Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author whose memoir Prozac Nation helped change how the world saw mental health, has died at 52.

She was just 27 when the book was published in 1994, a bestseller that became a publishing sensation and helped open up public discussion of depression.

The book's unapologetic, strident tone, describing Ms Wurtzel's experiences with mental illness, led to her being labelled "Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna" by The New York Times Book Review. 

She died of metastatic breast cancer on Tuesday in New York. After her diagnosis, she became a staunch advocate of testing for the BRCA gene mutation, which can cause the cancer and to which Ashkenazi women are more susceptible.

"I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer. I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so,” she wrote.

But later, in 2018, she wrote: "At one time it bothered me that I have a disease I could have avoided through prophylactic mastectomy.

"I don’t feel that way any more. I like the person I am with cancer and because of cancer.

"Yes, that thing happened. I evolved."

She was born in New York in 1967 and attended a yeshiva on the Upper West Side from the age of 12. She became a journalist after studying at Harvard. She published seven books in total and attended Yale Law School in her thirties.

Ms Wurtzel continued to write confessional articles through her life, including on marriage, growing older, her diagnosis and the revelation her biological father was actually Bob Adelman, a photographer famous for taking a photo of Martin Luther King during his "I have a dream" speech in 1963.