Lauren Slater has been on Prozac since it burst on the scene in 1988. PROZAC diary (1998) is her book recounting the first ten years of the drug and how it affected and saved her life. That’s not an exaggeration.
She was twenty-five and suffering debilitating OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). Slater had been hospitalized five times beginning in 1977 (age 14) and diagnosed in 1982 with Borderline Personality Disorder, among other diagnoses and treatments. Nothing had worked.
Then And Now
Recently, Ms Slater wrote an article for TIME about the current COVID-19 crisis, warning of the possibility of “a pandemic of depression born of loneliness and lack of touch. … Deprived of intimacy and just plain friendliness, we are all at risk.”
I don’t disagree. And that sent me to my garage to find this book, and Lying. Because I remembered I’d read them, and still had them!
After reading PROZAC diary, I wanted more, and so went to YouTube where I found this – a fascinating interview and Q & A with Slater in 2018 because she’d had just published Blue Dreams: The Science and the Study of the Drugs That Change Our Minds.
I won’t
diagnose her because, as my psych-girl likes to remind me, I’m not a Psychologist. However, her story is an open book, literally, on “mental illness” and its treatment. It’s a long-term study (30 years) on outcomes of the long term use of the drug, or as Peter Kramer famously said, Listening to Prozac. Which Slater, by the way, writes and speaks about.
Yes, Read This Book!
if you’re at all interested in Psychopharmacology, mental health, and what’s next. Slater is 57 now. And, from the outside, seems to have had a successful career as a writer, Psychologist, wife, mother, partner, and farmer. Thanks to Prozac.
Who Knows?
Certainly not the doctors, or “experts”, or the scientists. Slater rightly asks: Why hasn’t there been any long-term (longitudinal, meta-analysis) research of the outcomes on SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) effects/affects on patients?
She states that to maintain her functionality, she’s had to take six times (6xs) the recommended dose. And then, what’s the effect been on her brain, her life?
Who Are You?
is the question she asks. That intrigues me. As well as who are we?
Maybe, we’re about to find out?
