Prozac Nation (2001)
2/10
Portrait of self centered artist achieving no progress at all
24 March 2011
Well. There is saying "There is nothing more efficient to break the confidence than Jewish mother". I quite didn't understand that until I have meet some families with Jewish ancestry and very, very pathological relationships between mothers and daughters. Mothers are typically very demanding, cold to daughters but full of self pity and perform emotional scenes to their daughters full of blame and incredibly poisonous mix of love and hate. The daughters feel mix of hate and guilt to mothers, they feel they are not "up to the expected standards". They would like to set themselves free, but they cannot, because they are tied to their family very strongly. Every guy who tried to get between the mother and daughter in this fight felt he lives in hell house. Everyone had to leave this hell house sooner (the boyfriend) or later (the father). This is portrayed very realistically in the movie. The pathology is here and what is worse it propagates from one generation to the next generation. Unfortunately no pill is solution to this sort of pathology. It removes the pain but not the wound itself.

On the other hand the movie fails completely as the description of depression. Depression is not hysterical run to destruction and self destruction as shown in the movie. Depression sucks all the energy from people and leaves them optically calm, until something bad happens (suicide attempt). I know about several suicides of young people, usually "out of the blue", because these people were so depressed that they were not able to communicate their depression and seemed "only tired or ill" to the others. This was very sad because help from psychiatrist could actually save their lives. Not a single case was similar to the movie, usually even parents did not see what was coming, not even their friends.

So, this is not movie about depression and "problem than haunts US". It is movie about inability to reflect herself or to get any insight into her situation (the part about "swallowing the lover" is especially pathological and shows total narcissism and selfish personality). There is no movement to good, no progress, only pills that replace other drugs and alcohol to hide the problem. This is description of utter failure to resolve or achieve anything, she is as damaged at the end as she was in the beginning. The idea that someone could try to find something of use for his life from this movie is actually very frightening. Very, very bad example, please see this as only warning how to NOT proceed on therapy!
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