This entire article from Newsweek is well worth reading. It has me thinking quite hard about medication and our emotional states. Here are a few excerpts:

Students tell him [NYU professor, Jerome Wakefield] that their parents are pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention—”some Zoloft, dear?”—for their sadness, and the kids want no part of it. “Can you talk to them for me?” they ask Wakefield. Rather than “listening to Prozac,” they want to listen to their hearts, not have them chemically silenced.

And further down:

By labeling appropriate sadness pathological, “we have attached a stigma to being sad,” says Wakefield, “with the result that depression tends to elicit hostility and rejection” with an undercurrent of ” ‘Get over it; take a pill.’ The normal range of human emotion is not being tolerated.” And insisting that sadness requires treatment may interfere with the natural healing process. “We don’t know how drugs react with normal sadness and its functions, such as reconstituting your life out of the pain,” says Wakefield.

Do you think Christians should embrace pain and sadness? Or at always stay positive and happy? Should Christians medicate their happiness/sadness or are these natural God-given states? Other thoughts?

[HT: the tireless TitusOneNine]