prozac | Thornfield Hall

Many years ago, my friend C and I riffled through her husband’s files. “I married a doctor, not a psychiatrist,” she said. He had switched to psychiatry during his residency, and she’d never gotten over it.

We spent a morning happily reading his patients’ records. “Listen to this: “Electra (40) w. new boyfriend (60) at Chicago Playboy Club.”

This struck me as hilarious on several levels. “Electra at the Playboy Club! What was she doing there?”

“Gloria Steinem was a bunny there.”

C loved her husband, but she did hate his job. It made me a bit squeamish, too. He thought he knew everything about women. He had a fit because C and I loved Cathy cartoons.

“They’re sexist!”

When men analyze women’s comic books… Poor Cathy Guisewite!

Several years ago C and I joined a book club. Two of the members were psychodocs. C pointed them out to me with a grimace. They loved to read, but their psychoanalytic criticism was out of control and often inappropriate – especially when applied to Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road, an Oprah book.

It was a master class in post-Freudian pharmaceutical analysis. The only woman in Greek myth who didn’t have a complex seemed to be Clytemnestra. (Okay, that’s hyperbole.) But Binchy’s heroines had no complexes, to my knowledge. Except that Ria’s husband left her – what complex was that?

Anyway, I quite like some psychiatrists. One of them, a friend of mine, gave me a Prozac clock.

Pharmaceutical salesmen used to give little gifts like that to doctors.

Query: Is it appropriate for a doc to give a friend an old souvenir from a Prozac salesman?

Of course he gave me the clock! He was going to throw it out anyway.

I have shown the clock to many friends, and everyone covets one. You can buy them on eBay, but none are as cute as my obsolete blue alarm clock.

I used to think I could walk down the street and identify people on Prozac (by which I mean antidepressants in general). It turned out I was wrong. The handsome, impeccably dressed middle-aged man who held the bus door open for us appeared on the street corner one morning wearing “beggar clothes” (tattered jeans, a soup-stained sweater, and a small ski jacket that may have belonged to his wife, if he had one).

“Can you spare money for a cup of coffee?” he asked. Of course I could and did. I handed him $7, in case he craved two cups of coffee or a latte. Under other circumstances, I would have dircted him to the best place to get a latte, but it would be a miracle if he made it to any coffeehouse.

I asked the neighborhood security guard if the man, now apparently a beggar, would be okay.

“Yup, when the pills kick in. His house is a block away. And if he beds down in the alley in that sleeping bag, we take him home in the car.”

“Where does he get those beggar clothes?” I asked. The security guard said he’d wondered, too.

And a few days later, sure enough, the man wore his suit again and helped us onto the bus. I almost asked him about that imaginary latte but stopped just in time.

According to the National Institutes of Health, approximately 16 percent of Americans take antidepressants. That does not seem like an inordinately high number to me. In fact, it seems like a lowball number.

Because who isn’t depressed these days, even if not clinically? Americans seem more isolated than ever since the pandemic. They sheltered in place, and worked at home, but the work-at-home trend, though convenient, has also weakened the sense of community among workers. They used to meet daily and chat in their cubes and offices about Netflix, the weather, and on rare occasions, politics. I’m not saying people shouldn’t work at home, but perhaps they should put in an appearance once or twice a week, to reestablish a sense of community.

Meanwhile, it’s okay to take Prozac if you need it.