Happiness

What does it mean to be happy and what can the positive psychology movement teach us about happiness? These were two questions I had when I picked up Paul Martin’s “Making Happy People” (2005) in the library. It has a bright yellow cover with a smiley face on it and I was not expecting much to be honest. But so far I’ve reached page 56 and I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised. I still have some misgivings about the whole ‘science of happiness’ but we’ll get to that later.

Martin tells a nice story by way of introduction:

During a visit to France many years ago, the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan asked Madame de Gaulle, wife of the French president, what she was most looking forward to when her hard-working husband retired. To Macmillan’s surprise and embarrassment, Madame de Gaulle replied, “A penis.” Only later did it dawn on him that what she had actually said was ‘Happiness’.

I like this story, partly because of the little frisson of embarrassment which it creates in our minds. For me, it also poses the question of how important pleasure is to happiness. Are the positive psychology people saying that we should all just have more sex and then we would be happier? No, thankfully not. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, defines a happy life in terms of three dimensions: pleasure, engagement and meaning. It’s worth listening to his TED talk (from Feb 2004) in which he differentiates between the pleasant life, the life of engagement and a life of meaning. Ideally we should have all three but the second two are more important than the first.

Martin traces the word ‘happy’ back to the Old Norse word happ, which means luck or good fortune. I started wondering about the origin of the French word content as in “Je suis tres content” and the differences between the French and English understandings of happiness. ‘Content’ in English has two meanings: ‘that which is contained’ and ‘quietly happy’. This is rather neat since much of the unhappiness that I come across in my work has to do with feelings not being adequately contained. Anxiety that overwhelms someone and leaves them panicky for example, or other negative emotions which come from not being adequately held in a relationship.

Not surprisingly, Martin says that the “single biggest influence on happiness is … our relationships with other people”. And he also has a rather handy definition of happiness which has three main components: pleasure, the absence of displeasure and satisfaction. Happiness here is about the heart and and the head and it can be formulated like this:

Happiness = Pleasure – displeasure + satisfaction (and meaning)

According to this formula, what we need to be happy is the presence of pleasure, the absence of displeasure and then satisfaction, which is “judging, on reflection, that you are satisfied with your life in general and with at least some specific aspects of your life (for example, your personal relationships, career or physical abilities)”. The fourth aspect which is added on in brackets is that of meaning and it is this aspect which Seligman makes more of in his talk.

So far so good. But then Martin gets a little repetitive and boring. He bangs on about how happy people are healthier and more successful than unhappy people, implying (but not implicitly saying) that if the unhappy people could just learn to be happier then their whole lives would be so much better. This starts to look like blaming the victim and ignores the broader context. To be fair to him, the rest of the book seems to focus a lot on relationships so I should hold back on the criticism.

However, having recently read Jonah Lehrer’s piece on the usefulness of depression, I had to take exception to this paragraph:

Another dubious piece of folklore asserts that you have to be unhappy to be creative. Happiness encourages intellectual mediocrity, it is claimed, and creative geniuses are usually tortured souls. This romantic belief runs counter to the evidence, which I outlined earlier, that happiness boosts creativity; it is hard to find credible support for the ‘tortured genius’ hypothesis, even in the form of historical anecdotes. (p.38)

What a lazy argument! It’s so easy to dismiss views that don’t agree with your own when you can describe them as ‘dubious … folklore”, romantic beliefs and anecdotes. But then he balances it out by saying that there are some uses of displeasure and negative emotions after all. Lehrer referred to the close attention to detail which a more melancholic frame of mind can induce. Martin points out that the negative emotions are actually more important than the positive ones, certainly from a survival point of view. He says that there is also a greater repertoire of negative emotions than positive ones and these require specific attention. However, his focus is more on how to bring about happiness, which he says is quite straightforward and less complicated than unhappiness. I was reminded here of Tolstoy’s comment that happy families are all alike whereas unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way.

Incidentally, he comes up with an optimal positive / negative ratio of 62:38 but I’m not sure if those are thoughts or feelings (or both) that are represented there. (I remember from one of Dorothy’s posts that Barbara Fredrickson has a similar ratio of 3:1 which is apparently the tipping point in bringing about positive change.)

I’ll be back with some more thoughts when I’ve finished. Already I can feel a slight shift, however, in that this approach to happiness holds thoughts and feelings in equal balance. We are often a lot happier than we realise and being engaged and finding meaning in our daily lives is a trusty (and now scientifically proven) way to lasting satisfaction.

Looking for Lance (and finding Avatar)

• I loved this gem of writing advice from Roddy Doyle: “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” Now I don’t think he is making fun of depressed writers here (or the famous ones who committed suicide). But I like the mental image of the struggling writer looking to their mentor for inspiration and getting, well something other than inspiration I guess.

• The big story in Cape Town this week was the week-long presence of the world’s greatest cyclist and seven-times Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong. Apparently the number of watching spectators was almost double this year, and all to get a glimpse of the great man himself. I was watching on TV and, as luck would have it, just when Lance and the nine other riders made their winning breakaway with about 30kms to go, the live action feed stopped working because of the high winds. Instead we got to see helicopter shots of the breakaway group with no chance of identifying individual riders. It was so frustrating, especially if you drag yourself out of bed at 6.30am and sit patiently through the inane Lebo doing pretty mindless interviews every 10 minutes or so. Eventually we got to see Lance make his tactical charge straight into the howling south-easter with 1km to go but it wasn’t enough to set up his team-mate for the win. Very exciting though and my adrenalin was pumping from my leisurely position on the couch.

• The post-race interviewer wanted to know if legendary Lance had anything to say on the course. The guy who came second (Christoff somebody) said Lance was a bit alarmed when a cannon went off on one of the descents. “Why would somebody do something like that?” asked Lance. To which Christoff simply replied: “This is Africa.” I wonder if that is one of the abiding memories that Lance will take away with him from Cape Town. Crazy spectators letting off cannons. That, and the aerial shot of a Great White shark in False Bay.

• Today I finally got to see Avatar. The fantasy world that James Cameron and his team have created is breathtaking. Really excellent. I know a lot of people found it too long but I found it much easier to watch than the long battle scenes in the Lord of the Ring series. Even the inevitable fight-to-the-death sequence near the end, although predictable, was exciting. One thing that did grate a little was those scenes of the Navi people all moving in unison, swaying back and forth in a metaphor of a close community completely in sync with one another.

• Now that I think about the movie a little more, I also realise that these war epics very rarely show the suffering that war creates. We get the suffering after the initial attack on Hometree but the protracted fighting that inevitably ensues in this kind of situation? The countless wounded and traumatised people? No, we get none of those. The victors smile and the vanquished slink off to their space ship without much of a struggle. Interestingly, as viewers we have a lot of sympathy for Jake (who is a victim of war) but we’re spared all the other wounded veterans of this type of fighting. All in all though, a great way to spend close on three hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Debating Depression

From 'Living with a Black Dog' by Mathew and Ainsley Johnstone

Is major depression an illness or malfunction of the brain that needs to be cured or is it somehow adaptive in our evolution? (Or even both). The traditional view of mental illness would suggest the former but there’s an argument to be made that depression has some benefits too. This is certainly what writer (and blogger) Jonah Lehrer puts forward in his recent and excellent article ‘Depression’s Upside’ in the New York Times Magazine.

Lehrer takes the work of a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist, Andy Thomson and Paul Andrews, and presents it in a challenging and refreshing way. Their central hypothesis, the ‘analytic-rumination hypothesis’ suggests that being mildly depressed (or even majorly depressed) can help to focus our attention, which in turn makes us more analytical. Here’s an excerpt from Lehrer’s article:

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

I’m tempted to take that last quote and put in on my business card but I’m sure there are many who would dismiss Keat’s sentiment as dangerously unscientific. What Lehrer (and Thomson and Andrews) don’t do is to downplay the seriousness of depression or to make light of people’s suffering. I’m sure they would have every sympathy for someone like Kay Redfield Jamison (a psychology professor who is herself one of the most well-known bipolar sufferers in the US) who writes the following in her memoir An Unquiet Mind:

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images; I would not go through an extended one again. It bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and co-ordination; to be ugly, to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasure of sex, the exquisiteness of music, or the ability to make yourselves and others laugh.

She goes on to say that some people say that they know what it’s like to be depressed because they’ve gone through a divorce or lost a loved one or a job. But the intense sadness which most people would feel in such situations is qualitatively different from the suicidal despair of major depression, which Redfield-Jamison describes as “flat, hollow, and unendurable”. Depressed people, like the main character in David Foster Wallace’s story ‘The Depressed Person’, can be tiresome beyond belief, trapped in a seemingly endless loop of whining and pain. Redfield-Jamison again:

People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humourless and lifeless and critical and demanding.

How could this condition possibly have a plus-side? Well, one answer seems to lie in the fact that the disorder is such a broad one. For those with a milder form of depression or who have the support and intellectual skills to grow through their depressions, the analytic-rumination hypothesis (or ARH) could be more applicable. For many others, though, bouts of depression might just be simply awful with almost no benefits at all.

One of the scientists Lehrer quotes who is sympathetic to the analytic-rumination hypothesis is Randolph Nesse, who suggests that the hypothesis, while admirable, fails to reflect the heterogeneity of depression:

Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”

Andy Thomson himself responds to the major criticism of his hypothesis as follows:

“To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful … Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

This is such an important point and one of the big bugbears that I have with how the discipline of mental health is so often practised. It’s so tempting to stigmatise painful symptoms, be they intense sadness or anxiety or even paranoia.

What I also like about the analytical-rumination hypothesis (or ARH for short) is that it prompts a re-evaluation of depression. Depressives needn’t see themselves as weak and somehow deficient, just perhaps as people whose symptoms can spiral out of control when they are confronted with life’s problems.

Thanks to Ted at BookeyWookey for referring me to this article. It certainly affirms my view that the more I learn about mental health, the more I find out how complex it is.

On the road again

Picking a good read for a roadtrip is harder than it looks. Do you want a book about the area that you are travelling through? In my case that would be the Northern Cape and there are no must-read books that spring to mind there for me. What about a roadtrip classic such as ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac? Or the literary equivalent of ‘Thelma and Louise’ perhaps, whatever that might be. In the end (and because I was in a hurry) I grabbed Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.

After a slow start I am now hooked. I hope Grad is enjoying it as much as I am (and I know she also struggled initially, which is why I thought I would give it a try too). How to describe it? Time magazine described it (in 1974) as a ‘dazzling variation on the Gatsby theme of lost innocence … an American fugue, rhythmic, melodic and stately’. I prefer to see it as a fun tapestry of ‘silhouettes and rags’ of early Twentieth Century American history. I’m only on page 59 but already we’ve had Harry Houdini; Freud; the narrator’s ‘Mother’s Younger Brother’ getting involved with an infamous sex symbol; Jewish and Italian immigrants struggling in New York; the rich and the poor; Emma Goldman the anarchist; a buried baby and also Peary’s trip to the Arctic. You might be thinking that this is a little manic perhaps. Strangely enough, that’s not the effect that’s created. What we have is snippets of story, woven together as an American tapestry.

As for my trip to Kathu, it’s a little better than I expected. We’re not staying on the army base but rather in a basic bed-and-breakfast. My single bed is so small that when I rolled over this morning I hit my head on the bedside table. The breakfast was a surprise in that Mienie (the owner) made everyone scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage. I forgot that some people actually like slightly greasy meat for breakfast. The best part of the trip? We left on Monday and we’re back on Friday. That means that with any luck I’ll be in Betty’s Bay by the weekend (or at least back at the rugby).

On a sadder note, I’ve been a bit quiet here over the past week because my cousin’s daughter died in a car accident. She was only 25 and it was obviously a huge shock to her family and also to ours. While I was never very close to her, attending her memorial service made me realise how much she touched the lives of those she was close to. She was vibrant with a strong personality and, as cliched as it sounds, she did make the most out of life. It was really moving at the memorial service to see how much she was loved by her mother, her brother, her boyfriend, and her close friends from school. The last time I saw her was several months ago when she and her boyfriend cooked a group of us (including P) a truly delicious dinner which included steak in a mouth-watering sauce.

Over the last week I’ve been reminded how short our lives can be and how we should make the most of them. Next month I turn 40 and it already feels as if at least half my life has gone. Should I be spending less time blogging and more time out there in the real world? I don’t think it’s an ‘either or’ and as one of my patients likes to say, my online friends do add immense value to my life. So I guess this is an indirect way of saying thanks to you, my readers, and may we all remain true to what’s meaningful to us.

Now after that serious note, it’s back to the rag-tag world of Ragtime.