Prozac Quotes

Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. ~ Jim Carrey

Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Daxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions are spent purchasing them. You don't even need a specific trauma, just 'general depression' is enough, or anxiety, as if sadness is as treatable as the common cold. ~ Mitch Albom

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

But Hey, Guess What
Crazy means I'm not liable
for my actions. So screw it,
I'll go home, propped up on
Prozac against distractions ~ Ellen Hopkins

Who needed Prozac when a girl could get Pillsbury without a prescription?" ~Allie Shelby, Personal Assets ~ Kelsey Browning

There have been periods in my life where I have experienced depression. It has been through some of my darkest moments that I have written some of my best songs. For me, singing and writing is very therapeutic. It's much more effective than taking Prozac! ~ Gerry Rafferty

I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you made tons of money, had a beautiful wife and three adorable kids-when you were the envy of your community and coworkers-you had no right to behave badly. Stop whining, chin up, take Prozac, and pretend your pain isn't ravaging your soul. ~ C.S. Lakin

Sometimes I feel like there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make Environmental Protection Agency people feel better about their jobs. They're going out there, they're trying to protect Americans and then time and time and time again they get their knees cut off at the policy level. ~ Josh Fox

I had lived my life by these kinds of banners, only now, searching the sentence, I found little in it that resonated deep in my bones. I had a cerebral sort of appreciation for the sentence, or perhaps, an appreciation based in memory, the way one remembers with fondness a past partner whom one no longer loves. ~ Lauren Slater

The popular antidepressant Prozac, which acts by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and probably increasing its availability, has received wide attention; the notion that low serotonin levels might be correlated with a tendency towards violence has surfaced in the popular press. The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that "causes" a certain manifestation. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. A satisfactory explanation can arise only from a more comprehensive view of the entire process, in which the relevant variables of a specific problem, such as depression or social adaptability, are analyzed in detail. ~ Antonio R Damasio

How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings ~ Leonard Cohen

The bane of Terri's life could use a prescription of Prozac.' (Terri) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

it was Elner who gave me my first cat, after I had my breakdown, when I told her the doctor said I needed Prozac. She said, 'Tot, sometimes what you need is a kitten,' and you know, she was right. ~ Fannie Flagg

Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac. ~ Svetlana Boym

The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while. ~ Billie Holiday

When you drink fluoridated water, you're drinking liquid Prozac. You drink enough of it, even though it's a small amount, drink it for decades and decades and what does Prozac do to you? It dumbs you down; it makes you docile. ~ Jesse Ventura

Being creative is good for the mind... I write because I don't want to take Prozac! ~ Flossy Abraham

Suppose neutral angels were able to talk, Yahweh and Lucifer – God and Satan, to use their popular titles – into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their early kingdom?

Would God be satisfied the loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York Stakes, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all night, no-holds-barred, nasty "can't-get-enough-of-you" hot-as-hell-fucks?

Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan Oscar Wilde? ~ Tom Robbins

I was terrified when my doctor told me that I had a unique and interesting personality trait, but then he told me about new Zoloft or Prozac and now I just take three pills a day and I blend right into this horrible inbred corporate landscape. ~ Doug Stanhope

I said everyone looks happy. That was kinda my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac. ~ Harlan Coben

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

And I saw ans still see everything that I do have, but no matter what, there is always the itch of what gets lost. ~ Lauren Slater

A patient complains of feeling nervous or fearful. These feelings and behaviors suggest that the patient has an anxiety disorder, and the doctor prescribes whatever drug will most probably work for an anxiety disorder. However, there's no conclusive way to tell that this patient definitely has an anxiety disorder. Even if the doctor did get the diagnosis correct, there's a great deal of variation regarding which drug class (for example, anti-anxiety drugs versus antidepressants) a particular individual will respond to and which drug within a class (for example, Prozac versus Zoloft) will work best. If the drug doesn't work, the doctor will try the next one on the list and so on, thus delaying treatment success and complicating the process with the mix-and-match type of treatment. ~ Chris Prentiss

I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened. ~ Piper Faust

The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

The Swiss, in addition to being self-righteous and unyielding, will do anything to avoid conflict. Decorum and civility define their culture. Although they are unhappy or worried most of the time, they do not show it. I do not as yet have sufficient information to support the opinion, but I believe that the Swiss government has ordered Prozac to be added to the water. ~ Scott Haas

Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on? ... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat. ~ Michael Greger

However, because of the great marketing hype surrounding the SSRIs, one of them, Prozac, now has the distinguished honor of having more adverse effects submitted to the FDA than any other drug in history. More than 40,000 adverse reactions were reported in its first ten years on the market. No other drug even comes close (Breggin and Cohen 67). ~ Gwen Olsen

All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano. ~ Kiran Desai

The woman is skin covered prozac I like to call her. Half the trick to a film like this is keeping a sort of emotional level going and keeping an attitude that induces creativity on the set. You have to be in a good mood for that. You have to be happy to make a comedy I think and Anne sort of ensured that every time by expressing most of her feelings through the exciting medium of dance. ~ Ryan Reynolds

Lying in bed for a few days wouldn't help enact the kind of personality overhaul it would take to pull me away from my well-established pattern of mapping out escape routes, clinging to them like vines, and then watching as these lifeless forces suddenly pushed me away, though I continued to hold on for dear life. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

They sent the shrink round yesterday. He's put me on Prozac. Prozac! He thinks I'm depressed.'
'Aren't you depressed?'
'I wasn't depressed.'
'You did try to kill yourself,' I pointed out.
'Yes. That's what he said too. Apparently that's a classic symptom. It's not thought a sane plan of action for someone in my situation. ~ Gavin Extence

On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity. ~ Carl Elliott

Here are a few of the sources I used, and I heartily recommend them: Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil; Judith Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy; Louis Cozolino, The Making of a Therapist; Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths; James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside; Peter and Ginger Ross Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac; Robert D. ~ Lisa Scottoline

I've been on Prozac for 12 years and I'm off it now. I know what it feels like to be excited and sad again. I haven't felt like this in 12 years; I'm like a giddy little kid. ~ Jonathan Davis

Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful ... When we are not fixated on threat and defending ourselves, when we're not exhausted and burned out from chronic stress, we are able to see the daily evidence that we are in the midst of a mind-blowing miracle called Life ... Then we will experience breathtaking, heart-rippling moments that counterbalance every trial and tribulation. When we're fully conscious of the universe's artistry and generosity, who needs psychodelics or Prozac? ~ Charlette Mikulka

People used to explore the dimensions of reality by taking LSD to make the world look weird. Now the world is weird and they take Prozac to make it look normal. ~ Bangstrom

I've tried everything. I've done therapy, I've done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing. ~ Jim Carrey

The success of Prozac says that today's high-tech capitalism values a very different temperament. Confidence, flexibility, quickness, and energy - the positive aspects of hyperthymia - are at a premium. ~ Peter D. Kramer

Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.' ~ John Cornwell

Which God is the forgiving one, exactly? Old Testament, where He got His rocks off by smiting? Or New Testament, once Our Heavenly Father got Prozac? ~ Thomm Quackenbush

Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*....
If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course.

*This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should be medicated when there is risk of suicide, not mood swings. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Whatever your pleasure, I can facilitate. You need weed, you need meth- hey, you need Prozac, I'm your man. I know how you white boys always deal with that depression. I mean me personally, I don't understand what you white boys are all depressed about. Hey, you're white! Smile! ~ Chris Rock

Your blood reveal your most intimate secrets. Are you dying of leukimia or AIDS? Did you smoke cigarette or drink a glass of wine in the last few hours? Are you prozac because you're depressed, or Viagra because you can't get it up? ~ Tess Gerritsen

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon. ~ Lauren Slater

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving ... We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins ... We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers ... We are the daughters of the feminists who said, "You can be anything," and we heard, "You have to be everything. ~ Courtney Martin

"Poor Mrs. Benefer," Heather murmured. "Well, a nice cup of tea and she'll be right as rain.""Oh, puh-leeze, Heather. A nice cup of tea, indeed. A nice cup of tea, two Prozac, and sleep for a week, maybe ... " ~ Douglas Whiteway

I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

If you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too. -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. '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. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Were Moses to go up Mount Sinai today, the two tablets he'd bring down with him would be aspirin and Prozac. ~ Joseph A. Califano, Jr.

I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana's chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it's a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me. ~ Lauren Slater

I looked at him as if he was one Prozac away from a straightjacket. ~ Chrissy Peebles

To help other people, you've got to be able to help yourself. You go to a psychiatrist, and they're on this Prozac, Effexor, and antidepressants, you may have picked the wrong person. If you go to somebody who's broke who's selling you financial services, that might not be a good thing. You go to somebody who's fat to help you lose weight ... And a lot of people ironically do these types of things. ~ Tony Robbins

I tell people that going for a run is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because, ~ John J. Ratey

Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

The Failure of Will theory is equally popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You're too self-absorbed. This is just about the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn't that, it's Shut up and take your Prozac. ~ Chase Twichell

My friend goes, 'If you're going to use Rogaine, just put it somewhere you're going to remember to use it everyday.' So I put it right next to my Prozac. But now it just feels really pathetic using both of these products at the same time, 'cause if either one works, I don't really need the other one. ~ Greg Fitzsimmons

I couldn't reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel myself. ~ Lauren Slater

If you aren't paranoid before you arrive in this city, give it a few weeks and you will soon notice it creeping in, dripping into your subconscious like a leaky tap. The trick is not to give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about you, and if you are in the right frame of mind this can be an easy trick to perform but if not you'll soon notice that for a city full of people who do a great Stevie Wonder impersonation when it comes to the homeless and beggars and casual violence towards others, wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a cheap suit brings out a sneering, hateful attitude that can have weaker minded individuals locked in their houses for weeks before harassing their doctors for prescriptions of Prozac and Beta blockers just to make it out the front door. ~ Garry Crystal

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I can't quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you're not supposed to have because there's no reason to anymore. But still they're there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn't managed to eliminate yet. I want so badly to feel bad about getting pregnant. But I can't, don't dare to. Just like I didn't dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him, wanting to be a modern woman who's supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I'm never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, 'What makes you think I'm so rich that you can steal my heart and it won't mean a thing?' Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression, because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it's just the way things go, part of the growth process. Really nothing is surprising. After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. If one can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your li ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

If this is the case, then the "normal state" Prozac ushers in is an experience in the surreal, Dali's dripping clock, a disorientation so deep and sweet you spin. Thus Prozac, make no mistake about it, blissed me out and freaked me out and later on, when the full force of health hit me, sometimes stunned me with grief. ~ Lauren Slater

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging? ~ Lauren Slater

Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac. ~ David Gelernter

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel