The pursuit of happiness in an unequal society

The demand from each of us should be quite simple: “Implement the NICE guidelines”. In other words, give people with mental illness the choice of. psychological therapy. (The Depression Report 2006)

When I think of Richard Layard’s books on Happiness Ken Dodd’s song of the same name always pops into my head. Who knows why. Once upon a time in the not too distant past Layard’s was NL’s ‘Happiness Tsar’, he proposed we could easily train 10,000 new therapists within the next seven years. Some 5,000 of these should be “clinical psychologists”..

I recall at the time thinking this proposal was rather over ambitious and where would, precisely, the money come from to fund this adventure. And now this report:

 A flagship government strategy to train an army of therapists to get the nation off antidepressants and into work could be dramatically scaled back amid claims it is experiencing problems.

What about ‘tailored therapy’ geared towards the individual? Oh, that’s not cost effective. Yes, there is a massive problem about the over-usage and over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals where people do end up languishing in a zombified state. By the way before anyone says..no I am not completely knocking drugs and CBT… if it works for people then great but surely it should be based on choice and giving people that choice about what they want, on their own terms as opposed to threats of sanctions etc.

And on this is issue of ‘happiness’….yes, it is an individual thing, although who can be happy when those close to you are unhappy. In terms of policy though it must beg the question of the kind of society that we live in. Remember that the early theorising of neo-liberalism were about creating a new kind of self reliant human indifferent to the needs and wants of others except as expressed through money. We need a society that gives people the space to be happy. You cannot be happy in a social environment where you face continual dispossession and exploitation. The citizen of an industrial society today can be no more happy than the subsistence farmer confronting plagues of locusts and the depredations of the local landowner.

More misery to be experienced when this bunch of schmucks get elected with their big ideas, ‘tough and difficult’ choices to be made which is code for shafting for poor.

 If you want to read something that gives a political and scientific analysis of unequal societies then read Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level.