"There is a lesson for the way that healing might draw on the powers of plot and drama—we call that narrative medicine."

Roanne Kantor, an English professor at Harvard, concluded that drama was essential to healing, and that teaching has much in common with healing. "I settle on the idea that both are vaguely pro-social, meaning that making people healthier or better educated produces a net good in the world," Kantor writes. According to Kantor, perhaps the link between healing and writing is drama.

The drama might have something to do with how doctors explore how healing is produced through the placebo effect as more than just pills and injections. Kathryn Hall, a molecular biologist, went to an acupuncturist and had a needle stuck in her forearm for 10 minutes, her pain receded away.

"I was like, 'Oh, my God, what is this woman doing?' It was very dramatic," Hall said. She started to wonder whether the drama in itself had something to do with the outcome of her pain going away. And this account, as well as the work of Hall into the placebo effect, led Kantor to think more about the role and power of drama in healing.

Normally, I think of the concept of drama as turmoil, as instability in my life that needs to be eliminated, an unnecessary instability and chaos in other people's lives that also needs to be eliminated. When we say "drama," we either think of a TV series with emotionally tense conflict or utter chaos in our lives among relationships that we try to stay out of. The latter type of drama is something that doesn't have any sort of positive connotation.

But recently I've been thinking about whether the drama is a bad thing at all. If the placebo effect applies, maybe the drama in the act of giving treatment plays a severe role in whether the patient is healed or not. Kantor went to a three-day Course Development Institute under a theater director at her school, in which the director, Michael Rau, tasked everyone in the institute to produce a short performance arranged around a list of spontaneous elements such as "a passionate kiss" and "an excellent use of depth." Kantor wondered what the point of all this was, and Rau told her that the random elements of the performance were meant to enhance or create meaning in the performance.

Drama can have meaning. Good drama certainly does, but at this point of reading the article, I still wasn't convinced. The drama in my life might have a lot of meaning, but it also came at such an emotional and mental cost that thinking of it as positive is still a major stretch.

And much of the drama comes from the process, as Rau told Kantor. "It's like a butterfly struggling out of its chrysalis, or a chick from its shell. The struggle itself is pedagogical. They have to go through a process to gain insight, or they'll never get it at all." As a professor, Kantor understood the process of leading her students in a discussion through a "rising action" to a more intense "climax". She has held back the real purpose of an exercise until halfway through the exercise to allow students to discover the point for themselves. It's more fun. It gets the students' attention. "What if drama also works as a placebo in the classroom: an element of learning in itself, in the way it seems to be an element of healing?"

Well, drama certainly gets attention. And it certainly is a process, too. I'm tempted even to say, as a Christian, that all drama is a part of God's plan for making us more like Jesus Christ.

Prior to teaching at Stanford, Kantor taught at Boston University (BU) and Harvard, alternating in between. She rejects the notion that the student population at Harvard was more innately talented than the students at BU but only that student expectations of Kantor as a professor at Harvard were much higher than those at BU. At BU, her students thought she was a run-of-the-mill professor, just like they thought of BU as a "pretty good" but not a great school. The learning of BU students in that classroom reflected that "pretty good" faith they had in their professor and institution. The Harvard students thought they were getting the best education in the world, and thought, by extension, that she must have been one of the best professors in the world, "because what another kind of teacher could have made it to the front of a Harvard classroom?" The Harvard students learned a lot, and "their faith in the pill of my presence ensured it."

As a soon-to-be teacher, it's important for me to hear that drama is important to engage students' attention and engage them in a process. "Our practice requires and engages our students' faith, not just their rational minds," Kantor says.

Allison Fallon, an author, takes the positive notion and power of drama even farther, and opens an article with the line that "the human spirit thrives on drama." She acknowledges how counter-intuitive that might sound to audience members like me, but the drama in our lives and the drama in movies really aren't all too different, according to Fallon. But the skeptic in me says that our lives don't tend to have resolutions as movies do.

But we are tested the most when we're in dramatic situations. To Fallon, "we function our best in the midst of dramatic situations." She provides her memory of 9/11, and the twin towers falling down in New York. Despite the insurmountable tragedy, the best of the human spirit emerged. Strangers offered and sent money, prayers, and anything else to help. Off-duty firefighters abandoned their vehicles to rescue survivors.

"No competition. No jealousy. No comparison. No judgment. Just an unbiased willingness to get to work and do something awesome."

And this has happened in our own lives, too, that in the midst of the ugliness that comes with drama and crises, the most graceful parts of our characters arise in dealing with them. These situations come when we have a plane or job interview really early, and waking up at 5 in the morning suddenly isn't so difficult. And then there come the emergencies in our lives, like when a loved one is sick, or our house burned down.

Fallon asks us these questions of how we handle these crises: "didn't you suddenly feel like your priorities were snapped into perspective? Did you see the best of yourself come out?"

Despite her natural inclination to not want drama in her life, it occurred to her that we actually do need more drama in our lives. The human condition was made and designed for it. Think about when we have no drama in our lives, such as when, in college, we went home for a break and realized how utterly boring being home for break with nothing to do could be. "when our lives are stable and comfortable and boring...we feel we have to make drama up." The worst of the human condition comes when we have to make drama for ourselves, and we get stuck in anxiety "because our lives are too darned boring."

Instead, the solution to our lives is to embrace the good drama and seek out meaningful drama, finding drama that "matters for something." Instead of waiting for the drama in our lives to just happen, what if we went out to find drama. What if we engaged in drama in our work that went the distance and truly made a difference?

I can't parse words better than Fallon does here:

"What if we saw our work as so important, so utterly vital to the beauty and meaning and purpose of the world, that we would risk everything for it—we would let go of house and home, we would hold loosely to our possessions, and we would see every bad thing that happened to us as simply an obstacle in the way of reaching the ultimate goal?"

For me, God intended for the negative drama to happen in my life, as an obstacle in reaching the goal of becoming closer to him. For drama is a means to an end of accelerating ourselves towards goals that we would risk everything for. Maybe, after all, the drama isn't such a bad thing, but a good, meaningful thing.