Prozac Campus: The Next Generation
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In an accelerated culture, 15 years is a long time. And last spring, when a stiff, cream-colored envelope arrived in the mail to announce preparations for my 10th college reunion, I realized that it had been nearly that long since my experience with antidepressants began.
When the envelope came, I was at work on a book about my generation’s relationship to psychiatric drugs. The book opened with a memory from the fall of 1997, when I was a dumped, homesick, anxious, and tearful freshman. I sought guidance in my school’s health and counseling center, where I was quickly treated to a remedy that seemed exotic—a diagnosis of depression and a prescription for a pill known as an SSRI, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Over the following months, I realized with a mounting sense of shock how many of my classmates were using medication, too.
For those of us who were teenagers in the 1990s, this feeling of surprise was fundamental to our experience of psychiatric drugs. In our midteen years, antidepressants and medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder hadn’t been everywhere, and then suddenly they were. We attended college during the first report of a psychopharmaceutical explosion.
But people born in the late 80s and early 90s were raised in a very different world. They never knew a time before Prozac, can scarcely remember when advertisements for prescription medication didn’t peer out from bus shelters or blare from TV. Prompted by the arrival of my reunion invitation, I began to wonder whether psychiatric medication meant something different to this new generation of students than it had to mine.