Happiness: Enough Already_Newsweek
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 13:11:47 -0600 (CST)
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FYI
An insightful article by Sharon Begley in Newsweek suggest that a backlash
is underway against "happiness rat race" which helped catapult
antidepressants for non-pathological uses. Begley cites several new books
and scientific research that puncture the "happiness" climate fostered by
psychiatry which led to the pharmaceutical gravy train. She notes that in
1999, Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" was revived on Broadway 50 years
after its premiere. A reporter asked two psychiatrists to read the script.
Their diagnosis: Willy Loman was suffering from clinical depression, a
pathological condition that could and should be treated with drugs.
Miller was appalled. "Loman is not a depressive," he told The New York
Times. "He is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is
where he is." What society once viewed as an appropriate reaction to failed
hopes and dashed dreams, it now regards as a psychiatric illness....
"The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into
Depressive Disorder" (2007) by Jerome Wakefield, professor at New York
University, and Alan Horowitz, Professor at Rutgers University;
"Against Happiness," by Eric Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest
University, is now reaching stores;
"Rethinking Happiness," by Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of
Illinois, and his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, due for publication later this
year.
Wakefield and Horowitz argue that feeling down after your heart is
broken-even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression- is
normal and even salutary.
Wilson argues that Americans' fixation on happiness fosters "a craven
disregard for the value of sadness" and "its integral place in the great
rhythm of the cosmos."
He argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness
of the human condition. He praises melancholia for generating "a turbulence
of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a
perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing."
Diener notes that studies show that when you are in a negative mood "you
become more analytical, more critical and more innovative. You need negative
emotions, including sadness, to direct your thinking." Abraham Lincoln was
not hobbled by his dark moods bordering on depression, and Beethoven
composed his later works in a melancholic funk. Vincent van Gogh, Emily
Dickinson and other artistic geniuses saw the world through a glass darkly.
The creator of "Peanuts," Charles M. Schulz, was known for his gloom, while
Woody Allen plumbs existential melancholia for his films..
Here comes the surprise: even Robert Spitzer (the New York State Psychiatric
Institute) the psychiatrist most responsible for psychiatry's diagnostic
"Bible" the DSM which lent legitimacy to the medicalization of sadness--and
its treatment with antidepressants--expresses doubts about the medicalizing
of sadness. In a foreword to "The Loss of Sadness" he wrote: "To be human
means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in
one's life."
Perhaps--this may be wishful thinking--the chemically enhanced "happiness"
stage may be reaching an end of life point.
Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
veracare@ahrp.org
212-595-8974
http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569/output/print
NEWSWEEK
Happiness: Enough Already
The push for ever-greater well-being is facing a backlash, fueled by
research on the value of sadness.
By Sharon Begley
Feb 2, 2008
The plural of anecdote is not data, as scientists will tell you, but
consider these snapshots of the emerging happiness debate anyway: Lately,
Jerome Wakefield's students have been coming up to him after they break up
with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and not because they want him to recommend a
therapist. Wakefield, a professor at New York University, coauthored the
2007 book "The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow
Into Depressive Disorder," which argues that feeling down after your heart
is broken-even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression-
is normal and even salutary. But students tell him that their parents are
pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention-"some
Zoloft, dear?"-for their sadness, and the kids want no part of it. "Can you
talk to them for me?" they ask Wakefield. Rather than "listening to Prozac,"
they want to listen to their hearts, not have them chemically silenced.
University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener, who has studied happiness for
a quarter century, was in Scotland recently, explaining to members of
Parliament and business leaders the value of augmenting traditional measures
of a country's wealth with a national index of happiness. Such an index
would measure policies known to increase people's sense of well-being, such
as democratic freedoms, access to health care and the rule of law. The Scots
were all in favor of such things, but not because they make people happier.
"They said too much happiness might not be such a good thing," says Diener.
"They like being dour, and didn't appreciate being told they should be
happier."
Eric Wilson tried to get with the program. Urged on by friends, he bought
books on how to become happier. He made every effort to smooth out his
habitual scowl and wear a sunny smile, since a happy expression can lead to
genuinely happy feelings. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest
University, took up jogging, reputed to boost the brain's supply of joyful
neurochemicals, watched uplifting Frank Capra and Doris Day flicks and began
sprinkling his conversations with "great!" and "wonderful!", the better to
exercise his capacity for enthusiasm. When none of these made him happy,
Wilson not only jumped off the happiness bandwagon-he also embraced his
melancholy side and decided to blast a happiness movement that "leads to
half-lives, to bland existences," as he argues in "Against Happiness," a
book now reaching stores. Americans' fixation on happiness, he writes,
fosters "a craven disregard for the value of sadness" and "its integral
place in the great rhythm of the cosmos."
It's always tricky to identify a turning point, at least in real time. Only
in retrospect can you accurately pinpoint when a financial market peaked or
hit bottom, for instance, or the moment when the craze for pricey coffee
drinks crested. But look carefully, and what you are seeing now may be the
end of the drive for ever-greater heights of happiness. Fed by hundreds of
self-help books, including the current "The How of Happiness: A Scientific
Approach to Getting the Life You Want," magazine articles and an industry of
life coaches and motivational speakers, the happiness movement took off in
the 1990s with two legitimate developments: discoveries about the brain
activity underlying well-being, and the emergence of "positive psychology,"
whose proponents urged fellow researchers to study happiness as seriously as
they did pathological states such as depression. But when the science of
happiness collided with pop culture and the marketplace, it morphed into
something even its creators hardly recognized. There emerged "a crowd of
people out there who want you to be happier," write Ed Diener and his son,
Robert Biswas-Diener, in their book, "Rethinking Happiness," due for
publication later this year. Somewhere out there a pharmaceutical company
"is working on a new drug to make you happier," they warn. "There are even
people who would like to give you special ozone enemas to make you happier."
Although some 85 percent of Americans say they're pretty happy, the
happiness industry sends the insistent message that moderate levels of
well-being aren't enough: not only can we all be happier, but we practically
have a duty to be so. What was once considered normal sadness is something
to be smothered, even shunned.
The backlash against the happiness rat race comes just when scientists are
releasing the most-extensive-ever study comparing moderate and extreme
levels of happiness, and finding that being happier is not always better. In
surveys of 118,519 people from 96 countries, scientists examined how various
levels of subjective well-being matched up with income, education, political
participation, volunteer activities and close relationships. They also
analyzed how different levels of happiness, as reported by college students,
correlated with various outcomes. Even allowing for imprecision in people's
self-reported sense of well-being, the results were unambiguous. The highest
levels of happiness go along with the most stable, longest and most
contented relationships. That is, even a little discontent with your partner
can nudge you to look around for someone better, until you are at best a
serial monogamist and at worst never in a loving, stable relationship. "But
if you have positive illusions about your partner, which goes along with the
highest levels of happiness, you're more likely to commit to an intimate
relationship," says Diener.
In contrast, "once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further
increases can sometimes be detrimental" to income, career success, education
and political participation, Diener and colleagues write in the journal
Perspectives on Psychological Science. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is
extremely happy, 8s were more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more
education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who
are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more
motivated to improve both their own lot (thus driving themselves to acquire
more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs) and the lot of their
community (causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In
contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency.
"If you're totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in
the world," says Diener, "you don't feel very motivated to work for change.
Be wary when people tell you you should be happier."
The drawbacks of constant, extreme happiness should not be surprising, since
negative emotions evolved for a reason. Fear tips us off to the presence of
danger, for instance. Sadness, too, seems to be part of our biological
inheritance: apes, dogs and elephants all display something that looks like
sadness, perhaps because it signals to others a need for help. One hint that
too much euphoria can be detrimental comes from studies finding that among
people with late-stage illnesses, those with the greatest sense of
well-being were more likely to die in any given period of time than the
mildly content were. Being "up" all the time can cause you to play down very
real threats.
Eric Wilson needs no convincing that sadness has a purpose. In his "Against
Happiness," he trots out criticisms of the mindless pursuit of contentment
that philosophers and artists have raised throughout history-including that,
as Flaubert said, to be chronically happy one must also be stupid. Less
snarkily, Wilson argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience
the fullness of the human condition. While careful not to extol
depression-which is marked not only by chronic sadness but also by apathy,
lethargy and an increased risk of suicide-he praises melancholia for
generating "a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of
the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing."
This is not romantic claptrap. Studies show that when you are in a negative
mood, says Diener, "you become more analytical, more critical and more
innovative. You need negative emotions, including sadness, to direct your
thinking." Abraham Lincoln was not hobbled by his dark moods bordering on
depression, and Beethoven composed his later works in a melancholic funk.
Vincent van Gogh, Emily Dickinson and other artistic geniuses saw the world
through a glass darkly. The creator of "Peanuts," Charles M. Schulz, was
known for his gloom, while Woody Allen plumbs existential melancholia for
his films, and Patti Smith and Fiona Apple do so for their music.
Wilson, who asserts that "the happy man is a hollow man," is hardly the
first scholar to see melancholia as muse. A classical Greek text, possibly
written by Aristotle, asks, "Why is it that all those who have become
eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly
melancholic?" Wilson's answer is that "the blues can be a catalyst for a
special kind of genius, a genius for exploring dark boundaries between
opposites." The ever-restless, the chronically discontent, are dissatisfied
with the status quo, be it in art or literature or politics.
For all their familiarity, these arguments are nevertheless being crushed by
the happiness movement. Last August, the novelist Mary Gordon lamented to
The New York Times that "among writers . what is absolutely not allowable is
sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are
sad." And in a MY TURN column in NEWSWEEK last May, Jess Decourcy Hinds, an
English teacher, recounted how, after her father died, friends pressed her
to distract herself from her profound sadness and sense of loss. "Why don't
people accept that after a parent's death, there will be years of grief?"
she wrote. "Everyone wants mourners to 'snap out of it' because observing
another's anguish isn't easy."
It's hard to say exactly when ordinary Americans, no less than
psychiatrists, began insisting that sadness is pathological. But by the end
of the millennium that attitude was well entrenched. In 1999, Arthur
Miller's "Death of a Salesman" was revived on Broadway 50 years after its
premiere. A reporter asked two psychiatrists to read the script. Their
diagnosis: Willy Loman was suffering from clinical depression, a
pathological condition that could and should be treated with drugs. Miller
was appalled. "Loman is not a depressive," he told The New York Times. "He
is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is where he
is." What society once viewed as an appropriate reaction to failed hopes and
dashed dreams, it now regards as a psychiatric illness.
That may be the most damaging legacy of the happiness industry: the message
that all sadness is a disease. As NYU's Wakefield and Allan Horwitz of
Rutgers University point out in "The Loss of Sadness," this message has its
roots in the bible of mental illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders. Its definition of a "major depressive episode" is
remarkably broad. You must experience five not-uncommon symptoms, such as
insomnia, difficulty concentrating and feeling sad or empty, for two weeks;
the symptoms must cause distress or impairment, and they cannot be due to
the death of a loved one. Anyone meeting these criteria is supposed to be
treated.
Yet by these criteria, any number of reactions to devastating events qualify
as pathological. Such as? For three weeks a woman feels sad and empty,
unable to generate any interest in her job or usual activities, after her
lover of five years breaks off their relationship; she has little appetite,
lies awake at night and cannot concentrate during the day. Or a man's only
daughter is suffering from a potentially fatal blood disorder; for weeks he
is consumed by despair, cannot sleep or concentrate, feels tired and
uninterested in his usual activities.
Horwitz and Wakefield do not contend that the spurned lover or the tormented
father should be left to suffer. Both deserve, and would likely benefit
from, empathic counseling. But their symptoms "are neither abnormal nor
inappropriate in light of their" situations, the authors write. The DSM
definition of depression "mistakenly encompasses some normal emotional
reactions," due to its failure to take into account the context or trigger
for sadness.
That has consequences. When someone is appropriately sad, friends and
colleagues offer support and sympathy. But by labeling appropriate sadness
pathological, "we have attached a stigma to being sad," says Wakefield,
"with the result that depression tends to elicit hostility and rejection"
with an undercurrent of " 'Get over it; take a pill.' The normal range of
human emotion is not being tolerated." And insisting that sadness requires
treatment may interfere with the natural healing process. "We don't know how
drugs react with normal sadness and its functions, such as reconstituting
your life out of the pain," says Wakefield.
Even the psychiatrist who oversaw the current DSM expresses doubts about the
medicalizing of sadness. "To be human means to naturally react with feelings
of sadness to negative events in one's life," writes Robert Spitzer of the
New York State Psychiatric Institute in a foreword to "The Loss of Sadness."
That would be unremarkable if it didn't run completely counter to the
message of the happiness brigades. It would be foolish to underestimate the
power and tenacity of the happiness cheerleaders. But maybe, just maybe, the
single-minded pursuit of happiness as an end in itself, rather than as a
consequence of a meaningful life, has finally run its course.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569
C Newsweek Mag
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