Prozac Diary
by Lauren Slater

List Price: $11.95
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140263942
Publisher: Penguin USA

Lauren Slater is a Harvard-trained psychologist who is also the director of AfterCare Services, a mental health clinic. In addition, she has taught creative nonfiction writing for Goucher College's M.F.A. program. Her work was included in The Best American Essays of 1994 and 1997. The author of Welcome to My Country (1996), she lives with her husband in Boston.

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Much has been written about Prozac, from both negative and positive points of view. What does Prozac Diary add to this ongoing dialogue?

To this dialogue Prozac Diary adds the voice of the consumer—myself—telling the story of pharmacological "cure"from an intimate, and, I hope, authentic stance. Writing about Prozac, as so many people have done, is really not at all the same as writing through Prozac, as I have done, and the portrait that emerges, although no more or less honest than the more distant, "objective"portraits, is a singular story with singular details that no amount of detached research could have uncovered.

In addition, Prozac Diary is meant to address directly the issues involved in long-term Prozac use, which are in many ways different from the issues and ethical dilemmas involved in relatively short-term Prozac use. I wrote my book with the partial intention of portraying what this drug is like when taken over a lifetime, the difficulties, the dangers, and the blessings; and my hope is that it will speak to other people considering, or already embarking on, long-term usage.

Your first book, Welcome to My Country, was primarily about patients you worked with, while Prozac Diary is a much more personal book. Which book did you find easier to write? How did the writing processes differ?

At some essential level, the writing process is always the same for me, no matter how different the project is. Writing, whether about myself or others, demands a rigorous imaginative stretch, a reach for lyricism that conveys emotion, as opposed to covering it. This is always my struggle.

That commonality aside, the two books did present different artistic problems. I think I found it easier to write about other people, about patients, because I could portray the enormity and dignity of their suffering without risking self-absorption, or blatant narcissism. In writing about myself, I feel much more constricted. I worry about solipsism, shortsightedness, self-aggrandizement, self-denigration, and all the other treacherous territories that come with the fascinating pursuit of autobiography.

You offer readers glimpses of your childhood in passages interspersed within the running narrative. Why did you choose this method, rather than presenting a straight chronology from the onset of your illnesses through your experiences with Prozac?

There is a fairly simple answer to this. I intended for Prozac Diary to be a book about cure, not illness. Thus, I self-consciously set out to avoid a linear illness narrative, a structure that would have placed as much weight on sickness as on health. Instead, I chose to give quick glimpses of the illness—enough, I hope, to convey its essential character, but not so much that it obscures my main purpose: to write about an emergence, not a descent.

In retrospect, what was the hardest part of crossing into "the landscape of health"?

The hardest part for me was, and continues to be, my concern that I have lost some of the honesty and intensity that illness, which by its nature places one at the periphery of society, brought to my life. In Freud's famous essay "Mourning and Melancholia"he articulates this conflict extremely clearly. "The depressive has a keener eye for the truth than people who are not melancholic . . . we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can come to truth of this kind."

Memories of your mother play a large role in your descriptions of your childhood. What was your relationship to your father like? How did your two sisters react to the atmosphere at home?

My relationship with my father was placid but fairly distant. His way of coping with the crises on the homefront was to absent himself, physically and emotionally. I don't remember him around a lot. As for my two sisters, they were treated quite differently than I. My mother adored my younger sister and treated my older sister with respect. However, they did not escape the trauma that comes from witnessing the cruelty she inflicted on myself and others. Their scars are different, but, I'm sure, deep.

One of the "side effects"of Prozac you experienced was a new interest in religion and spirituality. Did this help you adjust to the changes you were undergoing? Can you describe the spiritual aspects of mental illness—and of mental health?

My own belief is that spirituality, the idea, the feeling of a greater moral coherence to our world, is essential for people, in illness and in health. Health was a crisis for me, a new world, and I partially relied on my sense of spirituality to guide me through. This "sense"for me is rooted in moral conviction. We are, I believe, morally obligated to navigate the complexities of living with as much grace and courage as we can muster. So yes, my spiritual leanings certainly helped me adjust to the adventure that was, and is, Prozac.

As for the spiritual aspects of mental illness and health, that's a big question, one which would be answered differently by every person to whom the question was posed. For me, the spiritual aspects are the same whether in the sanguine or pathological state. Spirituality transcends illness and health. It is, for me, a fixed yet oddly fluid set of beliefs that serve as a guide. However, in illness I am less capable, in some ways, of responding to the moral challenge that spirituality is, while in health, I have more stamina and, perhaps, more courage. On the other hand, in health, in the pastel glow of good days, I often catch myself becoming slack, letting myself loose from the discipline that a spiritual life requires. Illness represents, in many senses, a reminder, a calling back to attend to all I've let slide.

In what ways have your own experiences as a psychiatric patient helped you as a psychologist?

I don't think my experiences as a psychiatric patient have been much help to me as a psychologist. I don't believe the suffering induced by mental illness necessarily makes a person more empathic to others. In fact, it may be just the opposite. Mental illness, for me, can be a painfully self-absorbed state that shuts out the world, and one's ability to connect to it.

Memoirs, particularly by women with dysfunctional or difficult family histories, have become quite popular today. Why do you think this is true? Did any of them influence your own memoir, and if so, in what way?

I have always been an autobiographical/biographical writer long before the "memoir"craze. I have had a powerful urge to document "real lives,"as a means of directly communicating with other people. I love fiction, but it can feel like a veil to me, like a slanted way of saying something. Because, perhaps, I grew up in a home of lies and denial, I consistently crave art that is balder and somehow more stripped. So I actually don't think my own autobiographical writing was influenced by other memoirs, as I've been charting my life and the lives of others since I was a child. However, I do think the publication of my books, and any measure of publicity they have received, is probably entirely dependent on the popularity of the memoir in general.

As for the first part of the question, I don't know. I can hazard a few guesses. I can say for sure that I am fascinated by the phenomenal interest in the autobiographical form. Perhaps the public interest in this form has something to do with a collective sense that we are, as a culture, becoming increasingly less direct and honest, that we are ever more image-driven, that we know the media to distort and even lie, that we know our figureheads to distort and even lie. There is, perhaps, an ever-increasing sense that our world is warped, a place of funhouse mirrors and ever-shifting ground. In response, we want something solid, we want a real glimpse into real lives, and thus we grasp these books. That "these books"happen to contain much dysfunction in them is simply because any honest account, from Saint Augustine's Confessions to The Liars Club, will, by necessity depict dysfunction. Real life is difficult, and difficulty leads to dysfunction. It's not the dysfunction we're after. It's the sense of truth, of authenticity.

What message does your book have for people who are not prescribed Prozac or other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors?

I think, I hope, my book is about the search for and struggle with identity, about what constitutes a "real self,"and these are questions that are pertinent to any sentient human being. In addition, there is no person in the developed world today who is not a part of the "Prozac Nation."SSRIs, and Prozac in particular, have influenced the brains and souls of everyone—those who swallow the pills, those who don't. We all know someone who is on Prozac, or think about going on it ourselves, or see it seep into our communities in ways both alarming and amusing. Prozac, for these reasons alone, is a remarkable drug. It is perhaps the only drug to have seeped so far out of its plastic shell, to have been absorbed by the bloodstreams of so very many, even those who have never had any tactile relationship with it. I would go so far as to say we are all "on"Prozac, in that we all must grapple with its presence, its meaning, and its implications for our lives.

Has your relationship with Prozac changed since writing the book?

My relationship with Prozac has changed somewhat since writing the book, although the change has nothing to do with the book's publication or creation. Since that time, however, I have had more trouble with the dreaded tolerance, and have had to increase my dose to levels so high they are over what the FDA recommends. Of course, this is frightening for many reasons—side effects, toxicity, permanent cognitive damage, no one really knows. I will wait and see what the future holds.



Excerpted from Prozac Diary © Copyright 2008 by Lauren Slater. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.

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