Prozac Nation enough to drive you to Zoloft

I just completed Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Prozac Nation." May I have a Zoloft, please.

The 300-page memoir is a diet of depression roughage. The word pain is used incessantly to describe Wurtzel's life of drowning under the "black wave" of deep, deep depression. While many Americans, including myself, can relate to Wurtzel's despair, but some of us have to question her approach and lack of perspective. As she spent time cutting herself in her junior high school's locker room during lunch, she was shielding herself from experiencing life or as she says "gaining perspective."

I feel for Wurtzel, but sometimes I just wish she'd pull her head out of her butt and and realize that she had opportunities before her others only dream of. A semester in London, an internship in Dallas, an opportunity to write for Rolling Stone, Seventeen and more. Yet, she was willing to throw it all away even when she had a caring therapist who was ready to do everything it took to make her better, she still took the final step and made an attempt to take her life. THEN she laughed about it.

By the end of the book, I was well ready for it to be over. Her depression was so overly expressed, I was depressed.

While the epilogue and afterword made interesting points about the increasing diagnosis of depression in America today and even the trivialization of the disease that affects millions of people, it was not enough to bring a reader out of the darkness Wurtzel had painted.

Reviews called Wurtzel's book important, smart, real and truthful. I call Wurtzel's work excruciatingly redundant, overworked and ploy filled. I don't doubt Wurtzel's pain, I just doubt her reason to write this book and expose all of us to her utter despair. She claims she wanted to be true to the darkness that filled her. In fact she was true to her self-serving, self-absorbed nature that led her to the path of depression to begin with.

Pass the Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, please.