Prozac Diary (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When the author began taking Prozac in 1988 she was 26 and had already struggled for over a decade with hospitalizations, suicide attempts, anorexia, and self-mutilation resulting from a variety of mental illnesses, obsessive-compulsive disorder the most recent among them. The newly released drug liberated her from debilitating anxiety and pain even as it raised unsettling questions about her own identity, as she had always been defined by her afflictions. "The world as I had known it my whole life did not seem to exist," writes Slater in a characteristically incisive sentence. She was happier, but she found it difficult to write without the inner voices that had sparked her fevered creativity; even the philosophy books she had once loved now seemed irrelevant to her newly healthy state. With utter candor (even about her dampened sexuality) and a surprising amount of humor, Slater chronicles the ups and downs of life on Prozac. A nightmarish relapse when the dosage suddenly proves inadequate ("Prozac poop-out") ultimately helps her discover inner resources to combat her illness in conjunction with the medication. She finds new love and a better understanding of her past; she avoids the equally unrealistic extremes of Prozac boosters who ignore the drug's costs and doomsayers who depict it creating a generation of zombies. Slater's balanced final assessment is voiced, as usual, in exact, lyrical prose: "This is Prozac's burden and gift, keeping me alive to the most human of questions, bringing me forward, bringing me back, swaddling and unswaddling me, pushing me to ask which wrappings are real." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In the final chapter of Welcome to My Country (1996), an account of her work with schizophrenic patients, psychologist Slater revealed that, she, too, had been institutionalized, and that she saw much of herself in those she counseled. Now she steps back to tell how fluoxetine hydrochloride (better known as Prozac) freed her from crippling obsessive-compulsive thoughts and suicidal impulses and allowed her to continue her education, have a career, fall in love and marry. The flipside to Elizabeth Wurtzel's brash, bratty rants, Slater's chronicle focuses not on her depressions ("At fifteen, right when my life should have been growing, it warbled and shrank to the size of a hard, black dot"), but on her long-term relationship with the drug, which she wryly characterizes as a dependency: "We all have our teats. We all suckle something or other." Earnestly reflective in the manner of the best YA fiction (complete with sections of journal entries, letters to her doctor and poems), Slater's is a sort of coming-of-age story, that of a woman who spent her teens and early '20s in a limbo of symptoms and institutions, and had to learn to enjoy life once returned to it. Whether she describes her first weeks on the drug ("the air felt like flannel on my skin"), the Prozac "Poop-out" and its attendant relapses or the vicissitudes of love and sex in her chemically altered state, Slater is frank, engaging and closely descriptive. Her worry that long-term use has diminished her creativity should be allayed by this luminous, cautiously optimistic memoir. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Kimberly Witherspoon; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140263942
• ISBN-13: 978-0140263947
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #299,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gifted writer examines her experience with Prozac, February 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Prozac Diary (Hardcover)

Ten years into her relationship with Eli Lilly's breakthrough antidepressant Prozac, Lauren Slater contemplates the cost her dependence holds. She notices tremors in her hands. Her memory, once a point of pride, fails her in subtle ways. Is she just getting older or is her cure exacting a physical toll? Then, there is the loss of her sex drive.

There is a tradeoff here, however. For while these symptoms are troubling, and open profound questions about a drug that has no long term track history, there is the patient herself to consider. Hospitalized five times in her teens to early twenties, she was unable to hold steady employment. Ms. Slater becomes one of the early Prozac users in 1988 as the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) begins to haunt her. She has carried the burden of unrelenting depression as well as a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

Contrast this with the Dr. Lauren Slater who appeared on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation in early 1997. She has earned a master's degree in psychology from Harvard, and completed her doctorate in just two years. Her first book, Welcome to My Country, published in 1996 was critically acclaimed. Her essays have merited national recognition. Listening to her talk eloquently on the struggles of mental illness one can't help but be awed by her achievements. Clearly, the cream and green capsules Slater writes so effectively about in Prozac Diary have had a stunning impact on her own life.

The 204-page book offers depth and color to arguments that have often been hardened in black and white. From press coverage earlier in this decade that once surrounded Prozac in negative controversy to recent literature that painted it as a miracle compound, rarely have we visited the subject from the middle. Slater's account is of the give and take, a wondrous return to normal life followed by the disappointment of the drug suddenly losing effectiveness. It never again has the same impact, yet she realizes she is bound to it for each time she tries to stop using it symptoms recur. At the same time one realizes in reading her moving account, that maybe the true turning point in her life is when she realizes that even without Prozac she can exert some control over her condition.

The questions she digs at from so deep a personal level are fundamentally unsettling. As research into brain chemistry yields ever more effective pharmacological compounds, several issues creep into the picture. What is gained and what is lost from tampering with chemicals so closely linked to a person's sense of self? Do we lose in creativity what we gain in function? Ms. Slater finds herself concerned over an inability to write easily and by her own indifference to that fact early in her experience with Prozac. She is on the other hand amazed by her ability to perform at a level she has rarely touched beforehand. She wonders if when the drug is it yields unfair advantages. Where does a personality begin and chemistry end? Are the traits that make us who we are easily changed by advanced pharmaceutical design? Can we separate ourselves from the science?

While there are no easy answers here, Prozac Diary offers a funny and touching memoir about life changed forever by chemical interaction. Its strength is in Lauren Slater's ability to write so poetically about a struggle to emerge from the darkness of a life lived on the edges of mental illness. That she has the insight to ponder the price and meaning of her experience make this a provocatively engaging read.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Worthy Addition To The Genre, June 12, 2004

By	Cedric's Mom (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Lauren Slater's 1999 memoir Prozac Diary is a worthy addition to the "women and madness" genre or for the millions currently taking antidepressants. What makes Slater's book a standout, though, is that it's the experience of one of the first people to use Prozac for depression. Slater writes her diary ten years after she first started taking the drug regularly in 1988, so we get to read of the long-term affects of daily dosing and how the drug changed her life over time. What was most interesting about Slater's story is how she had to learn to live life as a no-longer-depressed person. Her entire life, depression and its consequences dominated her life, gave her life meaning and routine, and defined who she was. When the "Zac" started working, she struggled to develop a new sense of herself, separate and apart from the depressed Lauren.

For me, the problem was that there wasn't enough experience there; something felt missing from the story. Perhaps it was the editor's fault. Or maybe my expectations were incorrect from the start. Slater's history is briefly given: lifelong struggles with depression and other forms of mental illness, a history of hospitalizations and attempts at various therapies, none of which were successful until Prozac in 1988. Perhaps I wanted to know more or I wanted the story to be told in a different style. I can't put my finger on it, but for this reader there was just something missing. Slater's writing style is poetic, but it was sometimes a distraction.

I highly recommend the book to those interested in antidepressants for any reason, whether it's history of Prozac's rise to prominence (what some call the aspirin of our age), how it affects people over the short and long-term, or simple voyeurism into the mind and life of someone classified as mentally ill. Lauren Slater truly benefited from this drug, and while many people think Prozac is tossed around too freely these days, she is an excellent example of whom this drug was originally developed for. It's staggering and sad to think how many lives could have been saved if we'd had this drug fifty years ago.

Prozac Diary is a slim read that can be devoured in one day by the voracious reader. Definitely worth the time for those of us living in this Age of Anxiety.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good-enough diary of a long-time prozac patient, May 14, 2001

By	K. Eames "Just a guy with a nose" (Down in the valley, the valley below) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

On a whole, Slater's work is a well-written description of her struggle with mental illness and the relief provided by prozac. She provides an excellent thumbnail summary of Peter Kramer's thesis in Listening to Prozac (itself a superb book) as it relates to her own experience. This is not a memoir that rehearses every injury, every grief, every small sorrow that has piled up to tip her into unhealthiness; it is instead a series of brief but salient vignettes that reveal just enough about the author's past to give us an understanding and appreciation for the background of her pain. This content is subtle and understated. Parenthetically, it also reveals the multigenerational impact of the Holocaust on mental health. My one complaint about the book is that the prose can obscure the content at times. It can become too thick, too full of colorful or metaphoric language, and thus becomes tiresome. I found myself being impatient and irritated with the distraction, like an otherwise excellent dish that had been over-salted.

I must admit to being somewhat mystified at the hostility expressed in some of the other reviews. This book did not present itself as a self-help book or a practical manual on the pharmacology of selective seritonin reuptake inhibitors. It is an account of one person's experience with a remarkable medication - a personal and very individual history. While some may not identify with her experiences, others (including myself) may.