Prozac Nation- Elizabeth Wurtzel

Hello!

I just got back from Las Vegas which was amazing of course. I am pretty jet legged though so I am going to do an IMM tomorrow. I got some awesome books while on vacation then hit up the library today. I wish I could have stayed longer but I am now back in Canada where when I landed it was -2 sadly.

Title: Prozac Nation

Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Format: Soft cover

Source: Borrowed from the library

Rating: 3/5

Goodread Summary:

Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation still manages to be a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.

Elizabeth is an interesting character. She does not understand why she is depressed. She tries to rationalize why she feels this way and tries to convince herself her life is not bad enough to merit being depressed and unhappy constantly. I liked her a lot; she showed her deepest and darkest feeling and showed the side of depression we don’t always see. We hear about depression and how it affects people and the medication that is given to try to fix the imbalance but I feel like we don’t get to see the people who are actually suffering from it and how they feel and how they get through their days feeling like this and having people trying to help them but not fully understanding what they are going through.

Her family was like a roller coaster. Sometimes I liked them then they would plummet and I wanted to jump in the book and defend Elizabeth from them. Her dad was nonexistent and when he was there with Elizabeth he just brushed off her feelings and didn’t listen to what she had to say. He was unwilling to help her; he kept trying to make her mother pay. Elizabeth’s mother was an interesting character. She would be there for Elizabeth then she would start at her making her feel guilty. I felt sympathetic towards her, trying to help Elizabeth while trying to keep her own life a float. 

I would recommend this book for anyone who is suffering from depression or know someone who is. It made me feel differently about depression.  Sadly like Elizabeth I have wondered why people cannot just pull themselves out of it.  People close to me have suffered and I feel that I did not sympathize as much as I could have. This book has given be an inside look into what people suffering go through and how the world see’s them. It changed my view of mental illness.