Psychological Analysis of Lizzie Wurtzel from Prozac Nation

The problem of developing mental disorders is widely spread all over the world as nowadays the amount of mentally ill people is constantly increasing.

It is connected with stress people experience every day at their working places, during communication, or even while commuting; such eternal issues as family and personality problems are not even to be mentioned. The task of psychologists is to define the trouble and help the patient to recover. “Bipolar disorder is commonly misdiagnosed as depression since most people with bipolar disorder seek help when they’re in the depressive stage of the illness. When they’re in the manic stage, they don’t recognize the problem. What’s more, most people with bipolar disorder are depressed a much greater percentage of the time than they are manic or hypomanic. Being misdiagnosed with depression is a potentially dangerous problem because the treatment for bipolar depression is different than for regular depression. In fact, antidepressants can actually make bipolar disorder worse. So it’s important to see a mood disorder specialist who can help you figure out what’s really going on.” (Smith, Segal & Segal, 2016). One of the most complicated mental disorders to be diagnosed is bipolar disorder as it consists of separate phases, and it is rather difficult to realize whether it is bipolar disorder, depression, or mania. Sometimes, bipolar disorder is diagnosed as schizophrenia because of abnormal behavior during episodes of mania.

Bipolar disorder or manic depression is a mental disease causing phases of maniac behavior and depression. During maniac phase, a person feels abnormally active, irritable, and emotional, while having hypomania (a mild form of mania), people are highly productive and energetic. When hypomania worsens, they start behaving in an impulsive and erratic ways. They have some unreal and desperate ideas about their future, their sleep reduces, and sometimes they do not sleep for several days. At the extreme, people can have audio and visual hallucinations. During depressive phase, a person feels suppressed and sometimes even suicidal. Depression is characterized by loss of usual interests, desperation, hopelessness, grief, and other destructive feelings. In bipolar disorder, there is a state called mixed affective episodes, which is characterized by the simultaneous occurrence of depression and mania. People having the mixed state can have great plans and extravagant ideas while feeling guilty and suicidal. It is the state of high risk of lethal denouement connected with episodes of suicidal attempts. Bipolar disorder can be combined with the other mental disorders such as substance use, or anxiety disorder, or both.

An example of a person who suffers bipolar disorder is Lizzie Wurzel. She is the protagonist of a movie called Prozac Nation that is based on the memoir by Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel. When Lizzie was 4 years old, her father left the family, and the main person in her life became her mother. This was a real hit for the fragile kid’s mind; thus, her mother took the girl to the psychologist where he treated her with therapy. Lizzie’s mother is a rather nervous woman because she had to bring up her daughter alone, without any help from the father. Lizzie is a brilliant writer. One day she writes a letter in which she disembosoms her feelings telling the story about her father, and the magazine wants to publish it because the audience was very interested if her father returned to the family. Lizzie decided to tell a lie because she knew what the readers would appreciate. Though she has not seen her father for almost 4 years, she still misses him; this is the first step to depression. The plot of the movie takes place when Lizzie is 19, she is accepted to Harvard with scholarship in journalism. She makes friends with Rubi, and they decide to do whatever they want because they are young. Lizzie is writing reviews for the Rolling Stone, visits rock concerts, starts smoking marijuana and taking ecstasy. She drinks alcohol and writes all the time with a maniacal desire; she does not sleep for several nights and gets a nervous breakdown when her friends try to calm her down. The ambulance takes her to hospital. Stuck in the substance abuse, Lizzie is unable to write, her promising career and mental health are at risk. Supported by her mother, she decides to visit a doctor, and after a long medical treatment with Prozac, despite the suicidal gesture, Lizzie stabilizes her state and begins to enjoy her life. She suffers from the mixed affective episodes of bipolar disorder as she has promising plans for the future (become a journalist, meet her idols, become famous). Lizzie feels suppressed by everything happening in her life beginning with her parents’ divorce and ending with the loss of inspiration to write (her father’s indifference and mother’s hysteria, substance misuse, problems with communication, problems with her boyfriend, etc.). She even committed a suicidal attempt to draw attention.

According to the tripartite theory, the personality consists of three parts �" the ego, superego and the id. The id is a destructive component of personality (sex, libido, death); the superego reproduces the morality learnt from parents and society. The ego is connected with the real life, it balances the aggressive id and the highly moral superego, it also considers social norms and relations and decides how to behave. Lizzie’s personality got imbalanced and her conscious is ruled by all the three components at the same time. Her superego provokes her inspiration to self-development and writing while her id makes her insane by promiscuous sex, misusing medicine, and other amoral behavior.

Lizzie defends herself from the outer and inner problems with the help of defense mechanisms such as acting out and dissociation. Acting out is an extreme behavior to express person’s feelings in an implicit way. Instead of talking about the emotions, the one expresses them in physically releasing pressure and helping the person to cool down. When Lizzie is depressed or just upset, she has sex, throws things, overdrinks alcohol, commits a suicidal gesture. Dissociation is represented in losing sense of time and disconnection from the real world. If Lizzie is frustrated she is writing for several days without sleeping, eating and having a shower; she also replays her father’s pleasant words and visions of her happy childhood and the full family. Lizzie cannot stop because in such a way, she continues the period of childish happiness and success. According to psychological behaviorism, the person’s way of behavior depends on positive and negative reinforcements experienced by him/her. According to this theory, Lizzie’s behavior was formed by all the experience she has learnt through communication with others. Her behavior can be described as antisocial and marginal. The causes of such a behavior lie in the divorce of her parents and an amoral behavior of her father. Once, Lizzie told that he did not take care of her and often misused drugs. He did not take part in her upbringing and just paid for the psychological therapy when Lizzie’s nervous break-downs began. When Lizzie started her studying in Harvard, the father suddenly arrived with his family with the aim to strengthen the relationship with his daughter, but when she needed the therapy again, he left her saying that it was not his business. Another reason of Lizzie’s self-destructive behavior is her mother’s overwardship and denial of the fact that Lizzie might have some psychological problems as she thinks that her daughter is still too young to have some personal troubles. Then, Lizzie’s environment is rather destructive as many people around her take drugs and smoke marijuana. Nevertheless, the key problem lies in her family disruption.

According to Chapter 12, social psychology defines how people influence, think about, and relate with each other. Trying to explain someone’s actions, people can attribute the person’s behavior to his or her traits or the particular situation. However, people usually give too much weight to the influence of personality rather than a situation; that is called the fundamental attribution error. The Lizzie’s case cannot be called complicated as everything seems to be rather clear, this girl deserves sympathy as her bad behavior was caused by the chain of events that resulted in a nerve break-down and bipolar disorder. Attitude of people towards the ill person can influence the latter’s behavior as the attitude can be easily recalled; it is specific to the person’s behavior, stable, and the external influence is minimized. Actually, people who agree with a small request will agree later with a larger one �" it is called the foot-in-the-door phenomenon where doings become belief. “In dozens of experiments, researchers have coaxed people into acting against their attitudes or violating their moral standards, with the same result. Doing becomes believing.” (Meyers & DeWall, 2017). For example, when Lizzie began using drugs, they stimulated her brain to write but later she could not write without any kind of stimulation. According to the role play phenomenon, people playing some role in the society start to behave the way this role demands. For example, Lizzie acquired the role of a wild child beginning her studies at Harvard, and this behavior continued as she did not know how to behave in another way. All these factors worsened Lizzie’s disease as the behavior that could bring her relief was blamed by the society.

Lizzie’s disorder is provoked mainly by the behavior of her environment. Parent’s divorce, neglecting her right to be a personality, the ill-mannered surrounding of young people taking drugs, and unhappy romantic relationship led to bipolar disorder. Nevertheless, the biological factor still exists as her mother is a hysteric woman, so Lizzie might have inherited her mother’s nerve system type.

People suffering from bipolar disorder are usually treated by Prozac or medicines including Lithium Carbonate to calm the maniac episodes and prevent depression. To help Lizzie, not only medical but also psychological therapy is needed. “Psychological or pharmacological treatments at an earlier stage of bipolar disorder are more effective that in the later stages. This is apparent in multiple domains covering outcomes of importance to both clinicians and patients. The literature spans greater effectiveness on relapse, remission, recovery rates, comorbidity, symptomatic and syndromal outcome, global psychosocial functioning, and vocational and residential functioning. The fact that the same trend is seen with different treatment modalities, as well as a variety of outcomes adds validity and potency to our findings.” (Joyce, Thompson, & Marwaha, 2016). The psychologist should help her to get rid of her inconvenience and prove her problems to be important.

Unfortunately, lots of people nowadays suffer from bipolar disorder without being treated at all because they are ashamed of such a problem as it is punished by human society. One of the protagonists of Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides” suffered from bipolar disorder, her name was Lux, and she was 15 and her behavior resembled Lizzie’s. Her parents did not divorce but they were too strict to their daughters. Being not able to listen to the music she liked, date whom she liked, communicate with people she wanted, the girl committed suicide, but if her parents addressed the psychologist for the help, the story might have had a happy end. Lux needed to be heard and express her vivid personality, and the inability to do this made her feel worthless.

In conclusion, bipolar disorder draws much attention as lots of people suffer from it. I disagree with the fact that our society regards mental disorders as taboo; as a result, people suffering them are afraid of asking for help. Observing the example of Lizzie Wurtzel, it is obvious that people do not want to have a prolonged treatment, but just get a medicine and suppress the symptoms. I disagree with the society’s attitude to mentally sick people as if they were dangerous. Nowadays, almost everyone at least once had a nervous break-down, many people suffer from depression, eating disorders, etc. No one is really “normal” as the notion of normality is too subjective. The majority of mental diseases are caused by an unusual word outlook which is suppressed by others. People who are genius just could not invent something new because the innovation is the result of being ahead of time.

© 2021 Writer-elite, Ian Myles

Author's Note

For more articles of Ian Myles, please visit https://writer-elite.com

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