Ferraris for all

It is looking increasingly certain that the trend to classify everyday behaviour as abnormal will intensify further. Proposed changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) unveiled last month would widen the definition of psychiatric disorders substantially. If the proposals are adopted when the enormously influential reference work is published in 2013 more people than ever will be defined as mentally ill.

According to an article in the Washington Post:

“Children who throw too many tantrums could be diagnosed with ‘temper dysregulation with dysphoria.’ Teenagers who are particularly eccentric might be candidates for treatment for ‘psychosis risk syndrome.’ Men who are just way too interested in sex face being labeled as suffering from ‘hypersexual disorder.’”

It goes on to quote Christopher Lane, the author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, as arguing that "They are close to treating the children like guinea pigs. I think that's appalling and outrageous.”

Meanwhile, an article in Science notes that:

“proposed revisions for the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders include for the first time "behavioural addictions"—a change some say is long overdue and others say is still premature. So far, only one behaviour has made the cut: gambling, which under the new proposal would join substance-use disorders as a full-fledged addiction.”

The new proposals to further pathologise normal behaviour only confirm what already looked likely to be the trend. In my blog post of 26 July 2009 I already cited an article by Christopher Lane warning that this was likely to happen.

Back in 2008 I also reviewed a book for spiked which showed how this trend was already underway. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield is a key book on the subject.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, spiked

This week, virtually unnoticed, the British government announced an intervention into the minds of the country’s inhabitants. Although it was pitched as a strategy to deal with mental illness it has implications for the whole of British society although it is particularly aimed at the poor. The official New Horizons website run by the Department of Health quotes Gordon Brown, the prime minister, as saying: “This is about more than preventing mental illness...it is also about helping individuals and communities to bring the best out of themselves”. This trend is also embodied in a recent World Health Organization report on Mental health, resilience, and inequalities (PDF). Catherine Bennett also discusses the broadening of the conception of mental illness in a comment in the Observer but for her the problem is that Brown’s initiative is too timid.

For me this trend represents the redefinition of inequality in therapeutic terms. It gives the government licence to intervene in the most intimate aspects of our lives – even our interior mental world.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

Geoff Mulgan, the director of the Young Foundation and a former senior adviser to Tony Blair, has a comment piece in the Times (London) arguing that poverty should be redefined in psychological and psychosocial terms. In relation to the former he argues:

“Most of the arguments about poverty in the past have focused on material needs. Today there is still some material poverty, but psychological needs are much more important and much more challenging. Around one in five people in the UK experience mental health problems at some point in their lives. The number of prescriptions for antidepressant drugs increased from 9 million in 1991 to 34 million in 2007.”

In relation to psychosocial needs he points to the problem of loneliness.

How he can claim that his argument challenges the conventional wisdom is a mystery. Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize for economics in 1998 for advocating such a view.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

The way things are going it looks like it will not be long before virtually everyone is defined as mentally ill. If you think this is an exaggeration you should read this article by Christopher Lane in Slate. He points out that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is seriously considering classifying shopping, among other everyday activities, as a sign of mental illness:

“The fifth edition of the association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected in 2012. The APA isn't just deciding the fate of shopaholics; it's also debating whether overuse of the Internet, "excessive" sexual activity, apathy, and even prolonged bitterness should be viewed, quite seriously, as brain "disorders." If you spend hours online, have sex more frequently than aging psychiatrists, and moan incessantly that the federal government can't account for all its TARP funds, take heed: You may soon be classed among the 48 million Americans the APA already considers mentally ill.”

Since the diagnostic manual Lane refers to in effect sets the global standard for defining psychiatric disorders the widening of the definition does not just affect Americans.

For more on the broadening of the definition of mental illness see my review of Oliver James on “affluenza” on the left hand side of the homepage. Also read Helene Guldberg’s review in spiked of Christopher Lane’s most recent book (see post of 24 December 2007).

Labels: affluenza, America, consumption, happiness

I have written the following letter to the Financial Times in response to yesterday’s particularly outrageous article by Richard Layard on happiness as a goal of public policy. There is much more I would have liked to have said but space is obviously limited in a letter to a newspaper:

"Sir, Richard Layard is entitled to his views on happiness but his claim to be writing in the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment is astounding (“Now is the time for a less selfish capitalism”, March 12).

"Wealth creation was, contrary to his claim, central to Enlightenment thinking. The idea that human appetites could drive the economic machine and lead to progress more generally was fundamental to Adam’s Smith’s view of the world. His famous example of the pin factory in the Wealth of Nations was all about how to raise productivity for the benefit of society.

"Layard also misrepresents the Enlightenment when he claims it was about the increase of happiness. Perhaps the most famous Enlightenment document, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, called for “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It posed the pursuit of happiness - rather than happiness - as a right rather than an obligation or goal. It also linked happiness to progress more generally with its commitment to life and liberty."

Labels: affluenza, happiness, progress

Today’s Observer newspaper includes an article on how anxiety about the recession is “forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown”. Evidently the plan: “will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year”.

This is strange because the enlarged network of therapists was first proposed by Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and government adviser on such things, as a way of dealing with the supposed effect of rising affluence. Now it seems that we need therapists to deal with declining affluence.

A similar reversal is apparent in relation to crime. Not long ago the likes of David Lammy, New Labour’s skills minister, was blaming affluence for rising crime (see 15 August 2008). Now the recession, and therefore declining affluence, is widely seen as threatening an upsurge in crime.

The simplest explanation for such stark contradictions is that our rulers have an exceedingly low opinion of us. Whatever happens in the world around us we are in need of their “help”.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

Kate Pickett, one of the co-authors of Spirit Level, has emailed me to say I misrepresented some of the book’s statistical arguments in my 5 March post. I did point out that the post makes clear it is based on a limited range of sources – I have not read the book yet. However, in the interests of a fair and balanced debate, I have pasted her statistical rebuttal below. I hope to review the book properly before too long:

“First, our Index of Health and Social Problems does not contain happiness, it is based on hard, factual data from reputable sources like the World Bank, OECD, UN, etc. It contains life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, mental illness, imprisonment, homicide, teenage births, educational scores, social mobility (correlation between father's and son's incomes over 30 years) and trust. I think the only one that is arguably a "soft" outcome is trust. This is based on official surveys of random samples of the population who say that other people can be trusted or not. But really, if someone says they don't trust other people, they probably don't. And indeed the causal impact of inequality on trust has been demonstrated by others. We show relationships with income inequality for all of the outcomes in our index separately as well as when combined, and we show the same for the 50 US states, as well as rich market economies.

“Second, although definitions of mental illness do indeed change over time, we use data from the World Health Organization's Consortium on Mental Illness, which used the same psychiatric diagnostic interviews in population samples of several different countries at the same time, so the data are certainly comparable and are not simply measures of how people are feeling.

“Third, we do not, of course, only use evidence from primate studies to help us understand how status insecurities and anxieties can affect our behaviour and biology, but they can be very useful. It would be silly to think that we do NOT have an evolved response to social status and social interactions and anxieties. I imagine while we all sat in the Moral Maze green room, our adrenaline and cortisol were running pretty high, all due to our feelings about whether or not we were going to make a good showing on the programme and how we were going come across and be judged!”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, health, inequality

The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published today in Britain by Allen Lane, looks set to become an influential addition to the enormous and dubious growth sceptic canon. The two authors are proving popular on the circuit for such things including appearances on the Moral Maze with me yesterday, Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Nightwaves on Radio 3 as well as a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts today. They were also reviewed in the Economist.

The authors present the book as a technical – that is non-political – book on the facts of social inequality. Their central thesis is that what matters in the developed economies is not poverty but inequality. Better to have more equal societies, such as Sweden or Japan, than highly unequal ones, such as America or Britain.

Judging by what I have heard and read so far, it has several weaknesses. These include:

• Lumping together disparate forms of data in dubious composite “indices”. As far as I can gather these include more subjective factors (such as “happiness”) with more objective ones (such as life expectancy).

• They miss the extent to which many factors, such as mental illness, are largely socially defined. So, for example, the definition of mental illness in many western societies have been substantially widened in recent years.

• They seem to rely on primate studies for at least part of their evidence in relation to status. In its review of the book the Economist moves shamelessly from talking about poor Indian children to discussing baboons in the course of one paragraph: “Low-caste Indian children do worse on cognitive tests if they must state their identities beforehand. High-status baboons bred in captivity show elevated levels of stress hormones and become ill more often when they are moved to groups where they no longer dominate.”

In any case they draw sweeping growth sceptic conclusions which are clearly political – despite their protestations – and not justified by the data. The Economist quotes the two authors as arguing that: “We have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us.”

Much of my work is focused on refuting such ideas. For example, I argue that the challenge of climate change and an ageing population can only be met with substantially more resources – and that means economic growth. That is leaving aside the benefits to individuals being wealthier in the West and the still enormous challenge of development in the third world.

I have also argued the meaning of the demand for equality has been fundamentally transformed with the acceptance of the idea that there is no alternative to the market. It used to be a demand for more – for realising the human potential – whereas it is now typically a demand for less. I have written about this before in a 2006 article for spiked on Polly Toynbee (who has also just had a paperback edition of her latest book on “greed” in Britain published). However, I plan to extend the thesis considerably in my book.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, happiness, inequality, radio

While on the subject of anti-consumerism the lyrics of Lily Allen’s song “The Fear” are presumably meant to be knowingly ironic. The opening paragraph of the song starts as follows:

“I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don’t care about clever I don’t care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f***loads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them”

Later on she says:

“And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it’s not my fault it’s how I’m program to function.”

Sadly it seems there is little original or radical in contemporary popular culture – particularly when it thinks it is being both.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, happiness

I ‘m not a great fan of chick flicks but I had to see Confessions of a Shopaholic – for research purposes, you understand. Some of it was clearly true-to-life: the suave and sophisticated editor of a financial magazine who was the lead male character. But the film had a disappointingly predictable anti-consumerist message. When the debt-ridden female lead of the film finally escaped her fixation with shopping and luxury brands she finally had the time to lead a fulfilling life.

And it wasn’t nearly as funny as Legally Blonde.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, film, happiness

Belatedly caught up with an article on the likely social impact of the recession by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, in last Sunday’s New York Times. Among other things he predicts:

• A return to less expensive activities: “They may take the form of greater interest in free content on the Internet and the simple pleasures of a daily walk, instead of expensive vacations and NBA [National Basketball Association] box seats.”

• A larger than usual decline in consumption by the wealthy. Although the poor will suffer the most pain the rich have suffered a sharp decline in labour incomes owing to the problems in the financial sector. This is on top of the impact of declining asset prices.

• Popular culture catering to the wealthy, such as fancy restaurants, could decline.

• More mental health problems although paradoxically physical health could, on average, improve. On the latter accidents could decline as people make fewer trips while spending on alcohol and tobacco could also fall.

• Finally, a more “prudent” and risk averse climate could take hold.

I would not concur with all of Cowen’s predictions but the subject is worth considering.

Labels: affluenza, America, Austerity Watch, consumption, economics, happiness, inequality

Neuroskeptic has sent me a link to his incisive critique of Oliver James’s notion of Affluenza. I do not know who Neuroskeptic is but he makes some telling points.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

The current issue of New Scientist has an interesting article by Jessica Marshall, an American science writer, on “Is it really bad to be sad?”. She draws on the work of Jerome Wakefield, among others, to show that sadness is an important part of the human condition (see posts of 22 December 2007 and 6 February 2008).

Labels: affluenza, happiness

I finally managed to track down the origin of the quote by Oliver James, the clinical psychologist who propagates the idea of “Affluenza”, where he says that: “I absolutely embrace the credit crunch with both arms”. It was in a BBC Radio 4 Book Club programme with James Naughtie that was first broadcast on 7 January. The audience was largely sympathetic to James while Naughtie seemed oblivious to the fact that the Affluenza thesis is not original.

The criticisms I made of the book in my review still remain valid (see the list of links on the left). An additional point that struck me was his insistence that people should watch much less television if they want to protect themselves against Affluenza.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, radio, television

Miller-McCune magazine, a publication from the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy in California, has a useful review essay by David Villano on the “more-is-less” thesis. In other words it examines (sympathetically) the argument that it is possible to be more prosperous while consuming less.

Many of the points it makes are familiar – Americans consume far more per head than most of the rest of the world, the threat of climate change is imminent, the need to change lifestyles etc – but it includes many useful references. Among them are Confronting Consumption, (MIT Press) a 2002 book on America’s consumer society co-edited by Michael Maniates. Others include the California-based Global Footprint Network, the Voluntary Simplicity Movement, Redefining Progress and Mean Genes, a book on how our desire to consume is embedded in our DNA.

Labels: affluenza, America, book, climate, consumption, environment, footprint, inequality, progress, review, sustainability

Rob Williams, a freelance journalist and former assistant to a Labour MP, echoes David Lammy’s call for delayed gratification (see 14 August 2008 post) in an article in the Guardian Comment is free blog today:

“if there is a common theme running through the last decade, indeed, the last 30 years, it is one of instant gratification for businesses, governments and for individuals. There has been a total unwillingness to plan, wait for something, to save or to look more than five minutes ahead.”

He hopes the credit crunch will bring delayed gratification back into fashion again:

“For a start deferred gratification (remember your sociology classes?) needs to become acceptable again. The right amount of money to have is actually not quite enough, so that you have to save for a treat, and even, shock, horror, go without another luxury to get what you want. If you really want that holiday, or car, then save up for it.”

His conclusion:

“plastic is no longer fantastic, and our flexible friends are now cracking the whip. Hopefully the lesson of the next couple of years will be ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the downturn.’ “

It is amazing how creative New Labour and its supporters are when it comes to trying to get the rest of us to make do with less.

Sadly I expect this to be a common reaction to the economic downturn. If anything green trends are likely to be strengthened rather than weakened.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, economics, finance

David Lammy, New Labour’s skills minister, makes a crass link between growing affluence and youth violence in the latest New Statesman (14 August). Some excerpts:

* “In society, the fetishisation of money and the growth of consumerism add new pressures. In a "bling" culture, criminality easily becomes a short cut to symbols of wealth and power that will otherwise take years of hard work to achieve.”

* “the crucial point is this: a resilient economy cannot substitute for a good society.”

“An inability to delay gratification - whether with food, alcohol, money or sex - is becoming a hallmark of our age, reinforced by advertising and media (by the age of ten, the average British child recognises nearly 400 brand names).”

Some questions for Lammy:

- Why is it that richer societies are generally less violent than poorer ones (see posts of 20 July 2006, 30 July 2006 and 31 December 2007)?

- Why is it that only a tiny minority are involved in youth violence despite the mass of society becoming more affluent?

- How does he square his argument with the fact that, according to official figures, violent crime is not increasing in Britain (see Mick Hume’s recent article in spiked on this theme)?

Labels: affluenza, consumption, spiked

BBC online decided to lead its news coverage of Britain’s latest Social Trends report (PDF) with Easterlin’s paradox: that beyond a certain point happiness does not rise with incomes. Given that Richard Easterlin formulated the paradox in the early 1970s, and it has been repeated many times since, it is hard to see how it qualifies as news. However, there is lots of useful empirical material in the full report.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, progress

Spiked has published a review essay by me on books which see affluence and consumerism as leading to mental illness.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, review, spiked

The backlash against an obsessive attachment to happiness seems to be gaining ground. An article in the December 2007 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science evidently argues that moderate happiness is better than maximising happiness. A press release from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quotes Ed Diener, one of the authors of the study, explaining:

“Happy people are more likely (than unhappy people) to get married, are more likely to stay married, are more likely to think their marriage is good,” Diener said. “They’re more likely to volunteer. They’re more likely to be rated highly by their supervisor and they’re more likely to make more money.”

Happy people are also, on average, healthier than unhappy people and they live longer, Diener said. And, he said, some research indicates that happiness is a cause of these sources of good fortune, not just a result.

“But there is a caveat, and that is to say: Do you then have to be happier and happier" How happy is happy enough"”

The research team began with the prediction that mildly happy people (those who classify themselves as eights and nines on the 10-point life satisfaction scale) may be more successful in some realms than those who consider themselves 10s. This prediction was based on the idea that profoundly happy people may be less inclined to alter their behavior or adjust to external changes even when such flexibility offers an advantage.

Their analysis of World Values Survey data affirmed that prediction.

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

In the more social realms, however, the 10s were the most successful, engaging more often in volunteer activities and maintaining more stable relationships.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

Newsweek has a particularly interesting article on the backlash against the obsession with happiness (2 February). This blog has already mentioned some of the key references but it adds more as well as some illuminating details:

* Allan V Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (see 22 December 2007 post). In the foreword Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the psychiatrist who oversaw the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, expresses doubts about the medicalising of sadness: "To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one's life".

* Eric Wilson Against Happiness (see 17 January post).

* Also Ed Diener, a veteran happiness researcher, has evidently co-written a book with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, called Rethinking Happiness. It is due for publication later this year.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

The latest annual Family Expenditure Survey from Britain’s National Statistics gives some idea of how living standards have increased over the past 50 years.

For example, according to the official release: “In 2006 most homes had central heating (95 per cent), a washing machine (96 per cent), a microwave (91 per cent) and a telephone or mobile phone (99 per cent).”

Even the bottom decline (poorest 10th) of the population is benefitting. According to a BBC report on the survey 31% of the bottom decline have computers, 21% an internet connection and 56% a mobile phone.

From a 50 year perspective the trends are also revealing. For instance, in 1957 food and non-alcoholic drinks took up 33% of the household budget compared with 15% in 2006.

In contrast, food and travel costs have risen from 8% to 16%. This suggests more people have cars and they travel more.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, inequality, progress

Eric G Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, has written a wonderful essay on the value of melancholy as opposed to happiness in the Chronicle Review (18 January). It is adapted from his book Against Happiness which is about to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America (and is also reviewed in the issue of the Economist that is about to be published).

He starts with the observation that, in recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost 85 percent of Americans said they were very happy or at least pretty happy. Then he goes on to argue:

“Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?”

He later goes on:

“Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.”

At the end of the article also reproduces the “Ode on Melancholy” (1919) by John Keats.

Labels: affluenza, apocalyptic, book, happiness

Brendan O’Neill has an article on the BBC online website on Oliver James’s The Selfish Capitalist. After letting James explain his argument it quotes myself and Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiological and liaison psychiatry at King's College, London, giving a contrary view.

I will leave readers to look up my remarks if they want to but Wessely is worth quoting at length:

‘[He] believes that cultural factors, not capitalism itself, have created a situation where more people define themselves as mentally ill.

‘"In this country, rates of actual mental illness are not increasing," he says. "Studies by the Office for National Statistics, repeated over a decade, do not show an increase in all neurotic disorders, depressive disorders or depression."

‘"It is true that rates of self-reported symptoms are on the rise," says Wessely, but that has to be seen in a context where "more human experiences" are seen as illnesses nowadays.

‘"In my trade, for example, states of sadness are now seen as 'depression', shyness has become 'social phobia', and all sorts of variations in childhood temperament, personality, emotions and behaviour have become characterised as diseases that need treatment, be it Asperger's autism or ADHD."

‘Mr Wessely believes that this "therapy culture" means that people now regard as abnormal things that "previous generations regarded as part and parcel of normal variations in personality and emotion". So what earlier generations saw as an everyday struggle to make ends meet might now be referred to as stress or workaholism.

‘"I would lay the blame less at the door of Margaret Thatcher's selfish capitalism, and more at the door of Richard and Judy or Oprah," says Mr Wessely.’

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

A new spin on growth scepticism from John Naish, a health journalist, in an extract from his book Enough in today’s Times (London). He takes two of the usual charges from the growth sceptic litany – humanity is destroying the environment and making it unhappy – and blames them on our primitive human brains.

The opening passage of the extract argues that: “Over the past decade, two facts have become increasingly obvious – that our ever-increasing consumption is wrecking the planet, and that continually chasing more stuff, more food and more entertainment no longer makes us any happier. Instead, levels of stress, obesity and dissatisfaction are spiralling.” Of course these may appear to be obvious “facts” to Naish but they are far from straightforward or beyond dispute.

However, Naish does not waste any time. The next passage gives his explanation for what he sees as our terrible social maladies: “So why is our culture still chasing, consuming, striving ever harder, even though we know in our sophisticated minds that it’s an unrewarding route to eco-geddon? New scientific studies are helping to reveal why. It’s our primitive brains. These marvellous machines got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, ‘enough’.”

By a few paragraphs down it is becoming pretty silly: “The desire-driven wiring of our primitive brains evolved in the Pleistocene era, between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. It was moulded by half-starved hunter-gatherers and farmers whose crops frequently failed. Those who kept going survived to give us their yearning genes. That wanting instinct gets fixated on material goods. We evolved to desire possessions as no other creature does. Neolithic cave sites may partly explain why. Many contain millions of hand-axes – far more than cave-dwellers ever needed. Anthropologists believe that the best axes were not just prized tools, but precursors of Ferraris and Jimmy Choos. Owning Stone Age bling displayed your high reproductive value.”

So whereas the likes of Oliver James blame “selfish capitalism” for our alleged plight John Naish points to the primitive human brain as the culprit.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, environment, happiness

A feature in the January / February issue of Foreign Policy magazine suggests the idea of “affluenza” is pervasive in France rather than confined to America and Britain. Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, bases this claim on a study of official French textbooks:

‘ “Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities." ‘

Labels: affluenza, Europe, happiness

The awful Oliver James has a new book out. The Selfish Capitalist (published by Vermilion) evidently argues that the model of capitalism in the Anglo-American countries has led to an explosion of mental illness. I have already reviewed James’s previous book (see menu bar on left) and will read his new one as soon as I get a chance.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

By coincidence a review by Helene Guldberg on spiked echoes the points made in my 22 December post. She reviews Shyness by Christopher Lane, a Chicago-based research professor, which evidently shows how the definition of mental illness has widened considerably. Once again this broadening definition is reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to Guldberg:

“His [Lane’s] painstaking research shows how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the psychiatric profession worldwide, has been transformed – by a handful of psychiatrists behind closed doors – from the thin handbook it was up until the 1980s into the hefty tome it is today, with hundreds of new, poorly specified and poorly researched syndromes being added.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, spiked

Will Wilkinson has reviewed a useful-sounding book in the December issue of Reason which rejects the view that material abundance is causing higher levels of depression. Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press) is a polemic against the arguments on depression put forward by the likes of Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. (Oliver James and Richard Layard have proposed similar arguments in Britain).

According to the review what has really happened is that the definition of depression has widened enormously to include many who are simply unhappy:

“According to Horwitz and Wakefield, ‘There are no obvious circumstances that would explain a recent upsurge in depressive disorder.’ The ranks of the depressed are bulging, they argue, because the clinical category fails to make the elementary distinction between normal, functional sadness and true mental disorder. The depression data are littered with false positives—jilted lovers, white-collar workers who missed out on a promotion, and kids nobody asked to the prom. People who are suffering but aren’t sick.”

This broadening definition of depression is reflected in the standard reference book on the subject:

“Since its third edition was published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the standard handbook used by clinicians to classify mental problems, has defined major depressive disorder with a complex checklist of symptoms. In order to meet the exigencies of 15-minute doctor’s visits and the needs of public health surveys, the few diagnostic qualifications calling for expert judgment were stripped away to produce a simple rule of categorization that family doctors, mental health epidemiologists, and even—or especially—computers can apply. To simplify only slightly, if you meet five of nine mundane requirements over the course of two weeks, you qualify as suffering from major depression. The checklist: a persistently low mood, a diminished interest or pleasure in almost everything, an increase or decrease in appetite leading to a gain or loss in weight, too much or too little sleep, fatigue or low energy, fidgetiness or listlessness, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, difficulty concentrating or indecisiveness, and thoughts of death, suicide, or an attempt of suicide.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

On Monday I will be introducing a discussion of The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz at Nico Madonald’s Innovation Reading Circle. Details along with further readings and links are available at Nico’s website.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, happiness

Helene Guldberg writing in the latest spiked review of books reviews several works arguing, among other things, that affluence is damaging children’s lives. Guldberg counters that the problems are exaggerated and on balance children have benefited immensely from greater affluence.

A particularly interesting passage looks at how the idea of childhood can be seen as relatively new. She discusses the work of Philippe Aries, a French historian, who she describes as arguing: “In the seventeenth century the modern view of childhood first emerged, but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the advent and extension of compulsory schooling and a corresponding decline in child labour, that childhood really existed in the modern sense.”

Labels: affluenza, book, health, progress, spiked

I have come across so much on happiness in the last few days that I will have to resort to relaying it in bullet point form:

* Happiness debate in the Financial Times. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, had a belated review of Richard Layard’s 2005 book on happiness published in Wednesday (“Why progressive taxation is not the route to happiness” 6 June). A particularly interesting point he made was that the attack on happiness can be seen as a challenge to modernity itself. Developments such as improvement in life expectancy, the liberation of women from household drudgery or easier divorce do not increase reported happiness.

Two book hitters in the happiness debate replied to Wolf with letters. Layard says that there are some aspects of modernity that should be ameliorated. He gives levels of trust as an example. Meanwhile, Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick and well-known happiness advocate, makes the familiar point that reported happiness has not increased over time in the rich countries over the last few decades. He goes on to state: “That graph could usefully be pinned up in every minister’s and president’s office”. Why he thinks it should be such a decisive argument is not clear.

* Debating Andrew Oswald at Debating Matters. Talking of Oswald, I will be debating him at the national final of the Debating Matters competition in London on June 29. We will both be “expert witnesses” debating whether happiness should be a goal of national policy. Later on the same motion will be debated by the high school students who are taking part in the competition. In conjunction with the discussion the Debating Matters team has produced a useful topic guide for the debate. (Last year I debated John Hilary of War on Want on globalisation at the same event).

* Quoted in Financieele Dagblad. Yesterday I was also quoted on the happiness debate in a substantial feature in the leading Dutch financial daily newspaper by Esther van Rijswijk. I am hoping to get it translated.

* Paradox of Prosperity essay republished. My spiked essay on the “paradox of prosperity” is to be republished by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. The organisation is publishing a book in its professional reference series which is provisionally entitled: Prosperity Index: Assessing Growth Anew. It is due out in November.

* Happiness expert website. Ruud Veenhoven, one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, has a website: here. Evidently he also argues that a “paradox of prosperity” does not exist.

* Parenting-happiness link. A parenting expert made the point to me yesterday that the debates on happiness and parenting are linked. The likes of Oliver James argue there is a clear link between women not looking after children and the outbreak of “affluenza” in society.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, india, media appearances, modernity, speeches, spiked

The debate I took part in on the “Battle for Affluence” at the Battle of Ideas conference on 28 October 2006 can now be viewed on video. It fears me along with Avner Offer of Oxford University, Mark Easton on the BBC, Nicholas Crafts of Warwick University and Jenny Davey of the Sunday Times. More details can be seen at my post of 5 November 2006.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, speeches

Spiked has published my review of Affluenza by Oliver James. It argues that it is more likely that Oliver James is mentally disturbed rather than, as he implies, the rest of us.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, inequality, review, spiked

Yesterday went to a meeting organised by Compass, which describes itself as a “democratic left pressure group”, on the politics of well-being. The main luminaries were Oliver James, the author of Affluenza and Professor Richard Layard. What struck me was the ease with which they moved from the existence of mass affluence to the assumption that it is to blame for widespread mental illness. Little argument was needed to convince the audience of this point. I will be writing more on the subject in the next few days. The Guardian has also carried a series of related articles on the comment is free section of its website.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

This morning I debated Oliver James, the author of a new book on “affluenza” on the Radio 4 Today programme (programme available on its website for the next seven days). His argument is that affluence is increasingly making us sick. Nico Macdonald has produced a summary of our debate which is available here. James has not put forward an original thesis - his book is the third with “affluenza” as a title - but two things were notable about what he said:

* His thesis takes the form of an attack on the rich. However, it is the poor who suffer as a result of attacks on affluence.

* He claimed that over the long-term working hours in America and Britain have lengthened. This is simply wrong. Long-term statistics on his this trend are tricky to interpret - for example, because of the rise of the number of women in the labour force - but there is no doubt the trend is for working hours to fall. Even apart from the working week people are spending more time in education and more time in retirement. The amount of back-breaking manual labour people have to do has fallen dramatically. Also, according to the latest figures from National Statistics, the average working week in Britain has fallen by one hour over the past 15 years. I intend to do more work on the subject of working hours in my book.

At lunchtime I had a rematch against Oliver James on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2. A summary of the debate can be read here. James made much of the fact he was talking about mental illness rather than unhappiness. He did not see the bigger picture of how his arguments relate to growth scepticism.

Labels: affluenza, America, happiness, media appearances, radio, work

Last weekend I debated the Battle for Affluence at the Battle of Ideas festival. The thrust of my argument was that affluence has proved enormously beneficial for humanity and will continue to do so. In contrast others, such as Professor Avner Offer of Oxford university and Mark Easton of the BBC, argued that our preoccupation with prosperity has gone too far. In their view other factors, such as well-being, should be the main focus of government policy. Others on the panel included Professor Nicholas Crafts of Warwick university and Jenny Davey of the Times (London). Later that evening I also debated Professor Offer on BBC Radio Five Live.

At the conference I also chaired a session in which Damned by Debt Relief, a film made by Worldwrite, had its world premiere. The film showed how the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative imposes new conditions on the poor but does not offer any new money. A trailer for the film can be viewed here.

Other sessions at the weekend included a debate on the “happiness trap” and a series on the Battle over Nature.

Labels: affluenza, film, happiness, media appearances, radio, speeches, Worldwrite