Previous Meeting Outline

Prozac Nation

Can love cure depression?
Were Wurtzel’s struggles with depression a chemical imbalance, a product of a rough childhood and unhealthy culture, a philosophical problem, or a combination of these?
Is it possible that a depressive worldview is an accurate one rather than an irrational, diseased perspective?
Is there a contradiction of sorts in Wurtzel’s thesis for the misery of life often being tied to the inevitability of dying and her almost constant desire to be dead?
What are cultural norms and messaging that you feel that you have been able to thoroughly question and escape or distance yourself from?
How do you imagine Wurtzel’s teenage and college years would have looked differently if she was born ten or twenty years later in the time of the internet? Would she have been more depressed? Would she have more easily found useful resources?
Does identifying the origins of your troubles (or at least what seems to be a sensible theory of these origins) often help you overcome these troubles or is it knowledge that leads to “so now what?” without a clear answer? Do insights and revelations often serve as rationalizations as opposed to catalysts for change?
Does the inevitability of death make things seem “pointless”? What does it really mean when we claim that something is pointless?
Have you been able to find ways for your pain to feel purposeful? Does your pain fuel creativity or does your pain stifle it?
Do people often seem ambivalent towards others who suffer with depression unless someone has reached the point of suicidal ideation? Does the suicidal ideation help others empathize and understand the severity of the problem? Or perhaps is the concern generally more out of an obligation people often feel to help others not die (while dodging feelings of guilt) more so than an obligation to help others not suffer?
Have you cut people out of your life due to not being able to handle their depression? Have other people cut you out of their lives due to not being able to handle your depression?
Is there too much pressure to be “normal”? To what extent are you comfortable with displaying abnormal behavior or feeling like you are having abnormal thoughts?
Have you ever felt homesick for a place that might not exist?
Does planning for a better future bring you solace?
What helps you cope with feelings of anger and rage?
Wurtzel struggles with forgiveness in general but particularly when it comes to her father. When should we forgive? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being someone who is either quick to forgive or someone who is usually reluctant to forgive?
Wurtzel also struggles with relationships in general. Does she expect too much from people, or does she simply want genuine love and care which seems difficult to find?
Wurtzel grows up in an era where everything begins to be televised. “…nothing seemed too sacred for the camera’s lens.” What have we gained and what have we lost by this pattern only escalating in the decades since this book was written?
When is mental illness boring and when is it entertaining?
Is there something that is sometimes misguided in wanting “answers” to things?
Are diagnoses generally helpful or harmful? What are the pros and cons of the endless labels we have (and often eliminate or revise) for the various types of behavior and mental states that we find undesirable?
How did you feel about Wurtzel often referencing her interest in feminism and simultaneously expressing a disgust for abortion? She acknowledges that she would have considered an abortion, but she also asks “…how could anyone with a little love in her life kill the love growing inside her? I’d sooner kill myself.” (Perhaps we can address this with empathy rather than moral righteousness from either direction.)
Have you ever felt that you or someone else didn’t have the “right” to be depressed? Does depression require some sort of valid reason to justify it?
To what degree do you generally like or dislike playing the role of therapist for others? How might have you have handled a friendship with the 20-year-old Wurtzel?
What did you think of Wurtzel’s romantic obsessions and her talk of understanding why people sometimes want to kill, eat, and inhale the ashes of their lovers?
Is it okay to make promises to people even though we almost always can come up with a scenario in which we might imagine that the promise would be broken? Have you made any promises to people that you are absolutely certain that you can always keep?
Would you rather almost always exist in a state of mind somewhere in the middle or experience the higher highs and lower lows?
What sorts of entertainment (sports, film, literature, etc.) tends to move you to tears? Could you relate to Wurtzel’s emotional experience when watching a professional ice skater, nothing that “she is doing everything right and that is the right thing for her to do”?
Do you think that Wurtzel’s persona as a little girl which involved “trying on morbid depression as some kind of punk rock statement” influenced who she became or was this just a symptom of what she already was inevitably becoming? Do you think that any particular persona you tried on during childhood had a major influence on how your personality and worldview developed?
Do you think that Wurtzel had empathy for the suffering of others or was she only truly concerned with her own suffering?
Is being nice the worst thing that a therapist can do to an extremely depressed patient? Do you agree that a patient must be prodded and provoked, forced into confrontations, and given sufficient incentive to push herself out of the caged fog of depression?
Is pathology always rooted in not being loved enough as a child or being neglected at some other point?
What did you think of Wurtzel’s desperation to have someone say that they love and support her just the way she is because she is wonderful just the way she is?
To what extend does location and weather impact your emotional state?
Is it almost necessary to have clear goals and a clear mission? (Wurtzel explains that it’s “this neither-here-nor-there approach” which was at the heart of her depression.)
Does endless analysis typically lead to more negative perspectives? Can a seemingly excessive amount of analysis ever lead one to see more beauty in the world?
How would Wurtzel’s book have been received differently if she had been 40 or 60?
Is traveling an attempt to get lost in the world?
How often do you feel bored and how do you address feelings of boredom?
What are the advantages in reaching rock bottom? Could you relate to Wurtzel’s desire to get there?
What did you think of Wurtzel’s perspective that “You know you’ve completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights”? Is the redundancy of life sometimes too absurd for you to bear?
What are the pros and cons with romanticizing madness? Wurtzel warns against this, but did she not reach fame in this way…with a sexy and artsy cover to her book included?
In your life, have you found that solutions to some things often become part of the problem which require new solutions?
Can you relate to Wurtzel’s fear of giving up depression, fearing that the worst part of her was actually all of her?

“It’s funny, but when I was little, before I’d go to sleep my mom would do this routine with me where she’d tell me to think of pretty things. I would close my eyes and she would run her fingers over my cheeks and across my brow. And we’d go through this list. I think it was a way of preventing nightmares—and it would always be, you know, pussycats and puppy dogs and ballons at the zoo. Sometimes she’d mention yellow submarines, stars in the sky, blackbirds flying overhead, trees in Central Park, and even—believe it or not—that on Saturday I would get to see Daddy. Nothing that extraordinary, but when you’re four years old, it’s cats and dogs that make life worth living. And I kind of think it’s maybe not so different now.”