Prozac Nation

Neer Korn takes a look at Elizabeth Wurtzel's much talked about book Prozac Nation, a highly personal account of her battle with depression.

Some authors change people's names in their true-story accounts by declaring something like " ... to protect the innocent". Elizabeth Wurtzel does it in Prozac Nation, her articulate account of what it is like to be young and depressed in America, by quoting the Talmud: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"That's the thing I want to make clear about depression," she says. "It's got nothing to do at all with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in the right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant. Depression is in an altogether different zone ... The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part ... to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purpose, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead."

The daughter of Jewish parents who divorced when she was two, Wurtzel lived with her mum, a loving, neurotic woman who struggled to provide her daughter with a private school education, summer camps and extensive psychiatric attention. Her dad, meanwhile, lead a less responsible existence sleeping, through most of her weekend visits and, later in her life, disappearing for an extended period.

Depression took hold of Wurtzel early in her adolescence -- "maybe I was 10 or maybe I was 12". Since then she has survived several suicide attempts, hospital stays and many desperate times. She describes these periods with intense clarity: "I am so demanding and difficult for my boyfriends," she says, "because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about, if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your school work, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theatre productions and stop doing anything besides sitting here by my side and passing my Kleenex and aspiring while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in misery."

Wurtzel was prescribed Prozac well before it became trendy and while she openly admits to the help this, and other anti-depressants, have offered, her book is really an exploration of whether the origins of depression lie in childhood experiences.

"Some people are born to single mothers and turn out just fine. I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence felt in a positive way. But I got two parents who were constantly at odds with each other, and all they gave me was an empty foundation that split down the middle of my empty, anguished self." But her experience of family life, she argues, wasn't that different from that of her peers. "[Psychiatrists] react as if my family situation was particularly alarming and troublesome, as opposed to what it actually is in this day and age: perfectly normal. ... I mean, is there anybody out there who doesn't think her family is dysfunctional?"

A final suicide attempt several years ago lead her to recovery. "Something just kind of changed in me," she says, "Over the next few days, I became all right ... the black wave, for the most part, is gone. On a good day, I don't even think about it anymore."

Wurtzel does not set out to espouse the answers to modern-day depression, rather, she offers some observations on our times. "How is it possible that so many are so miserable," is the ultimate issue raised in Prozac Nation.

"What is fascinating about depression this time -- what is unique about this Prozac Nation -- is the extent to which it is affecting those who have so much to look forward to and to hope for, who are, as one might say of any bright young thing about to make her debut into the world, so full of promise. These are people about whom one cannot say that life is over, that it's already too late, but rather young people for whom life has just begun."

Wurtzel, who is a Harvard graduate and an award-winning journalist with The New Yorker and New York Magazine, is currently working on a book about women in the Bible. "I went to the New York Public Library and couldn't find a single book on Delilah or Bathsheba," she said in a recent interview. "I'd like to use them in ways that can bring us up to date and I'd call the book Bitch."

Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, (Quartet), $19.95.

© Copyright 1995

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