Thoughts on the pursuit of happiness

I was speaking to someone last week and stumbled across something that I hadn't thought of in a while: the hedonic treadmill. The model says that good and bad events temporarily affect happiness but a person usually quickly returns to a neutral state.

People fill their lives with the acquisition of things that have meaning to them. Often it's money, status, possessions or people (e.g. having a more beautiful girlfriend). Once these goals are achieved happiness results. That's the assumption. In fact what often happens is the happiness is short lived and the next goal comes up. This is the treadmill.

In my mind it is represented by a hamster in a wheel. It's the futility of desire. The satisfaction of achieving a target quickly fades and the next rung in the hamster's wheel becomes the new goal.

One aspect of the psychology behind this effect was explained to me by a drugs and alcohol counsellor. He spoke of the work of Jorge Luis Borges who wrote about labyrinths and mazes of life. Life itself is a corridor. The maze is a construct of the mind, the winding paths and twists and turns of the hedonic treadmill. Maze-dwellers travel through the maze seeking the end - the completion of their goals - but in the end they return to the corridor upon achieving success and the mind creates another maze with new twists and turns. This is a human trait.

Awareness of this effect is useful but troubling to me. This paper makes an important point.
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The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure
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It's as though there is no hope for human happiness.

I've tried to live with a new understanding over the past few months. I don't remember who said it but
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The secret to happiness is realising you don't have to be happy.
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It's not a positive message nor one that's given me much happiness, but then I wasn't looking for it.

Reflecting on my conversation with the Rastafarians last night makes me think this quote is a more important idea. It's a quote from Bertrand Russell.
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I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
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Most other people are more optimistic about the potential for people's happiness. There's a wonderful piece by Polly Toynbee published in The Guardian and reposted on this site where she speaks of her hopes that society will shift from a Gross Domestic Product-orientated measure of success to Gross Domestic Happiness. It was hoped to become a reality in the UK before the financial crisis and change in government.

In my own life I've eschewed the hedonic treadmill as much as possible. I've forsaken the wealth of my parents and the opportunities of wealth my education gives me. I've battled the internal desires to have more and want what other people have though it was yet another thing I failed at. It gave me access to valuing the small pleasures as much as someone else might enjoy a fine wine or dream holiday. Cheap wines taste like Chateauneuf du pape and discovering my local area is a substitute for the holidays I used to have.  Accepting my desire to have more was the same desire that millionaires feel when comparing themselves to billionaires helped me understand a little bit more about what was valuable.

My home is where I rest my head. My kingdom is where my feet touch the ground. My wealth is my brain, my heart, my soul and what I do with them.

Misery will come and go but it's the same for everyone.

Wellbeing: same shit, different era?

Well being is possibly misunderstood by the people pushing through the policies.

Its a dimension of mental health outside psychiatry and the current diagnostic system. It is the other continuum of mental health, as I understand it, and is a paradigm shift for it to be used in practice.

It is sa that it is the current mental health system and psychiatry that will be driving this new way of thinking about people's mental health. It will fall back into thinking along the psychiatric disorders continuum because that's all that psychiatrists know and where the majority of research is.

The real expertise in this area lies outside psychiatry. The world's expert on well being is most likely to be the Dalai Lama or the Bhutanese king rather than someone who's spent most of their life learning a system of disorder based on a mix of people's experiences of severe distress, society's stigmatised groups medicalised and social stigmas falsely made into illnesses (e.g homosexuality, communism, hearing voices).

I believe that the new operational definitions of well being will end up being very much like the psychiatric mental health system so much so that in a few years people will ask whether there was any point. It may even end up looking very similar to premorbidity developments in DSM-V because the people working on these definitions have been educated in the same paradigm: psychopathology.

Few of them would know the continua model of mental health that has been promoted through the last century by organisations such as the National Association for Mental Health. Mind (as its know today) still haven't realised just what a significant victory it is that the UK, French and other international governments are putting what the original meaning of mental health was on the national policy agenda. This is the paradigm that separates psychiatric diagnosis from mental health, so a person can be very 'ill' but have good mental health or well being.

Commissioners, policy makers, researchers and the general public still don't understand this. This will show in the processing through which the operational definitions are constructed such that they show strong similarities to psychopathology's system and future critics will lambast the wellbeing system for being psychiatry all over again.

This is why it is essential for their to be a wider group of people involved in the development of wellbeing. Importantly the psychiatric movement should be on a equal par with the alternative and fringe. In practice this will not happen because psychiatry has such a high regard, it is embedded as a way of thinking about mental health in too many people and few are openminded enough to quickly leap to an alternative, untested paradigm.

If this happens it is still not a failure. The change brought about to psychiatry and the perception of what is mental health may be the more significant. The continua model serves most to separate diagnosis from distress or wellbeing. It is not well understood. The discussions surrounding wellbeing will mean that the idea of individual distress will permeate into the mind's of clinicians who often consider only the academic diagnostic criteria as the be all and end all of mental health.

Wellbeing should also bring a cornucopia of new treatments. These will be humane and safer than medication though this will still remain and become a last resort. Again, this will perhaps be more important than the separation of well being and mental illness. It will mean better, safer treatments for the mentally ill alongside continued antistigma work and this will make their lives better.

Mu utmost hope is that true sages will become involved in medical mental healthcare and national policy. The factory-made sages (psychiatrists and their ilk) can only repeat what they have been taught by their common system. Those that have learnt the wisdom of life through their own journey in life have the most to offer to any movement, and most of all to one that hopes to make the word a genuinely better place.