Prozac Diary

In the final chapter of Welcome to My Country (1996), an account of her work with schizophrenic patients, psychologist Slater revealed that, she, too, had been institutionalized, and that she saw much of herself in those she counseled. Now she steps back to tell how fluoxetine hydrochloride (better known as Prozac) freed her from crippling obsessive-compulsive thoughts and suicidal impulses and allowed her to continue her education, have a career, fall in love and marry. The flipside to Elizabeth Wurtzel's brash, bratty rants, Slater's chronicle focuses not on her depressions (""At fifteen, right when my life should have been growing, it warbled and shrank to the size of a hard, black dot""), but on her long-term relationship with the drug, which she wryly characterizes as a dependency: ""We all have our teats. We all suckle something or other."" Earnestly reflective in the manner of the best YA fiction (complete with sections of journal entries, letters to her doctor and poems), Slater's is a sort of coming-of-age story, that of a woman who spent her teens and early '20s in a limbo of symptoms and institutions, and had to learn to enjoy life once returned to it. Whether she describes her first weeks on the drug (""the air felt like flannel on my skin""), the Prozac ""Poop-out"" and its attendant relapses or the vicissitudes of love and sex in her chemically altered state, Slater is frank, engaging and closely descriptive. Her worry that long-term use has diminished her creativity should be allayed by this luminous, cautiously optimistic memoir. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Kimberly Witherspoon; author tour. (Sept.)