Prozac Diary Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Prozac Diary Book

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 SmithRead More

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  • Product Description

    A dazzling and powerful account of a life profoundly altered by Prozac-- "surely among the best on the long-term effects of the drug" (The New York Times)

    In 1988, at age 26, Lauren Slater lived alone in a basement apartment in Cambridge, depressed, suicidal, unemployed. Ten years later, she is a psychologist running her own clinic, an award-winning writer, and happily married. The transformation in her life was brought about by Prozac. Prozac Diary is Lauren Slater's incisive account of a life restored to productivity, creativity, and love. When she wakes up one morning and finds that her demons no longer have a hold on her, Slater struggles with the strange state of being well after a lifetime of craziness. Yet this is no hymn to a miracle pharmaceutical. It is a frankly ambivalent quest for the truth of self behind an ongoing reliance on a drug. Slater also addresses Prozac's notorious "poop-out" effect and its devastating attack on her libido. This is the first memoir to reflect on long-term Prozac use, and reviewers agree that no one has written about Prozac with such beauty, honesty, and insight.

    * 12 million Americans take Prozac regularly
    * Prozac Diary appeared on the Boston Globe and Independent bestseller lists
    * Penguin Readers Guide Bound into Every Book

    "Powerful. . . . The chemistry of Prozac Diary is beautiful." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  • 0140263942
  • 9780140263947
  • Lauren Slater
  • 24 February 2000
  • Penguin Books Ltd
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 224
  • New edition
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