Young and depressed in america a memoir pdf

The chronology is also effective, with each chapter focusing on a very specific time in her life beginning at age 11, "full of promise," when depression hit her not as a "sudden disaster" but as "accumulated data. The suicide attempt, which readers keep expecting in each chapter, finally occurs toward the end of the memoir: "I am doing exactly the thing I don't want to do, committing the act I believed I was above: making a wimpy attempt that is bound to fail. The final chapters provide intriguing, knotty questions about psychopharmacology as Wurtzel on one hand characterizes Prozac as a national joke, trendy, a silly drug for crybabies, cosmetic pharmacology for the U.

Her writing complicates the issues surrounding psychopharmacology and therapy, and her attempt to "write a book that felt as bad as it feels to feel this bad. Toggle navigation. Annotated by: Wear, Delese. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Hot Indonesia, Etc. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Indonesia, Etc. The Free by Willy Vlautin. Primary among the causes of her deeply sorrowful feelings were being in the crossfire of her battling, divorced parents, and loss of her relationship with her father after custody was granted to her mother.

Her relationship with her mother as she grew up wasn't good either. For example, she says that although she absolutely hated summer camp, "my mother sent me here [to summer camp] for an eight-week reprieve from single motherhood" p. Her self-esteem was probably harmed by her father telling her, when she was about ten years old, that once her mother became pregnant with her, she "wanted to have an abortion, that she'd gotten as fas as the gynecologist's office and was all set to have a D and C, and that he physically restrained her to prevent the process.

Later, when I told my mother about that conversation, she began to cry and said that the opposite was true" p. Each parent claiming the other didn't want her was shortly before the onset of her so-called depression.

She summarized her upbringing as follows: "My parents are divorced, I grew up in a female-headed househould, my mother was always unemployed or marginally employed, my father was always uninvolved or marginally involved in my life. There was never enough money for anything, my mom had to sue my dad for unpaid child support and unpaid medical bills, my dad eventually disappeared" p.

Other causes were disappointments in life that make anyone extremely sad, such being rejected by a boyfriend she loved after a long relationship with him. Her description of her life is a classic and undeniable example of despondency or "depression" being caused by what she experienced in life rather than by some as-yet-undiscovered biological cause of depression or some known cause, of which there are none.

What's more, she says "To ask anyone how he happened to fall into a state of despair always involves new variations on the same myriad mix of family history. There is always divorce, death, drunkenness, drug abuse and whatnot in any of several permutations" p. Of course, to family members of those mired in a state of dispair or so-called depression or other so-called mental illness, such as members of the misnamed National Alliance for the Mentally Ill NAMI , this is horrible news.

They prefer to believe so-called mental illness including depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance" or other physical illness that, as they often say, "is no one's fault.

Much of her story is about the time she was a student at Harvard University, one of the most selective and perhaps the most prestigious insititution of higher learning in the USA if not the world.

But if your expectations are high, say a value of , with the same success your happiness equals a value of only 0. She does present the following theory - repeat, theory - of how her despondency could be biological and be helped by a so-called antidepressant drug: "In the case of my own depression, I have gone from a thorough certainty that its origins are in bad biologiy to a more flexible belief that after an accumulation of life events made my head such an ugly thing to be stuck in, my brain's chemistry started to agree.