Download or read book Prozac Nation written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword "Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back." —New York Times "A book that became a cultural touchstone." —New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Download or read book More Now Again written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-01-07 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the brutally honest account of Wurtzel's descent into drug addiction and how she managed to break free from Ritalin to love life and herself.
Download or read book Prozac Nation written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of sex, drugs, and depression indicts an overmedicated America as it chronicles the fortunes of a Harvard educated child of divorce who lived in the fast lane as a music critic, always fighting her chronic depression
Download or read book Bitch written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock." Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.
Download or read book Listening to Prozac written by Peter D. Kramer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling examination of the revolutionary antidepressant, with a new introduction and afterword reflecting on Prozac’s legacy and the latest medical research “Peter Kramer is an analyst of exceptional sensitivity and insight. To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.” —Joyce Carol Oates When antidepressants like Prozac first became available, Peter D. Kramer prescribed them, only to hear patients say that on medication, they felt different—less ill at ease, more like the person they had always imagined themselves to be. Referencing disciplines from cellular biology to animal ethology, Dr. Kramer worked to explain these reports. The result was Listening to Prozac, a revolutionary book that offered new perspectives on antidepressants, mood disorders, and our understanding of the self—and that became an instant national and international bestseller. In this thirtieth anniversary edition, Dr. Kramer looks back at the influence of his groundbreaking book, traces progress in the relevant sciences, follows trends in the use and public understanding of antidepressants, and assesses potential breakthroughs in the treatment of depression. The new introduction and afterword reinforce and reinvigorate a book that the New York Times called “originally insightful” and “intelligent and informative,” a window on a medicine that is “telling us new things about the chemistry of human character.”
Download or read book There She Was written by Amy Argetsinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post style editor’s fascinating and irresistible look back on the Miss America pageant as it approaches its 100th anniversary. The sash. The tears. The glittering crown. And of course, that soaring song. For all its pomp and kitsch, the Miss America pageant is indelibly written into the American story of the past century. From its giddy origins as a summer’s-end tourist draw in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, it blossomed into a televised extravaganza that drew tens of millions of viewers in its heyday and was once considered the highest honor that a young woman could achieve. For two years, Washington Post reporter and editor Amy Argetsinger visited pageants and interviewed former winners and contestants to unveil the hidden world of this iconic institution. There She Was spotlights how the pageant survived decades of social and cultural change, collided with a women’s liberation movement that sought to abolish it, and redefined itself alongside evolving ideas about feminism. For its superstars—Phyllis George, Vanessa Williams, Gretchen Carlson—and for those who never became household names, Miss America was a platform for women to exercise their ambitions and learn brutal lessons about the culture of fame. Spirited and revelatory, There She Was charts the evolution of the American woman, from the Miss America catapulted into advocacy after she was exposed as a survivor of domestic violence to the one who used her crown to launch a congressional campaign; from a 1930s winner who ran away on the night of her crowning to a present-day rock guitarist carving out her place in this world. Argetsinger dissects the scandals and financial turmoil that have repeatedly threatened to kill the pageant—and highlights the unexpected sisterhood of Miss Americas fighting to keep it alive.
Download or read book Creatocracy written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The defining characteristic of America is our fanaticism: We dream big, we think large, we create grandeur..." And we created Elizabeth Wurtzel: A celebrated writer who has lent her voice to depression, to women scorned, to addiction, and now to the Constitution of our great states. True to form, Wurtzel brings to life the dry document that framed our nation, homing in on one key feature-the Intellectual Property clause-which she credits for everything cool in our country, from Bruce Springsteen and rock 'n roll, to Jeff Koons and his stainless steel balloons, to Half & Half in our coffee. In Creatocracy, Elizabeth Wurtzel has masterfully written a crash-course in American history and the arts, wise and witty, full of humor and insight. This is pop patriotism in book form.
Download or read book The Secret of Life written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though she might not always follow her own advice, Elizabeth Wurtzel knows certain things to be true: Doing copious amounts of drugs leads nowhere you want to be; trying to be friends with your ex is always a bad idea; if you can’t afford to hire a mover, you can’t afford to move; and always doing the best you can is always good enough. Here are Wurtzel’s succinct and clever rules for living your best life. Fulfillment is within everyone’s reach. Grasping it takes enjoying your mistakes, being strong, and having opinions. Today’s woman should: • Be Gorgeous. Make the absolute most of what you’ve got. Believe that you are gorgeous, and you will be. It’s the only trick that really works. • Embrace Fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others. • Use All Available Resources. Let the M.D.s and the Ph.D.s help you solve your problems so that you don’t become everyone else’s problem. • Never Clear the Table at a Dinner Party Unless the Men Get Up to Help First. Cleanup should not be gendered. Change the world, one dinner table at a time. Hold a sit-in. One of the fiercest, funniest, and best-known essayists of her generation, Elizabeth Wurtzel infuses this modest gem of a rule book with a sharp wit and a real candor.
Download or read book Dopamine Nation written by Dr. Anna Lembke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER “Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.
Download or read book Happy Pills in America written by David Herzberg and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valium. Paxil. Prozac. Prescribed by the millions each year, these medications have been hailed as wonder drugs and vilified as numbing and addictive crutches. Where did this “blockbuster drug” phenomenon come from? What factors led to the mass acceptance of tranquilizers and antidepressants? And how has their widespread use affected American culture? David Herzberg addresses these questions by tracing the rise of psychiatric medicines, from Miltown in the 1950s to Valium in the 1970s to Prozac in the 1990s. The result is more than a story of doctors and patients. From bare-knuckled marketing campaigns to political activism by feminists and antidrug warriors, the fate of psychopharmacology has been intimately wrapped up in the broader currents of modern American history. Beginning with the emergence of a medical marketplace for psychoactive drugs in the postwar consumer culture, Herzberg traces how “happy pills” became embroiled in Cold War gender battles and the explosive politics of the “war against drugs”—and how feminists brought the two issues together in a dramatic campaign against Valium addiction in the 1970s. A final look at antidepressants shows that even the Prozac phenomenon owed as much to commerce and culture as to scientific wizardry. With a barrage of “ask your doctor about” advertisements competing for attention with shocking news of drug company malfeasance, Happy Pills is an invaluable look at how the commercialization of medicine has transformed American culture since the end of World War II.
Download or read book Mind Fixers Psychiatry s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness written by Anne Harrington and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Superb… a nuanced account of biological psychiatry.” —Richard J. McNally In Mind Fixers, “the preeminent historian of neuroscience” (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry’s waxing and waning theories have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.
Download or read book How to Weep in Public written by Jacqueline Novak and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This darkly funny memoir from “one of the next great stars in comedy” (Mike Birbiglia) doesn’t offer help overcoming depression—just much-needed comfort, company, and tips for life inside the fog. “No one is able to synthesize the Venn diagram of depression and hilariousness quite like Jacqueline Novak.”—Nick Kroll “While most books on depression try to help you win the war, this one is merely a cigarette in the trenches.” With advice that ranges from practical (Chapter 17: Do Your Crying on a Cat) to philosophical (Chapter 21: Make Peace With Sunshine), this laugh-out-loud memoir traces the depression thread from Novak’s average suburban childhood to her current adult New York City existence, an imperfect but healthy-ish life in which Novak is mostly upright but still rarely does laundry. At heart, How to Weep in Public provides a no-pressure safe zone for the reader to curl up inside. Whether you’re coping with the occasional down day or thriving fully in Picasso’s blue period, it’s the perfect place to regroup during a dark stint. Jacqueline will be waiting to tell you “You can fight another day.” No, not as in “fight on another day” but “fight this some other day.” So sit back, relax, and let Jacqueline Novak show you how to navigate the shadowy corridors of your troubled mind—or the cheese display at the supermarket when food is the only thing that can save you.
Download or read book Anatomy of an Epidemic written by Robert Whitaker and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated with bonus material, including a new foreword and afterword with new research, this New York Times bestseller is essential reading for a time when mental health is constantly in the news. In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Interwoven with Whitaker’s groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. As Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, other societies have begun to alter their use of psychiatric medications and are now reporting much improved outcomes . . . so why can’t such change happen here in the United States? Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public? Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up. Praise for Anatomy of an Epidemic “The timing of Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, a comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States, couldn’t be better.”—Salon “Anatomy of an Epidemic offers some answers, charting controversial ground with mystery-novel pacing.”—TIME “Lucid, pointed and important, Anatomy of an Epidemic should be required reading for anyone considering extended use of psychiatric medicine. Whitaker is at the height of his powers.” —Greg Critser, author of Generation Rx
Download or read book My Year of Rest and Relaxation written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Download or read book Radical Sanity written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and published by AtRandom. This book was released on 2001-01-23 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miss Wurtzel is back, and this time she's armed with advice for the modern woman. She's found the secret of life, and it's within everyone's reach. It's about enjoying your mistakes. It's about being strong. It's about eating dessert. It's about having opinions. It's about adoring feminism. It's about embracing fanaticism. It's also about saying your prayers, not overpacking, and making your boyfriend do the dishes.. Some of her words of wisdom: - Think Productively: It's not that you have to see it to believe it; on the contrary, you have to believe it to see it. - Be Gorgeous: I myself believe that I am about ten times prettier than I actually am. By dint of sheer will power, I have managed to convince many people of this. - Enjoy Your Single Years: Do not think that the whole point of being single is being married; men don't think this way, and neither should you. In Radical Sanity, these lessons, and many more, are delivered with the sharp wit and candor we've come to expect -- and love -- from Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Download or read book Males With Eating Disorders written by Arnold E. Andersen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1990. The subject of anorexia nervosa and, more recently, bulimia nervosa in males has been a source of interest and controversy in the fields of psychiatry and medicine for more than 300 years. These disorders, sometimes called eating disorders, raise basic questions concerning the nature of abnormalities of the motivated behaviors: Are they subsets of more widely recognized illnesses such as mood disorders? Are they understandable by reference to underlying abnormalities of biochemistry or brain function? In what ways are they similar to and in what ways do they differ from anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa in females? This book will be of interest to a wide variety of people—physicians, psychologists, nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, nutritionists, educators, and all others who may be interested for personal or professional reasons.
Download or read book Prozac on the Couch written by Jonathan Metzl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-16 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there’s a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of three “wonder drugs”—Miltown, Valium, and Prozac—Metzl explains the surprising ways Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of these drugs. Prozac on the Couch traces the notion of “pills for everyday worries” from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through psychiatric and medical journals, popular magazine articles, pharmaceutical advertisements, and popular autobiographical "Prozac narratives.” Metzl shows how clinical and popular talk about these medications often reproduces all the cultural and social baggage associated with psychoanalytic paradigms—whether in a 1956 Cosmopolitan article about research into tranquilizers to “cure” frigid women; a 1970s American Journal of Psychiatry ad introducing Jan, a lesbian who “needs” Valium to find a man; or Peter Kramer’s description of how his patient “Mrs. Prozac” meets her husband after beginning treatment. Prozac on the Couch locates the origins of psychiatry’s “biological revolution” not in the Valiumania of the 1970s but in American popular culture of the 1950s. It was in the 1950s, Metzl points out, that traditional psychoanalysis had the most sway over the American imagination. As the number of Miltown prescriptions soared (reaching 35 million, or nearly one per second, in 1957), advertisements featuring uncertain brides and unfaithful wives miraculously cured by the “new” psychiatric medicines filled popular magazines. Metzl writes without nostalgia for the bygone days of Freudian psychoanalysis and without contempt for psychotropic drugs, which he himself regularly prescribes to his patients. What he urges is an increased self-awareness within the psychiatric community of the ways that Freudian ideas about gender are entangled in Prozac and each new generation of wonder drugs. He encourages, too, an understanding of how ideas about psychotropic medications have suffused popular culture and profoundly altered the relationship between doctors and patients.
