Three consecutive days, three published reports, three outrageous shockers. The first, dubbing us 'Prozac Britain', found that 29 million prescriptions for happy pills are written out every year - four times as many anti-depressants as two decades ago. The second, from a poll of teenagers, found a quarter of girls aged 18 and 19 so depressed that they have considered suicide. The third and the worst, based on American research, declared depression to be a problem for two- to five-year-olds, with possible treatments to include counselling and medication.
That is, these days, as far as the debate goes: in our search for a cure, shall we invest further in the already wealthy drugs industry - or chuck a bit more hard-earned cash in the direction of the costly charms of the exploding counselling trade?
It is way, way out of vogue to ask a more basic question: what if most of these people don't actually need a cure at all; what if, in fact, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them, save that they are properly, rationally, unhappy?
Unhappiness has become, only in recent years, an enemy of human tolerance. Once upon a time, when something utterly horrid happened, and especially if several horrid things happened at once - the lover left, the job fell through, the cat was sick on the duvet and the best friend was inexplicably no-speakums - we used to understand instinctively not only that the wave of misery would come but that it would eventually go, albeit only when it chose, and meanwhile it was time to clamber into bed (with or without the cat sick) and remember why the Good Lawd gave us red wine and Hank Williams.
It was part and parcel, something to get through; the emotional yin to the yang, the dark days whose counterpoint would be a heightened relish and appreciation of the happy days that would surely follow. No longer. Now, cajoled by those who stand to make the most money out of human misery (agony aunt Virginia Ironside bravely admitted last month to having spent £54,000 on 'therapy' before realising it was bunkum), we elevate our unhappiness, lend it the status of pathology, pinch the term 'depression' from its true clinical sufferers - by itself a monstrous thing to do - and demand that, now we have thus defined it as a sickness, we want it cured.
Stoicism? A forgotten art. For every poor soul who is seriously squished by crisis or bi-polar imbalance, and who genuinely needs a chemical or commiserative helping hand to steer them from breakdown, there are a dozen who won't put up with even a month of heartache at, say, the end of a relationship, without reaching for that same hand.
They never admit that something so humdrum is what it's about, mind. They are far too intriguingly complex to be felled by a mere broken heart. So they summon the godforsaken cheek to look you in the eye and swear that they now see that the break-up was only 'symptomatic' of 'a deeper issue' and if you say oh really, who diagnosed that, then? - might it be the person charging you to 'deal with' it? - they won't talk to you again.
Such is the current expectation of happiness that it threatens to promote itself as a human right; good grief, even our forefathers, who took it upon themselves to cross the ocean in search of better, only enshrined the right to the pursuit of happiness. Not the same thing at all.
Moreover, if we continue to let those with vested interests persuade us that unhappiness has no role in the rhythm of our lives, that it must be stamped out - 'cured' - at all costs, here's where we end up: with teenagers having so little immunity to a period of misery that they think they'd be better off dead, and with toddlers on drugs. Now, there's depressing for you.
It's the Tories that put me off voting Tory
Somewhere between a new Tory leader and a new Tory government lie more than 3 million new electoral votes - and the prolonged Tory leadership campaign cannot have helped to find them. The intended platform message was one of fresh and new and change; the endless grassroots footage, however, gave the lie, as day after day we were reintroduced to the Tory faithful: snobby, disdainful, nimby, permed, affected, hunting, mean, vengeful, and mad, mad, mad not for justice but for - oooh! - punishment. In short, people with whom I could not bear to have a thing in common. It was a forceful reminder that although some leading figures ('Dave'? Boris?) and some likely policies (Europe?) might, just, tempt me to vote Tory, I still could never be a Tory voter.
