NOTE: Newshawk Stanton Peele, a clinical psychologist, notes he knows of
not a single case like the "typical" ones portrayed in Peter Karmer's
"Listening to Prozac," where Prozac leads to permanent magical
transformations with no downsides and no need for constant dose
adjustments, intermixed with breakdowns and relapses.

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

HELPING A DISSONANT PSYCHE SING

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

In 1988, at age 26, Lauren Slater lived alone in a sparsely furnished
basement apartment in Cambridge, Mass. She was unemployed, having finished
college with a spotty record and having dropped out of graduate
creative-writing school after one semester.

She then held a variety of mostly menial jobs from which she was usually
dismissed because her abilities were compromised by a psychopathology
involving depression, self-mutilation and suicide attempts that had led to
five hospitalizations.

She suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was "for me," she
writes in her powerful book, "Prozac Diary," "the nattering need to touch,
count, check and tap, over and over again."

Ten years later, Ms. Slater was a changed person.

She had a master's degree in psychology from Harvard and a doctorate from
Boston College, completed in only two years. She was the director of a
clinic, Aftercare Services. She had published a book, "Welcome to My
Country," about her work with the insane.

She taught writing at Goucher College.

She was happily married.

Because the transformation in Ms. Slater's life was brought about by Prozac
- -- prescribed in 1988 to treat her obsessive-compulsive disorder, when the
drug was new and little-known -- you would think that her new book, about
that experience, would be an unqualified hymn of celebration.

Up to a point it is.

Ms. Slater writes eloquently of her remarkably fast reaction to the drug.

After a sudden good night's sleep, she awoke finding that "something was
different," as if she had been "visited by a blind piano tuner who had
crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my
body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the
same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out."

She continues: "Everything seemed to be moving according to a different
rhythm, 4/4 now 2/2, a smoothing out or slowing down.

It was, to date, the single most stunning experience of my life, although
later it would unfold with ever more complexity, even danger." She
concludes, "Somehow, my attention had become flexible, swiveling left, now
right, with such ease it made me giddy."

But her praise is very far from unqualified.

She treats the drawbacks of Prozac with expressiveness. First, the obvious
ones: what her pharmacologist calls "Prozac poop-out," which caused her to
"crack up" again after a year, while on a research trip to Kentucky, and
forced her to increase her dosage, although "Prozac never again made me as
well as it once had."

And she writes of her loss of libido and sexual dysfunction, describing
physical relations with her husband: "Boredom is diffuse and psychological.

I am not at all bored by Bennett, but it is as though I have been bored
into by something else, injected with Novocain at a very specific spot.

I want to weep."

But what makes her book most worthwhile is her discussion of the subtler
perils of Prozac: for instance, her pain at having to give up what she
calls the "illness identity" she had made for herself, "a story of self
that had illness as its main motive." She found her drive to write
diminished; the voices in her head fell silent.

"I can't get anything really creative done in this state," she complained
to her doctor.

"Well," he replied, "you are not getting as many crises done. You are not
accomplishing as many hospitalizations."

So Ms. Slater never stopped doubting the drug. She worried about being
addicted and dependent.

She worried that without her sexuality, she could not possibly be in touch
with her essential self.

She tried to embrace the post-modern notion that no real self truly exists,
but she found that she could never believe this.

"So.

There it is," she writes. "Here I am.

Or here I am not. The difference really matters to me.

Probably, despite the trends in our universities, it matters to a lot of
people.

It could be that many people will continue to believe in bedrock or, better
yet, to believe in the importance of the search.

The search for the genuine. The gem."

Yet despite her doubts, she was unable to give up the drug by the time she
completed her book.

"I always break up.

Maybe not at first. There have been a few weeks, even once more than a
month, when I soared through space and saw the stars as peaceful.

But each time, eventually, there's a little splitting sound and then a big
kaboom, and the wreckage is a mess."

This leaves the reader with the sense of a void about Ms. Slater's future,
which is particularly distressing because her book is so involving.

It must surely be among the best ones available on the long-term effects of
the drug, even superior to Peter Kramer's landmark "Listening to Prozac."

You are left feeling the way Ms. Slater must have felt about her future
husband's strange expression of love when they were first getting to know
each other.

A chemist by profession, he brought her a rose one evening, saying, "For
you." But when she reached for it, he withdrew it, dipped it in liquid
nitrogen he had brought with him and "pulled back out a frozen flower, a
glassed-in growth, color and form perfectly preserved."

When she expressed wonder at it, he said: "We're not through. I love you.
We will never be through."

"And with that," she writes, "he bowed, smiled, and hurled my rose at the
wall, whereupon, after a perfect click of contact, it broke into hundreds
of icy beads."

"Hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen."

"So damn easy to deconstruct."

"And yet the beads were beautiful, flakes of snow, scarlet hail."

So is the chemistry of "Prozac Diary" beautiful.

If only you could trust that its elements might melt into a soul.

Checked-by: Pat Dolan