This research examines first-person narrative representations by women with lived experiences of madness, in the context of the 1990s or the ‘Prozac period’, in the United States. Drawing from the discipline of Mad Studies, that prioritizes Mad knowledge and offers methods of analysing Mad people’s lived experiences with the mental health system, I explore the politics of self-identifying as a ‘madwoman’, in memoirs written from the Mad perspective. The study is particularly interested in women’s personal accounts of psychiatrization, at the turn of the twenty-first century, since it recognizes the period as a historical moment in the mental health discourse of America, during which, the proliferation of women’s self-identified lived experience narratives, coincides with the Prozac phenomenon. The Prozac phase is marked by the growing popularity of anti-depressants, especially Prozac and simultaneously, the increasing propensity to diagnose women’s emotional distress as depression. This has led critics such as Clark Lawlor to argue that, the invention of depression as a quintessential feminine condition and the manufacturing of the new drugs to treat it, happened simultaneously. In this regard, I have selected the following memoirs for literary and critical discourse analysis: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me (1998), Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary (1998), Norah Vincent’s Voluntary Madness (2008) and Judi Chamberlin’s On Our Own (1999). I argue that these memoirs are valuable epistemic resources, since they offer critical perspectives on the real, experiential and discursive aspects of women’s madness, problematize mainstream psychiatric discourses, as well as reimagine the literary/feminist interpretations of the figure of the madwoman as a metaphor for women’s oppression and/or rebellion.

By proposing to evaluate these memoirs by women with lived experiences, from the Mad Studies framework, I seek to determine the significance of writing from the madwoman subject-position, and inquire about the diverse madwoman subjectivities that emerge from this politics of self-identification. I argue that, the given memoirs, adopt the diagnostic label as a vantage point, to articulate the different aspects of lived experience of psychiatrization such as illness, recovery, institutionalization and resistance. Thereby, these personal narratives become political spaces of interactions with the mental health system, through which the authors negotiate their identities to recognize themselves as patients, consumers, inmates and survivors. Furthermore, I argue that, speaking from these mad subject-positions, allow the authors to reconstitute themselves as agentic subjects and take charge of their own narratives of madness. This study, therefore, traces the four madwoman subjectivities, that emerge in the memoirs as the “Depressed I”, “Prozac I”, “Incarcerated I” and “Activist I”.