Visibility of Inner Darkness in Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation

Abstract

This paper studies the memoirProzac Nation as an exploration of internal darkness made visible through socio-psychological reading.it analyses how Wurtzel’s memoir unravels a complex and multi-faceted personal experience, mental health is correlated with societal structures, offering new possibilities for thinking about the complex relationships between individual experience and broader cultural and social norms.The narrator of this memoir and her inner psychology along with social ideologies, using Prozac (antidepressant medicine) as a culture unveils the dark side of American modern practices in which they live. The narrator’s mental illness starting with her family complexes is observed and analyzed using the theory of psychoanalysis presented bySigmund Fraud, a broader socio-cultural study byDeleuze and Guattari and Jacques Lacan, and the collective unconscious as a universal analysis by Carl Gustav Jung. The research scrutinizes the complex relationship of thepainful personal complications that start with the family complexes, living environment, and society that reaches to the collective study ofthe whole nation as Prozac. Study of Prozac as an antidepressant medicine helps readers access its negative impacts and prepare the ground forpossible moral and social mental health recovery. Keywords: Psychological problems,Depression,Unconscious,Mental health,Darkness, Prozac