Measuring happiness and the "feel-good' factor
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By Bryan Wilshire
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Over the recent holiday break I had the
opportunity to read several books including an unusual holiday read
titled
“The Tyranny of Numbers” written by David Boyle, a book more
concerned with a view on life and philosophy than the fascination of
patterns and numbers.
At Lifeline each year we interact with a growing number of people from
all walks of life, age groups, social, cultural and economic
backgrounds - the volume of data we collect provides a very good
snapshot of the happiness and wellbeing of our nation.
We know that sports results, social and economic conditions and even
the weather can affect how our communities feel - call numbers to
Lifeline’s Depression line increase sharply at times of community
disappointment. We know the effect of holiday breaks and the festive
season - Rita Inch Lifeline Auckland’s Director of Counselling Services
has spoken on television’s Breakfast Show about the “Christmas effect”
where immediately before the holiday call numbers fall dramatically
only to rise equally dramatically following the end of the holiday
period.
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Happiness or the lack of it isn't just a problem for the medical and counselling profession; it's a problem for all of society including politicians, policy makers and economists.
To liberally quote from David Boyle’s book:
“Virginia Bottomley, a minister from Britain’s Home Office explained that up to 93 per cent of the British population now had colour televisions, washing machines and freezers. That covered people of all classes, paying their own way and on welfare. It was an extraordinary achievement, she said - adding suddenly and off-message: 'Why on earth isn't everybody happy?'”
It seemed to go to the heart of the unease at the time, because the usual measurements of success, for politicians in particular, had let them down so disastrously. Britons were having two foreign holidays a year, their house prices were rising fast, but people just weren't happy. The political press dubbed what was missing as the 'feel-good factor'.
This elusive, immeasurable and indefinable factor became one of the key issues of the early years of John Major's premiership in Britain. Commentators discovered, as if for the first time, the terrifying figures of “feel-bad”. There were 10,000 calls a day to the child advice phone service Childline, rising divorce and suicide rates. Academics were stalking the pages of the broadsheets talking about a crisis of parenting. 'Governments must encourage parenthood of the highest quality,' wrote the respected social scientist A. H. Halsey after the 1990 riots. But how? And how could it be measured?
People seemed to be so angry. People were also needy. Book-shelves bulged with the weight of self-help titles like “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway”. And when the marriage guidance organisation Relate opened an office in a GP's surgery in the middle of London's commuter belt in 1991, there was a sudden enormous demand for free 45-minute sessions with a psychologist for stress or loneliness.
Within two months, the office had been so overwhelmed that it had to close altogether. Maybe it was always this way. Maybe nobody had noticed it before. But the emotional toll seemed to be landing most heavily on children, and that felt new. Suddenly one in 20 British children was suffering from depression or anxiety so badly they needed professional help - including one in 50 in primary schools.
As many as half of the long-term absences of children from school were due to them feeling “inexplicably tired all the time”. Then there were the diets - 1 to 2% of all British schoolchildren had anorexia. . Suddenly girls of just eight or nine were worrying about their weight and not surprisingly; the girls most aware of diets also had the lowest self-esteem.
Leeds University's Dr Andrew Hill blamed Cindy dolls and their ultra-thin bodies. 'Why pick on Cindy?' said a spokesman for the manufacturers Hasbro. 'An eleven and a half inch piece of plastic is not responsible for the ills of today's society.'
So who or what was responsible for this emotional toll on children? Step forward the three main contenders - school pressures, rising divorce rates and the consumer society.
Describing her affluent town in Connecticut as a place that expects children to do well, columnist Anne-Marie Sapsted went on to outline a school system which puts enormous pressures on children from an early age.
This is a place where eight-year-olds have an hour of homework every night and sit formal tests each week – and where children have such busy diaries filled with “CV-building” after-school activities, that 'windows' for play are often a week or so apart.
The point is that fundamental problems like unhappiness can't be measured simply by the usual methods of number crunching and statistics. They just have to be experienced.
I believe that Lifeline has a unique role in society to listen, experience and to “sense with the heart” what is going on for our communities. This gives us a rare insight, and a responsibility, to share what we know to be true in order to inform policy makers and to support evidence based decision making.
As the French novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince:
'It is with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.'
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