Name: Prozac Nation
ISBN: 9780544960091

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Young and Depressed in America

Prozac Nation

Kendall Lobdell

I start to think there really is no Cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it

knowing versus knowing, head versus heart

I need that thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off. 

. . . Only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark. 

Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I’m always missing someone or someplace or something, I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing. 

My god, where on earth do I have to go to get away from me?

young and depressed in America

Prozac nation

Elizabeth verbalizes the pain of depression in a way that pierces me right to my core. The medication onslaught never ends. So relatable it hurts to think about it. 

jaya kohol

white girl insanity memoir has been done to death but wurtzel does it pretty well. a glimpse of the subjective experience of melancholic psychosis. better than the movie

eris

armoni mayes

3.5 stars. Christ this book took me forever to finish, partially due to me only reading a couple of pages a week. The book at some parts would grab my attention and cause me to read more, and sometimes it was so boring I wanted to DNF it. Overall, it was a good portrayal of what is it like to live and suffer from depression. I am no psychiatrist or medical doctor but I do believe Elizabeth may have been suffering from more than just depression, due to her outbursts and attention-pleading which sounded as if she was experiencing mania from time to time. I believe people did not catch this and thought she was just being self-absorbed, but who really knows. 

"My morose character would not ever go away because depression was everything about me. It colored every aspect of me so thoroughly, and I became resigned to that.”

“There was no way I could possibly explain to them that I was suffering from an acute depression, that it was so intense that even when I wanted to get out of my own head and attend to other people’s needs—as I had so much wanted to do that day—I just couldn’t.”

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.”

Faith Ho 

"One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live." 

this was electrifying. it's a beautifully crafted memoir, not in the sense of empty but pretty words, but hard hitting, almost brutal (but not violent) paragraphs. her experience with depression is spelled out in full, giving a sense of no holding back, while she writes a mincingly precise portrait of her experience, emotions and reflections. while she reveals certain thoughts around depression, its treatment and social attitudes towards it, at heart this is a memoir, in every true sense of the word. 

"It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on." 

at points it feels almost like you're invading something, but you realise it is her taking you by the shoulders, staring you down, telling you: this. this is what im feeling. this is what it feels like. 

"As soon as I was out on the street, I realised I didn't want to be alone after all, realised I didn't want to be anything at all."

Iris Emily

self absorbed but so is any depressive. perfectly describes the selfishness of a crazy woman.

Sabetha Danes

It's crazy how this book was written in the early 90s and it is still relevant.

Mahasin S Ameen

This is by far Wurtzel's best book. As someone who suffered from depression I could relate to young Wurtzel and her relationships and interactions with other people.

Rachel

This is one of those books that when you read at the right time in your life the feeling is indescribable.

Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword "Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back." —New York Times "A book that became a cultural touchstone." —New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Prozac Nation Young and Depressed in America

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