Marketing Madness: Mental Health in the Mid-’90s

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ABSTRACT How do we solve a problem like Elizabeth? This might well have been the title of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘depression memoir,’ Prozac Nation (1994); or rather, it might have been the title if the book had been a memoir, rather than a piece of first-person gonzo-style reporting from the field of chemical imbalance. This reading forms the basis of a deeper reconsideration of Wurtzel’s position in the popular imagination as the ‘voice of a generation.’ In the public imagination, mid-’90s culture in America is inextricably linked with irony, depression, and apathy. It may be a Canadian writer who is credited with popularising the term ‘Generation X’ (Douglas Coupland, in 1991), but the blankness and indeterminacy of its signification seemed to speak directly for a generation approaching adulthood in the nexus between the conservative Republicanism of the Reagan and (first) Bush years and the ostensible liberalism of the saxophone-sound tracked Clinton era. With her keen wit and canny publisher, Elizabeth Wurtzel capitalised on the ‘representative’ function of her writing, which is nowhere clearer than in the epilogue that gives Prozac Nation its title.