´You don´t need drugs, Elizabeth. What you really need is close, caring relationships. You need to trust somebody. You need to think people are okay´.
´Depression was the loneliest fucking thing on earth´.
Prozac Nation is one of the most deeply depressive books I´ve read in a while. Sadder as it is a memoir, not a work of fiction and testifies the pains of Elizabeth Wurtzel, trapped in her own body-and-soul pains as fighting with chronic depression since the young age of 12.
Depression is a bad bird: there is nothing that will make you happy, and the explanations based on chemical disbalance and deficiency are not fully reliable. Although the proper therapy was discontinous, mostly for financial reasons, the drugs were her constant companion. ´At first, the idea was to get me going so I could respond to talk therapy, but now it seems clear that my condition is chronic, that I´m going to be on drugs forever if I just want to be barely functional´. After various drug trial, she ends up fully depending on Prozac, the second most commonly prescribed drug in the USA. I don´t know which are the favorite prescriptions of doctors in Germany, for instance, or in other parts of the world, but I remember how my mother, of blessed memory, used to take fists of various drugs that turned her catatonic, mostly detached from everything and everyone, with very very short intervals when she was slightly responsible to her immediate reality. As Wurtzel will mention too, ´Mental health is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent´.
This description of her frequent state of her body and mind are very familiar with my observations about my late mother too: ´When I am this depressed, every small activity is a body blow, and I feel knowcked out and somnambulant all the time´. Cultural norms prevented me to ever ask my mother what was going on with her, and often took her distant cold behavior as a failure of our relationship when in fact, her relationship with the entire world was completely distorted.
Deeply affected by the divorce of her parents and an absent father that preferred to constantly avoid to take full responsibility of his parenthood, Elizabeth sunk into a dark wave that never ended since. ´Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn´t stop and suffer with me´. She was brave enough to put into words her whole suffering, helping among others those coping with relatives or loved ones to understand what they are going through.
By default, outsiders people may consider depression associated simplistically with madness as a source of creativity, a bohemian label only those few gifted are experiencing. In fact, it´s nothing like that. ´Depression is such an uncharismatic disease, so much the opposite of the lively vibrance that one associates with madness´.
I had Prozac Nation on my TBR for a long time but for very personal reasons I tried to avoid it. Reading it also took me a couple of good weeks, as I just needed to take a break from the everyday black diary. It hurts to read about it - she writes very empathically yet simply - and to figure out that, inf fact, there is nothing one can do than embrace with love and understanding someone going through such an ordeal. But who does possess infinite love? It´s so hard and we are so limited and selfish, especially when we deal with someone irreversibly affected by depression.
There is also a movie based on the book that I promise myself not to watch. For now, it was enough, I may need to take a break for a while from psychological books and therapy stories. It is not an easy burden to carry, especially when we start to understand things but it´s very very late say ´good bye´ or just ´I love you´.
Rating: 5 stars
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