This trend seems to beg the question: Why do so many Americans seek to medicate what seem to be entirely normal emotions? If you were to lose your job, say, or see your net worth reduced by 75%, you could reasonably expect to feel just a wee bit blue.

So why pop a pill?

Advertisements reinforce this idea. Take, for instance, a commercial for Pfizer’s (PFE) Zoloft, in which the voiceover soothingly explains that “it works to correct chemical imbalances in the brain.” There’s a sentence so wonderfully vague, it speaks to just about everybody: Life, after all, is just one big balancing act, isn’t it?

Until recently, psychologists and psychiatrists distinguished depression from clinical depression: The first is a feeling of sadness or melancholy -- the kind you might experience at the death of a parent or the loss of a job; the second is a serious psychological disorder caused by one's neurochemistry.

In a major economic crisis like this one, we'd expect to see a whole lot of the first kind of depression -- and we have, just as we did in previous crises. But the common response to it has been entirely new: Get medicated -- at least if you have health insurance.

The ubiquity of pharmaceutical drugs is a relatively new phenomenon, beginning roughly the 1990s. There are now more than 30 antidepressants from major drug companies. Over 1.8 billion total prescriptions, across drug classes, were written last year.

In the past, psychiatrists had to prescribe psychotropic drugs -- which makes a certain amount of sense. Now, family doctors can scribble at will. And all of these drugs are readily available online with a few clicks and a credit card (along with an appetite for living dangerously).

What anecdotes and statistics from this recession tell us is this: Drugs are being used as a stopgap; there's no larger support program in place. A study of antidepressant use in private health-insurance plans by the New England Research Institute found that 43% of those who had been prescribed antidepressants had no psychiatric diagnosis or any mental-health care beyond the prescription of the drug.

But if you take enough of them -- from Seconal to Ambien to Prozac to horse tranquilizers -- it's kind of hard to care.

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