The Age of the Prozac Princess
by Sloane DiBari, Opinions Editor
Illustration by Violette Stevenson
Do you take antidepressants? If so, congratulations—you are officially in your hot girl era. Countless Hinge users agree: We “go crazy for girls on Lexapro.” Ever heard of the Hot/Crazy Scale? Mental illness is directly correlated with sex appeal, and also coolness. It’s literally science.
The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read “honk if you’re a lexapro girlie” in the style of the Barbie logo. It was so profoundly cringe that I almost couldn’t believe my eyes, but it also felt eerily familiar. I found that searching the phrase on Google returns pages upon pages of relevant results, virtually all of which are consumer products. Redbubble, Etsy, various print shops, selling cutesy pins and stickers and T-shirts with the aforementioned phrase and similar ones: “maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s wellbutrin.” “HOT GIRLS TAKE PROZAC.” And, of course, “Live, Laugh, Lexapro.”
I’d seen little slogans like this before, reposted on Instagram stories and stuck on Nalgenes and Hydro Flasks, heard them in passing at school and at work. I’ve heard people my age—mainly women—wield antidepressants almost as status symbols, flexing Zoloft prescriptions (the brand-name stuff, not generic sertraline, which is actually more commonly prescribed) to their fellow mentally ill like glamorous older ladies do with Louis Vuitton bags. Where designer purses are a show of monetary accumulation, brand-name medications are a show of psychopathological accumulation.
In the best of faith, this phenomenon might be attributed to well-intentioned efforts for the destigmatization of mental illness. It’s safe to assume that that group of girls sitting around chatting in the library or even those Etsy and Redbubble sellers aren’t being paid by Big Pharma to namedrop brand-name psychiatric drugs; rather, they assume that they’re simply painting mental illness in a more casual light. We can joke around about being depressed, mention panic attacks offhand like one might do for a nasty cold. These things are innocuous enough on their own—positive, even, in some ways. Facilitating discussion of mental health not only encourages people to seek professional care, but to be more open to potential connections with others who may or may not be mentally ill themselves: connections which are crucial to maintaining good mental health. But it gets a little more complicated when we start advertising brand-name SSRIs (and SNRIs, mind you) for free—and embracing sexist attitudes to do so.
The Hot/Crazy Scale has existed in popular culture since as early as the mid-2000s, when it was featured in an episode of How I Met Your Mother. Until sometime in the past handful of years, the sentiment that “crazy = sexy” has chiefly been espoused by men talking about women. Now, the women of my generation appear to be “reclaiming” this through the manner in which they discuss their mental health. Let’s return for a minute to that trend of Hinge users putting “I go crazy for girls on Lexapro” in their profiles. In the subreddit r/lexapro (note how it’s not called “r/escitalopram,” the generic version of the drug), a user posted a screenshot of one of said profiles (“28, man, straight”) and expressed disgust: “my mental health isn’t a fetish.”
The comments overwhelmingly defended the man. One of the top comments emphasized “how much this normalizes the ‘stigma’ of having mental health issues, which some people find so embarrassing to admit they have.” On a similar post, one woman commented, “I mean…I’ve never been more easygoing and fun in my life so I get it?”
It’s hard to say what the intentions of the kinds of people who openly “go crazy for girls on Lexapro” actually are. This expression of the idea of finding mentally ill women especially sexy rehashes the Hot/Crazy Scale mentality. Clearly, though, there are plenty of people—straight men included—who (ostensibly) see taking antidepressants as indicative of stable mental health, and find this stability attractive in themselves and in others.
Still, why specifically cite taking medication as a so-called sign of mental stability? Why reference the name-brand version of said medication almost exclusively? And why doesn’t anyone ever seem to talk like this about medications like Risperdal or Zyprexa, prescribed for conditions like bipolar 1 disorder or schizophrenic disorders? Are those medications not signs of mental stability, of looking after one’s health? Are the women living with those disorders crazy in the wrong ways—the ways that are ugly, unsexy? Men love manic pixie dream girls until their mental illness makes them scary. Psychosis is a turn-off, I suppose, as are the decidedly unglamorous side effects (impaired motor function, sedation, metabolic syndrome, etc.) of antipsychotic medications.
Of course, antidepressants often have “unsexy” side effects, too: weight gain, fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, and—the one I’ve heard talked about the most—sexual dysfunction. But these people aren’t actually invested in the functions of the medications themselves. What they’re really fixated on are the psychiatric illnesses that they’re designed to treat. In acting as volunteer advertisers for pharmaceutical companies, people who are obsessed with namedropping Prozac and Lexapro and Zoloft and what have you are commodifying mental illness. The medications are merely the signifier, the illness the signified.
And the sign? Desirability. Whether it manifests as sex appeal, cuteness, intrigue, mystique, trendiness, worldliness—these medications confer a certain status to the people taking them. Under the guise of “destigmatization” lies a consumer capitalist repackaging of mental illness (or the socially acceptable kind, anyway) and an inadvertent privileging of an industry which doesn’t necessarily have the best interests of mentally ill people at heart. Antidepressants can be good—even life-saving—for some. But it’s important to keep in mind that their manufacturers are capitalizing on our psychological distress, even if the products themselves can be beneficial.
The primary victims of this are women—vulnerable women suffering from mental illness, especially. We have been given a new and attainable means to be attractive, acceptable. The people practicing this particular method of normalization are unwittingly not only perpetuating sexist thought, but feeding the pharmaceutical companies that are in this for the money, not for our wellbeing alone. It’s the dawn of the Age of the Prozac Princess—but she’s still a far cry from taking the throne.
