Prozac Nation (9 page)

Paris just puts her arms around me and hugs me. Lizzy, everyone likes you fine just the way you are, she says, because that's what people say in these situations.

I sit there with my face in my hands as if to catch my head, to keep it from falling off and rolling across girls' campus like a soccer ball that someone might kick by accident.

3

When I think of all the things he did because he loved me—what people visit on each other out of something like love. It's enough for all the world's woe. You don't even need hate to have a perfectly miserable time.

 

RICHARD BAUSCH

Mr. Field's Daughter

 

By the time I made it to eighth grade, my parents were ready to kill each other. For the first time since their divorce, they had to talk pretty regularly about what to do with me. These were hopeless and frustrating discussions, no doubt, because every little thing always seemed to make me worse. I was like an already overspiced stew, and all the chefs adding all their condiments were only making it more foggy and muddled and bad.

And my parents were a disastrous pairing for getting anything much accomplished. Here were two people who had barely spoken for ten years, just passing each other in the vestibule as they passed me back and forth between them, and now they were suddenly in constant contact, mostly yelling and fighting violently on the phone late at night. I would hear my mother's voice as I lay, not sleeping, not even trying to sleep, in my bedroom. And sometimes, when I was deep in a slumber, the sound of them shouting in the other room would invade my dreams like a foreign army. My mother's end turned up loud and clear while my father's side was left to the vivid realm of imagination. They argued about whether Dr. Isaac was right for me, about who would pay for what, and, above all, whose fault it was that I was so messed up. They unearthed old controversies, and it was clear that if their problems had ever been buried, it was a very shallow and degraded grave. The pettiness was horrific: My father would complain that when I needed braces my mother managed to pick the most expensive, crooked, shyster of an orthodontist; my mother retorted that his insurance covered ninety percent of it anyway so what did he care. He accused her of always wanting to spend more than either of them had so that I could go to private schools and wear pretty clothes; she would scream that if he'd prefer, I could just as easily go to some horrible public school in Queens, where he lived at the time, and take up with kids who had poor elocution and never went to Bach recitals or exhibits at the Met. Then all she could say was that it was lucky for me that she was the custodial parent. He said she was living in a dream world; she said he was living in a dream world.

Though I could not hear his exact words, I know he must have accused her of being a lousy mother, which would trigger more screaming on her end; this allegation was the same as telling my mom that her whole life was worthless, that she wasn't even good at the one thing she was supposed to be good at. Her response was always the same: Donald, she would yell, I have had to raise our daughter all by myself with almost no help from you. I am a saint, I am. You never took her on vacations. You never took her on weekends. It's all been left to me and I think I've done a pretty good job, thanks not at all to you.

And then the phone would slam and there would be silence followed by her wailing. The sound of her cry was so scary it was as if she were part of the chorus in a Greek tragedy and this was the big funeral scene—and I would think: I am more trouble than I'm worth.

Their belligerence had arrived about a decade late. The procedure of their separation and divorce had been a relatively peaceful one: There was so little money or property to argue about, save for some good china and some bad Jose Feliciano records, that they never even bothered to get separate attorneys; they just had my mother's lawyer-cousin draw up the papers. My mother got custody, my father didn't even fully use his visitation rights, and the combined amount of alimony and child support that he had to pay was fixed at a weekly sum of less than seventy-five dollars. They had such a straightforward and uncomplicated relationship for so many years, or at least so it had seemed, that it was astonishing to watch as my depression became a catalyst for them to address all the mutual rage that they had been sublimating.

When they started doing battle night after night, I remember thinking that something was really wrong here because last I checked,
I
was the one who was supposed to have the problems. They were ostensibly arguing about what would be the best method of treatment for me, but in the meantime, as they lay screaming, I just hid in my room languishing in an increasingly morose state. Occasionally, in an effort to upset my mother, my father would refuse to process my psychiatrist bills through his insurance plan, not realizing that she wasn't going to suffer without the therapy—
I
was. Everything had gotten so damned out of focus. Instead of feeling like a kid whose parents
were
divorced, I felt like a kid whose parents
should
get divorced.

Here was this thing called depression that was not definable in any sort of concrete way (was it bigger than a bread-box? smaller than an armoire? animal, vegetable, or mineral?) that had simply taken up residence in my mind—a mirage, a vision, a hallucination—and yet it was creeping into the lives of everyone who was close to me, ruining them all as I was ruined myself. If it were a pestilence, like the roaches that used to creep around the kitchen of our apartment, we could have called an exterminator; if it were a fire, we could have turned an extinguisher on it; my God, even if it were something simple like having trouble with quadratic equations in algebra class, there were tutors who could have taught me about 2ab or 3
²
or how to mix numbers and letters so they are just right. But this was just madness. I mean, I wasn't an alcoholic, an anorexic, a bulimic, or a drug addict. We couldn't blame this all on booze or food or vomit or thinness or needles and the damage done. My parents could argue until late into the night about what to do about
this
—this thing—but they were basically bickering about something that in measurable terms did not exist.

I found myself
wishing
for a real ailment, found myself longing to be a junkie or a cokehead or something—something real. If it were only a matter of keeping me away from my bad habits, how much easier it all would be. I know now, of course, that alcohol and drugs also mask a type of depression that is not so very different from my own, but getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of
keeping away from the dope.
But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind? Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to get rid of Jack Daniel's than Elizabeth Wurtzel?

Around that time, John and Mackenzie Phillips had just gone through rehab to kick their coke habits, and it seemed that every week one or the other of them was on the cover of
People:
Mackenzie because she lost her job on the TV series
One Day at a Time
and married the record producer Peter Asher, who supposedly supplied her with blow, and John because he was going to put the Mamas and the Papas back together now that he was sober. I carefully read about their lives as drug addicts, which seemed to beat the hell out of being depressed like me. For one thing, people who did self-destructive things like drive a BMW into a tree got lots of attention, and for another, they got to be rescued.

Rescued. That's what it looked like to me. Drug addicts had the crutch of a tangible problem—they needed to get sober—so there were places they could be carted off to for help. There were Hazelden and St. Mary's and the Betty Ford Center and the whole state of Minnesota to go to for recovery. Somehow, I got it in my head that rehab was like a conveyor belt that you rode for twenty-eight days or twenty months or however long it took to get better. Then you were pushed off the assembly line all fresh and spanking new, ready to start all over again.

Obviously, this is a prison house fantasy of the life of addiction. Many people go through rehab several times and still don't recover, but it was certainly true that there were many outlets and much alarmist behavior you could indulge in if you developed a nasty drug problem. I, on the other hand, had taken a small overdose of pills and scarred my legs with razor blades, and still no one seemed to be rescuing me. Because, on paper, there was no actual problem. If I had a heroin habit, you can bet my parents would have checked me in faster than it takes a junkie to jiggle blood in a syringe. If I were on drugs, they'd have stuck me in a hospital, where my behavior would be monitored all the time by counselors and doctors, and I'd get to meet other cool drug addicts who were getting clean, so I'd never be lonely. After rehab, I could spend the rest of my life going to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings and hanging out with other recovered drug abusers with problems just like mine.

All those celebrity stories about drug abuse were meant to be a caveat to the youth of America, morality tales that were supposed to teach you to Just Say No. But it seemed to me that if I could get hooked on some drug, anything was possible. I'd make new friends. I'd have a real problem. I'd be able to walk into a church basement full of fellow sufferers, and have them all say, Welcome to our nightmare! We understand! Here are our phone numbers, call any time you feel you're slipping because we're here for you.

Here for you: I could not imagine anyone ever being here for me.

Depression was the loneliest fucking thing on earth. There were no halfway houses for depressives, no Depression Anonymous meetings that I knew of. Yes, of course, there were mental hospitals like McLean and Bellevue and Payne Whitney and the Menninger Clinic, but I couldn't hope to end up in one of those places unless I made a suicide attempt serious enough to warrant oxygen or stitches or a stomach pump. Until then, I would remain woefully undertreated by a Manhattan psychiatrist who could offer only a little bit of help amid the chaos of my home life. I used to wish—to pray to God for the courage and strength—that I'd have the guts not to get better, but to slit my wrists and get a whole lot worse so that I could land in some mental ward, where real help might have been possible.

As far as individual therapy went, it's hard for me now to evaluate Dr. Isaac's ability because he spent so much time off in the referee's corner, trying to keep my parents at bay. Since then I have had many more therapists—nine to date—whom I can assess more solidly for their touch and technique. Diana Sterling, M.D., was the only thing standing between me and suicide; later, there would be the idiots like Peter Eichman, Ph.D., a psychologist I saw my freshman year of college who wanted to talk more about the time I arrived at my appointment than about the business at hand. But Dr. Isaac's job was grounded so solidly in crisis management that there is no way for me to judge the work we did together. He was an odd man, with an air of studied casualness: He wore running shoes with his suits and ties, even before the New York City transit strike. But in the midst of his mellow dude approach, Dr. Isaac was also one of those typical self-promoting New York professionals who would happily boast about his many celebrity clients. During one of my long ramblings about Bruce Springsteen or rock and roll as salvation, he would interject that he had once treated Patti Smith, a singer whom I idolized, when she was in a mental hospital. Did I know that he had been the doctor who had examined Mark David Chapman when he was admitted to the psychiatric ward after assassinating John Lennon? Did I know the recently deposed president of NBC was one of his patients? And I would think to myself, I must be really far gone to be worthy of the same therapist as Patti Smith, who after all had cohabited with Sam Shepard and had all of her album portraits taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. But I'd still be left wondering, What's in it for me? Is this therapy or dinner at Elaine's?

As for the family counseling sessions, whatever therapeutic potential our visits with Dr. Isaac might have had were derailed by the manipulations of all three of us trying to get him to make our disastrous little triangle work a bit better, to make it more equilateral than isosceles, or altogether less of a triangle and more of a happy circle. But it was an impossible task. Without a concerted, united effort on the part of the parents, a withdrawn child is not likely to emerge and return to health (although that's a bit like saying the only thing you hate about rain is that it's wet, because unhappy children are often the result of fractured home lives). After a while, Dr. Isaac seemed to resign himself to the idea that he could not truly help me to get better, so the best he could do was just prevent my sinking even lower. Like everything else in my life, our biweekly visits were just a Band-Aid, a small buffer zone full of social prattle and practical advice, but getting down to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the teeth was not in the offing.

 

In the midst of all this, my mom had pretty much turned Dr. Isaac into her guru, so there was no way I could discuss my misgivings about him with her, and my dad was uncharacteristically thrilled to fill up the power vacuum left by my mom's inability to deal with most of what was happening with me. He liked, almost relished, reading my bad, depressing, adolescent poetry, much of which went something like “I have been encompassed by the night / As its curtain of darkness has wound me in its threads . . .” My mom wasn't interested in my miserable writing, and she just couldn't look at it without feeling awful herself. While she was able to continue competently as a parent on all the usual material fronts—she fed me, she gave me a bed to sleep in, she theoretically sent me to school—she was completely dense about my emotional life. She just didn't want to know about it, had pretty much decided this was a job for the professionals. On the other hand, my father loved chatting with me about how awful the whole world was because he basically agreed. After a while, he was the only one of them I really talked to, and because I was in a vulnerable enough state to believe pretty much whatever loony theories anyone wanted to toss my way, my father came damn close to convincing me that my mother was the sole party responsible for all the ills that beset me. He'd tell me that she sent me to these repressive Jewish schools, she shut him out from being an active parent, and in my desperation to find a locus of blame for all my pain, I'd sometimes think he was right.