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An issue I have been struggling with, that seems implied in much of this discussion though perhaps I am misreading into it, is the idea that when one takes a pill to help alleviate depression, the experiences one has while on medication will not be as meaningful as suffering through the depression might have been. Why does not depressed (if one would have been depressed except for a medication) = no meaningful experiences? There is an entire world of other feelings besides those experienced during depression that are absolutely essential, difficult and wonderful parts of human life. Some are good, some are bad, but they cannot all be boiled down to either depressed or not depressed. Certainly much can be learned through depression for some people, but the experiences those people might end up having while on medication could end up being just as meaningful, just as educative, as those they experienced while depressed. I feel in this class we have been very careful to continually remind ourselves that we don’t actually understand the true underlying causes of most of mental illness, so it seems strange that we are in this case asserting that “natural” is necessarily better (or rather, able to teach more, is a better way of saying it) than some kind of “induced” mental state. And I put natural and induced in quotation marks because we have pointed out that there are so many different ways to change one’s mental state! So many in fact, that calling some “natural” and some “induced” seems completely beyond the possible scope of our knowledge, or of scientific knowledge more generally. Therapy, drugs, just sitting around and thinking – all of these are ways to change brain chemistry, why are some more “natural” than others? I realize this question perhaps sounds ludicrous or overly hypothetical, but I don’t think it should be!