Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation; Young and Depressed

Copyright 1994 by Elizabeth Wurtzel
All rights reserved

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Wurtzel, Elizabeth.
Prozac nation : young and depressed in America / Elizabeth Wurtzel.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-68093- X
1. Wurtzel, ElizabethMental health. 2. Depressed personsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
RC 537. W 87 1994
616.85'27'0092dc20
[ B ] 94-28897
CIP

e ISBN 978-0-547-52414-6
v2.1014

Credit lines appear on .

Authors Note: Long before Derrida and deconstruction, the Talmud said, quite sagely, We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. As far as I am concerned, every word of this book is the complete and total truth. But of course, its my truth. So to protect the innocentas well as the guiltyI have changed most names. Otherwise, unfortunately for me, every detail is accurate.

For my mom,
lovingly

Very early in my life it was too late.

MARGUERITE DURAS
The Lover

Prologue

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put togetherthe lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at nightcan no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. But that was so long ago.

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isnt one Ill have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if its worth it.

I start to feel like I cant maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong.

Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is. I dont know.

My dreams are polluted with paralysis. I regularly have night visions where my legs, though attached to my body, dont move much. I try to walk somewhereto the grocery store or the pharmacy, nowhere special, routine errandsand I just cant do it. Cant climb stairs, cant walk on level ground. I am exhausted in the dream and I become more exhausted in my sleep, if thats possible. I wake up tired, amazed that I can even get out of bed. And often I cant. I usually sleep ten hours a night, but often its many more. I am trapped in my body as I have never been before. I am perpetually zonked.

One night, I even dream that I am in bed, stuck, congealed to the sheets, as if I were an insect that was squashed onto the bottom of someones shoe. I simply cant get out of bed. I am having a nervous breakdown and I cant move. My mother stands at the side of the bed and insists that I could get up if I really wanted to, and it seems theres no way to make her understand that I literally cant move.

I dream that I am in terrible trouble, completely paralyzed, and no one believes me.

In my waking life, I am almost this tired. People say, Maybe its Epstein-Barr. But I know its the lithium, the miracle salt that has stabilized my moods but is draining my body.

And I want out of this life on drugs.

I am petrified in my dream and I am petrified in reality because it is as if my dream is reality and I am having a nervous breakdown and I have nowhere to turn. Nowhere. My mother, I sense, has just kind of given up on me, decided that she isnt sure how she raised this, well, this thing, this rock-and-roll girl who has violated her body with a tattoo and a nose ring, and though she loves me very much, she no longer wants to be the one I run to. My father has never been the one I run to. We last spoke a couple of years ago. I dont even know where he is. And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what Im really looking for, is not something I can articulate. Its nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

And I know its around me somewhere, but I just cant feel it.

What I do feel is the scariness of being an adult, being alone in this big huge loft with so many CDs and plastic bags and magazines and pairs of dirty socks and dirty plates on the floor that I cant even see the floor. Im sure that I have nowhere to run, that I cant even walk anywhere without tripping and falling way down, and I know I want out of this mess. I want out. No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out. The promise that on the other side of depression lies a beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.

It is Saturday night, were about at that point when it starts to be Sunday morning, and I am curled up in fetal position on my bathroom floor. The black chiffon of my dress against the stark white tiles must make me look like a dirty puddle. I cant stop crying. The twenty or so people who are still sitting in the living room dont seem at all fazed by whats going on with me in here, if they notice at all, between sips of red wine and hits on a joint someone rolled earlier and chugs on Becks or Rolling Rock. We decidedmy housemate, Jason, and Ito have a party tonight, but I dont think we meant for two hundred people to turn up. Or maybe we did. I dont know. Maybe were still the nerds we in high school who get enough of a kick out of the possibility of being popular that we actually did bring this on ourselves.

I dont know.

Everything seems to have gone wrong. First, Jason opened the fire escape door even though it was the middle of January because it had gotten so hot with the crush of bodies, and my cat decided to make the six-flight climb down into the courtyard, where he got lost and confused and started howling like crazy. I didnt have any shoes on and I was worried for him, so I ran down barefoot and it was freezing and it really shook me up to come back in to so many people I had to say, Hello, how are you? to, people who didnt know I have a cat that I am absolutely crazy about. For a while Zap and I hid in my room. He curled up on my pillow and gave me a look like all this was my fault. Then my friend Jethro, seeing that I was scared of all these people, offered to do a run up to 168th Street and get some cocaine, which would maybe put me in a better mood.

Being on so many psychoactive drugs, I dont really mess with recreational controlled substances. But when Jethro offered to get me something that might possibly alter my state just enough so I wouldnt want to hide under the covers, I thought, Sure, why not?

Theres more: Part of the reason I am so meek is that I stopped taking my lithium a few weeks before. Its not that I have a death wish, and its not that Im like Axl Rose and think that lithium makes me less manly (he supposedly stopped taking it after his first wife told him that his dick wasnt as hard as it used to be and that sex with him was lousy; not having that kind of equipment, Im in no position to give a shit). But I had my blood levels taken at the laboratory about a month ago, and I had an unusually high concentration of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH)about ten times the normal amountwhich means that the lithium is wreaking havoc on my glands, which means that I could end up in a really bad physical state. Graves disease, which is a hyperthyroid condition, runs in my family, and the treatment for it makes you fat, gives you these bulging, ghoulish eyes and creates all kinds of symptoms that I think would make me more depressed than I am without lithium. So I stopped taking it. The psychopharmacologist (I like to call his office the Fifth Avenue Crack House, because all he really does is write prescriptions and hand out pills) told me I shouldnt. He told me that if anything the lithium was going to give me a condition the opposite of Graves disease (What does that mean? I asked Will my eyes shrink up like crinkly little raisins?) but I dont trust him. Hes the pusherman and its in his interest to see that I stay loaded.