagandizing people to drug their problems away and Wurtzel is not an agent of some sort then she is a con artist because she just does not fit the prototype of a depressive. As far as general entertainment value I don't know who this book would appeal to except attention seeking self absorbed narcistic upper middle class young women who can afford things like shrinks, Prozac prescriptions and Harvard tuition bills.
—Cwn_annwn_13
I loved his book, but I hold her hotness against her. Let me explain.Wurtzel does a brilliant job detailing the devastating depression she goes through. In the closing, she said one of the hard things was justifying why she had to write this book, when there are so many other serious problems out there. But depression is one of them...it is a huge and growing problem and the author does a powerful job showing the ravaging, exhausting, all-consuming effects of said depression. The biggest insight I gained out of this book was that it as so damn hard being depressed...that it took all your energy to do anything, and when feeling like things will never get better, even eating can just seem to much. One really does get a sense of the weight a chronic-depressive carries on their shoulders....so how the hell does a girl who abuses drugs (badly I might add...and not badly in the copious sense, but badly in the irritating sense...like I am high and taking you to the psych ward right now because you can't handle your coke appropriately is the last fvcking thing I want to do) destroys relationships and acts like a nutter not drive everyone away...oh yeah...she is DAMN hothttp://images.google.com.sg/images?q=...Unfairly I admit, but I somehow feel that a woman who looks this good in our society is going to have depression play out a bit more differently than someone unattractive...it doesn't take away from her writing at all, and no doubt she bloody well suffered...I am just not sure that a smokingly hot white-woman-in-America reality should be held as a symbol of a general experience. I don't think this is a fair comment, but this is my space, so I guess mine to make.
—Tony Cohen
The only line that I thought was interesting in this book was something to the affect of "we don't really know what the brain is going to look like 40 years from now since I have been taking pills my whole life." The rest of the book was full of holes and I didn't particularly like the author. The author says multiple times how she wished she had a drug/alcohol addiction because it would be easier to cure. However, the author fails to notice that she has those addictions and more...she is a cutter, sex addict, drug addict, alcoholic. The author claims she didn't attend middle school through high school and as a result she failed all her classes; but some how she ended up at Harvard for college. The author is very self absorbed and makes it sound like she is only depressed because things did not got the way she wanted them to go, so mainly if things didn't revolve around her she got depressed. I would not recommend this book because I feel it displays a false reality of what depression really is.
—Aaron
