Is it Okay to Be Unhappy? Kierkegaard in The NY Times

A few months ago, philosophy professor Gordon Marino wrote an editorial for The New York Times, Kierkegaard on the Couch. Marino looks at how we treat issues of depression and despair in the modern age. While Marino focuses on identifying differences between despair and depression, for me the important question raised by his article was the issue of how we respond to unhappiness in our society. It seems to me as if American society sees most manifestations of unhappiness as a problem to be treated by medicine or therapy. The concept of valuing our melancholy musings is all but lost. The goal of therapy is not to deeper or clarify your thinking on deeper issues, but to "fix" you for having them. Clearly, I am referring to only a specific type of unhappiness/depression and this type is not the only manifestation of unhappiness or depression. For some, therapy and medication may be helpful and/or necessary. However, it seems that psychiatric care is almost always the first option. Serious spirituality has been relegated to new age practitioners and the church. Even here, the aim seems to be to "fix" the problem, to fix you, as if there is something wrong with deep and problematic quandaries. As the respectability and influence of humanities departments in colleges sinks, and our society pushes more and more towards a medical and scientific conception of thinking, I wonder what the place is for serious thought that fails to be uplifting.