“One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.”
Wurtzel clarifies the misconception that mental illnesses such as clinical depression could only be cured through psychoanalytical means. In Wurtzel’s case her depression was too severe for therapy and action to actually work towards curing her clinical depression. Hence the assertion is the subversion of the medical assumptions that were held for a long time regarding mental health. In that, if therapy and personal effort could not help a depressed individual then their case was unsolvable. However, Wurtzel tries the new medication, Prozac, and eventually helps her manage her depression and anxiety. By the conclusion of the novel, the presence of such drugs in the market pushes the discourse on medicating depression thus makes the topic less off-limits.
“Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness; the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up.”
Depression is a subjective experience that can only be fully understood by people who have actually suffered it. Thus words such as madness to describe the experience of people suffering the disorder does not really encompass the experience. In that, the semantics used to describe mental disorders have taken away the actual severity of these illnesses. Clinical depression is a vacuum state that rips away feelings, interests, and normal responses. And when this state is a constant, that it is an awful experience that cannot actually be put into a single word to describe it.
“...if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know.
The statement accentuates the sentiment that depression is not a state of mind that the sufferer has total control over once afflicted. The progression of depression is an occurrence that is so sudden that its origins or triggers are usually impossible to capture. Therefore this makes curing the sufferer through therapy such a hard task because they are also unaware of the specifics.
“Very early in my life it was already too late.”
The origin of most mental disorders is usually attributed to emotional distress in early life and childhood trauma. Henceforth the assertion highlights that Wurtzel’s depression and anxiety began early in her life that her entire life became shaped by it. Witnessing the divorce of her parents, she falls into deep depression which subsequently leads to therapy sessions that bring further financial constraints in the family. As the severity of her depression increases as she gets older and incorporates different life changes, she accepts her dark fate but that is before she finds the right medication.
