"Nation of Prozac": be happy and be yourself at the same time
The film features a phrase that Elizabeth uses to describe how depression comes - “Gradually, then suddenly. It's just that one day you wake up and it hurts to live. " “Do I exist only to eat, sleep, breathe, achieve success, buy some things, talk to people, travel, fall in love, start a family? So what is the point of all this? "…
I am a writer. The keys beat the rhythm, give birth to special music - the music of words, music of feelings, music of meanings. All the deepest, inexplicable, important flows with a strange current into the fingers, and from the fingers into words. The words are combined, intertwined into sentences, and the fingers on the keyboard are constantly looking for a special combination - the most important, accurate, as if taken from the depths of the soul, true, vital, which will later be called a text, but suddenly one day it is not found.
Elizabeth Wurzel is a Harvard journalism student. She writes great music reviews and receives the prestigious Rolling Stone Award for one of them. But one day Lizzie realizes that she has lost the ability to write: she is looking for exact words, correct images and does not find. She plunges into the dark depths of depression, from which she tries to get out throughout the film. This is a short plot of the movie "The Nation of Prozac", based on the autobiography of the same name by Elizabeth Wurzel.
The film strikes with the accuracy of the expressed states, some kind of special recognition for many people who at least once faced depression.
A piercing cry that does not come out, despair, sleepless nights or an endless desire to sleep, the inability to explain to anyone how bad you are and why. Loss of meaning, suicidal thoughts, a black abyss in the soul, into which life flies every day.
Hope for salvation and again despair, and then again and again. And again. This is what happens to the heroine of the film. This is what happened to the author of the novel based on which the film was made, Elizabeth Wurzel. This is what happens to many other people whom Yuri Burlan's "System-Vector Psychology" defines as the owners of the sound vector.
Depression. "Gradually, and then suddenly"
“Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? Why do I live? For what? Who am I? These questions lie in the very essence of a person with a sound vector and are conditioned by his innate desire to know himself. To reveal the hidden, the plan, the root cause, God, in the end - everyone calls it differently. These questions are not always realized by a person, but the meaning remains the same. The desires of the sound engineer do not lie in the plane of the material world, he wants to know, to feel what is hidden outside of it.
“Do I exist only to eat, sleep, breathe, achieve success, buy some things, talk to people, travel, fall in love, start a family? So what's the point of all this? When the sound engineer does not find the answers to these questions, depression sets in.
The film features a phrase that Elizabeth uses to describe how depression comes - “Gradually, then suddenly. It's just that one day you wake up and it hurts to live."
Real severe depression, and not just a temporary bad mood, is a condition that is inherent only in a person with a sound vector, whose heartfelt desire to know the meaning is not satisfied. Lizzy is not saved from depression by studying at Harvard, or making new friends, or recognizing her talent, or being rewarded for her favorite business, or career opportunities that open up. Nothing saves. One day Lizzie sits down to write an article and writes it for several days. Without sleep. With fanatical persistence, as if on the verge of insanity, Lizzie searches for the right combination of words. Desperately clinging to your only salvation - the ability to express the important in words. But the words are not found. "I can't create anything original."
Lizzie realizes that nothing will free her from the onset of depression now. “Writing won't save me. Not even Harvard can save me. How do I escape the demons in my head?"
Words and meanings
“I can't believe it's all happening again,” Mom says, looking at Lizzie, lying lifeless on the bed.
- Do you think I want it myself?
“I don’t know, Lizzie.
Mom's voice sounds louder and turns into a scream, and immediately the retrospective takes us back to Lizzie's childhood. We see little Elizabeth watching her parents quarrel. This episode accurately reveals to us a very important moment that influenced the life of Lizzie Wurzel. Heart-rending, shrill screams during a quarrel - real torment, suffering, pain for a person with a sound vector.
The soundman's ear is the most sensitive organ. But his sensitivity is not limited to acute hearing - negative meanings coming from the outside world hurt the sound engineer even more. Therefore, unpleasant words, even spoken in a whisper, have a very painful effect on him. In desire, he fenced himself off from the pain outside - from shouts, from insults and humiliations - the sound engineer is more and more immersed in his inner world, closes in on himself.
Lizzie's soul is hurt, traumatized by loud screams and negative meanings that her parents exchange: their conflict continues after the divorce. Therefore, since childhood, Lizzie has difficulty making contact with the world, other people and becomes a black sheep at school.
“Since childhood, my mother and I have always been together. I was hardly friends with anyone at school, everyone thought I was strange, and I felt like an outcast. Creativity becomes the only salvation for her. Working with meanings through the word, which is so necessary for a sound engineer, gives Lizzie the opportunity to live on. Feel alive. After all, writing is one of the most powerful realizations of sound desire, it is the ability to communicate with the world, it is the ability to reveal life and people, step by step closer to the knowledge of the human soul.
I am different
“I said I couldn't live with another person,” Lizzie says to her mother, explaining why she moved to a separate dorm room.
Since childhood, sound people often feel different from all other people. Sometimes this causes a painful feeling of not being able to become part of a common life. The conversations that people have are of little interest to the sound person. Discussions of everyday problems can cause almost physical pain, they seem empty, vulgar. “I just want to be understood, but no one fully understands me, and it's hard for me to listen to banal phrases,” says Lizzie.
In depression, the desire for isolation from people becomes overwhelming. Cutting off ties with the outside world, the sound engineer, concentrated exclusively on himself, becomes an involuntary hostage of his difficult internal states, from which he cannot find a way out. An unconscious desire to know oneself, focused only on one's own psyche, gives the opposite effect and makes it impossible to realize this desire. This only increases the person's mental pain. At the training "System-Vector Psychology" we reveal that the realization of the desire to know oneself in a sound engineer occurs at the moment of concentration on the psyche of others, when he finally reveals himself in differences from them.
They are different
Sometimes Elizabeth makes attempts to talk about what is happening inside her with other people. But he does not find understanding. Indeed, the anal-skin-visual mother and friend Lizzie are unfamiliar with these conditions. “I don’t understand you,” Mom tells her. And so it is. After all, we look at people only through our desires, our worldview.
“Everyone has hard times,” says a friend.
“I'm different,” Lizzie says.
There is a challenge in her answer. The soundman's desire to be understood by other people, to live a normal life, conflicts with an even greater egocentric desire to be different from everyone else. Faced with misunderstanding, Lizzie receives another confirmation of her own exclusivity, features, which further removes her from people, closes in on her own feelings and experiences.
The tragedy is that in loneliness there is still no silence, it is disturbed by thoughts rushing in my head. Alone there are no people who do not understand you, but there are no people for whom to write. It is difficult to write alone, it is difficult to express a thought so that you will be heard and understood. It is precisely because of self-focus that sound professionals lose their ability to write. Although they were born with the talent to penetrate the souls of people through the word.
I am a living example that therapy does not work
Relationships with people are deteriorating, and depression is increasingly covering its black, hopeless canvas. Talking to a therapist doesn't help. In an attempt to cling to at least something in this world, Lizzie throws herself into parties, alcohol, drugs, sex and eventually makes an attempt to find salvation in love. But building a happy relationship in such a state is difficult, almost impossible. In order to be close to another person, you need to pay attention to his feelings, thoughts, experiences. Self-centered Elizabeth perceives everything in a distorted light - a painful, viscous, painful perception of depression. The sound vector is dominant, and until its desires are filled, all attempts to live an ordinary life are meaningless. Relationships collapse, and, experiencing a painful break with a young man, on the verge of despair, Elizabeth Wurzel begins to accept Prozac. The psychotherapy that Lizzie underwent did not help.
In the final scene of the film, a very important dialogue occurs between Lizzie and the therapist. Elizabeth regrets that although she has become the “right” person with the pills, she no longer feels like herself.
- So this is the point of treatment?
- Yes, in this.
There is much more behind Lizzie's question than meets the eye. The meaning so necessary for a sound person has not been found. This is not salvation. There is no point. It is not in pills, not in therapy, nowhere else. Lizzie runs into the bathroom, breaks a glass, and a shard freezes near her veins.
A series of depressions and remissions, psychotherapy, antidepressants, therapy again - a vicious circle in which a person falls into sound depression. Therapy often helps only temporarily; medications can provide relief from acute pain, but do not permanently save you from depression. “Gradually, and then suddenly” will replace each other until the answer to the main questions is found: “Who am I? What is the meaning of my life?"
“I can't be myself and be happy,” Lizzie tells the therapist, and the thought makes her desperate. The feeling of hopelessness persists. The pills only dulled her pain and insomnia, made her more balanced, but the changes were external. Inside her there are all the same unresolved questions, all the same sound desire suppressed by drugs.
“I've always been waiting for the moment of truth that would set me free and change me forever, but it won't come.”
And he really will not come for a sound person - until he understands what his most important desire is and how it can be realized. How can you be yourself and be happy without understanding yourself?
Moment of Truth
The modern world is suffering from an epidemic of depression. Someone just lives and does not understand why he is so hopelessly sad to live. Another is trying to solve problems with psychotherapy and antidepressants. The third escapes from life into a narcotic intoxication, the fourth, unable to withstand the pain of the soul, takes the last step into nowhere … And all these are the problems of modern owners of the sound vector, who can no longer be filled with either literature, music or science as it was yesterday. Today the sound engineer seeks to reveal the secret of the human soul. With thousands of results, the online training "System Vector Psychology" confirms that the ability to know yourself is an opportunity to get rid of depression forever.
