"Dear Gabe,

The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen..."

With that enigmatic line, Philip Roth began his first novel, Letting Go, which was published in 1961, when the idea of taking drugs just so you can function was anathema. Decades later, it's the norm. Zoloft, Prozac, Adderall, Ritalin, Ambien... The list is as long as the symptoms that more and more people are seeking to fix with a little white tablet. And their doctors are more than willing to oblige.

On Saturday, a friend of mine was supposed to meet me for coffee in the mid-afternoon. She never arrived, and texted me to say she was still at home because she felt disoriented, detached, and unable to sleep. She had been prescribed Adderall that week by a doctor who, after one consultation, diagnosed her with attention deficit disorder.

I've known this person for more than three years, and while she can be flighty, the only "condition" she suffers from is what I've always known to be called the "human condition." It hardly needs medical treatment.

But with big Pharma constantly creating new drugs, and a culture that strives to normalize afflictions like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and ADD to the point of allowing anyone who ever has a bad day to think they, too, are sick, we have nothing short of an epidemic on our hands.

Unlike most epidemics, though, this one was man-made, and propagated by a culture of hypochondria. And when more and more people abuse those drugs, as we're seeing all too often in the media these days, the problem compounds itself.

My friend resolved never to take her Adderall again after learning that it's essentially just speed. Shouldn't her doctor have informed her of what it was before she took it?

I realize this is a complicated issue, and it may be that we have so many more pills now than before simply because we have the means to diagnose illnesses that have always been part of human life. But isn't hardship also part of human life, as much as learning how to deal with it?

[Image: Tom Varco from Wikimedia Commons]