I remember in seminary being enthralled with the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. He argued that being fully alive means learning to live with ambiguity, pain, suffering, and disappointments. There is a naturalness to all these emotions and experiences, and they serve to build character, which as St. Paul reminds us, deepens our bond with God.
 
I thought again of Kierkegaard as I reviewed a book by Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Barber points out that since Prozac's release in l988, we have experienced an explosion in legal drug use. In 2004, 33 million Americans were taking a psychiatric drug; spending on antidepressants rose from $5.1 billion in 1997 to $13.5 billion in 2006; 9% of teenagers have taken drugs for depression.
 
Obviously, to anyone who has ever been clinically depressed, anti-depressant drugs can be a godsend. But for the rest of us, are we becoming numb to the richness, variety and texture that is human life? Sometimes having a bad day is not bad - it is good. It teaches us that our life is not in order, that our life is misdirected, that we need to make amends and live differently. We have a choice: to stay with the pain that it may become our teacher, or to take a pill.