Prozac Nation Gave Me Permission to Talk About My Mental Health

I was a little late to the Prozac Nation party, but when I discovered it, I inhaled it. It was 1998, four years after the book—written by Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died of metastatic breast cancer this week—was published. I was 21 and had been living with anxiety and depression for many years and had been on antidepressants—not Prozac, in my case, but another selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)—for two of them. Almost no one in my life knew.

Back then, nobody spoke about mental health. At least, not in my life. And if they did, it was in vague, meaningless terms uttered under the breath (“She’s struggling”) or with more than a hint of disparagement (“She’s gone off the rails”). I knew nobody who had lived some of what I’d lived. Then I read Prozac Nation.

Published when Wurtzel was 27, the memoir details her drug use and sex life against the backdrop of her time at Harvard. (See, people with mental illness can still do impressive stuff like go to Harvard.) She held nothing back, and while critics were divided, I was a little bit in love. A naive girl from a small town in Scotland, I had something major in common with this bold, ballsy New Yorker besides booze, cigarettes, and unsuitable men. I just didn’t know I could talk about it.

More than 20 years later, I still have my old copy of Prozac Nation. Sandwiched on my bookshelf between Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jacqueline Novak’s How to Weep in Public—my top trio of books about clinical depression that don’t tell you how to deal with the illness but describe, with almost unbearable perfection, what it’s like to live with it. Wurtzel’s words have been a solid, if slightly uncomfortable, security blanket throughout my life.

Her hugely quotable one-liners spoke the truth to me at 21, when I was desperate to ask “Why?” about my mental health but nobody was listening. “I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am 20 and I am already exhausted,” she wrote.

They spoke to me at 25, when I was looking for love in all the wrong places. “I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn for the loss of something I never even had,” she wrote.

And at 28, when I was clawing my way out of an abusive relationship: “I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.”

And, most recently, at 39, when I realized I’d been self-medicating with alcohol for years: “Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.”

Prozac Nation has stood the test of time because it was ahead of its time. Of course, the history of the “confessional memoir” goes back way further than Wurtzel. Think Plath, think Anne Sexton, think Sue Monk Kidd. The genre is often attributed to “self-indulgent” female writers, but men have been at it for years too: John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass, Pat Conroy. But Prozac Nation tackled what was still largely a taboo subject—mental illness—in a way that was new, raw, and entirely unapologetic. It put the crack in the foundation of the stigmas that are finally crumbling decades later.

The book changed my life by giving me the courage to share my own story, beginning with difficult, emotional conversations with a few close family members who had no idea of the pain I’d lived with for years and the pills I relied on to function. Today I continue to share my experience with mental illness with the world. Talking—and writing—about mental health has become second nature. The freedom in putting my truth out there, after bearing the weight of silence for so long, is always liberating. Call me confessional, call me self-indulgent, call me an angry feminist. I may be all or none of those things. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the conversation about mental illness—and mental health in general, because we all have it, not just those of us who have a clinical diagnosis—continues. Wurtzel pushed it forward in a way that shouldn’t be underestimated.

In the afterword of my (1995) edition of Prozac Nation, Wurtzel wrote:

“If Prozac Nation has any particular purpose, it would be to come out and say that clinical depression is a real problem, that it ruins lives, that it ends lives, that it very nearly ended my life; that it afflicts many, many people, many very bright and worthy and thoughtful and caring people, people who could probably save the world or at the very least do it some real good, people who are too mired in despair to even begin to unleash the lifespring of potential that they likely have down deep inside.”

A few hours after the news of Wurtzel’s death became public, Prozac Nation was the number one best-seller on Amazon’s Depression list. But the legacy of Wurtzel’s work all these years later makes it clear: Her words aren’t only for people with depression. They’re for everybody.

Claire Gillespie is a writer in Scotland covering parenting, health, and wellness. Follow her @clairegillespiewriter.