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How happy is one meant to be? How miserable can you get and still be normal enough? When does a melancholy or depressed phase become a form of mental illness? I suppose such questions have never had clear answers, but it feels like they are becoming ever more problematic. Every other week there is a new report about the rise in depression in young people. This week it was the turn of UCL to declare a significant increase in teenage depression over the last ten years. Maybe something has gone wrong with our culture: young people are being encouraged to see happiness as the normal state of human beings - if they feel excluded from it, they fear they are drifting into mental illness. Of course in some cases depression requires professional help, but maybe it’s also helpful to see psychological struggle as a fairly normal phase that many young people go through with particular intensity, as they find their place in the world. Part of what drew me to religion, when I was a moody undergraduate, was a sense that it has a narrative about depression. It’s something you might have to suffer, as you grow. It is the semi-normal human condition. But it’s not the whole story: there is light at the end of the tunnel. One of the main writers who helped me see it this way was the poet George Herbert, who was commemorated by the Anglican church this week - the unseasonably warm weather was appropriate to a poet of sudden changes of mood, the sudden blossoming of hope. Partly what I liked about his poetry is what teenage music fans like about really depressing indie bands: one’s darkest moods are reflected in poetry of sharp dejection, grim despair. God did not hear my prayers, he complains in a poem called Denial - and so ‘my breast was full of fears / And disorder.’That short last line had a jangling dissonance that spoke to me, named how I felt, and this felt sort of hopeful - for maybe I could also learn to feel the joy and hope that appear in other poems. The problem was I didn’t really believe in God. But hang on - neither did Herbert half the time. In plenty of poems he’s complaining that religion feels like an empty charade, a sick joke. In his poem the Collar he has a little anti-religious huff. And in other poems he stages internal debates, giving voice to his doubts. The honesty of such poems helped me to see that religion is not just for pious folk, do-gooders, those blessed with a serene sense of purpose - maybe it’s also for dodgy edgy types like me - people who never stop being sceptics. Religion does not cure depression - it isn’t as simple as that. But it says that one’s psychological struggles have meaning, it says that the sharpest angst might be a necessary part of your story, and it’s a story of hope, of the sun coming out at last. Denial, that poem of painful dissonance, ends with a plea for God’s favours - ‘That they and my mind may chime/ and mend my rhyme’.