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Elizabeth Wurtzel
Quartet Books, £6

This book was carried up the bestseller lists last year by its genre of East Coast journalist takes on the nation's feelings of hopelessness. It was hyped to the status of a classic that defines a generation. In fact it was written as a raw case study of depression; the author attempts to broaden and deepen its relevance, but the bulk of the book's 326 pages is given over to blunt descriptions of key episodes in the life of a person suffering from crippling mental illness.

There is much to be gained from reading Wurtzel's book. It is a powerful document of suffering, and the author's success lies not so much in her glib jibes at the significance of moody pop culture, as in the strong grip with which she takes us up and down (mostly down) her depressive spiral.

Born into a struggling middle class family in New York, 1967, Elizabeth Wurtzel was always " full of promise." It shouldn't have mattered that her father was submerged in Valium or that her mother was a strict Jew. As she often points out, this is no excuse for her later behaviour; others come through worse. She charts the onset of her pain from around the age of 12 through to the tenuous equilibrium she has now achieved with the help of Prozac, lithium, and disipramine, backed up where necessary by cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol.

The book is built around three processes. Firstly, her need to accept that she is ill, that her brain chemistry is different from a normal person's. Secondly, her need to convince others of this and get adequate doses of sympathy. Thirdly, her attempt to understand how normal people manage to be happy in what her perceptive mind (and limited experience) tells her is a cruel world.

Above all she wants to show how damaged she is, despite the difficulty the world has in recognising her wounds. She is vaguely critical of the medical profession, but in her account the care available seems both immediate and perennial. The psychiatrist from her Harvard years, Dr Sterling, is an undoubted hero- Wurtzel says she chose her as a role model.

If the book is frustrating- as the author wanted it to be- it is because dealing with disease is frustrating, both for the sufferers and for the carers. Most of the time Wurtzel sucks up sympathy until those close to her can take no more. When she meets people with flint intheir souls (a boyfriend who tells her to let him know when she's finished crying, her trusted psychiatrist and a doctor swapping gallows quips) she has to check her assumptions about her relationships with those who are meant to be looking after her. She is fascinated at the complex but seemingly innate way that most people (epitomised by medical professionals) can confront horror and remain human.

As Wurtzel has convinced us of her faith in a chemical cure for a physical problem the end of the book seems paradoxical. True, Prozac enables her to get on with her life. She can live with the side effects- at least here she is willing to be stoical. But she speculates that her depression will adapt, resurface: " I believe, perhaps superstitiously...that brain cells will always outsmart medical molecules." Prozac Nation demonstrates nothing so well as the relentless drive of a sufferer to obtain relief.