tonyplant's blog for February 2006
Submitted by tonyplant on February 27, 2006 - 16:02.
There is an interesting piece in the New York Times that asks Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?. The authors claim:
Americans are increasingly bewildered — not liberated — by the sheer volume of choices they must make in a day.
As behavioral scientists, we have found that the people who frame freedom in terms of choice are usually the ones who get to make a lot of choices — that is, middle- and upper-class white Americans (most of our study participants are white; we can't make any claims about other racial and ethnic groups). The education, income and upbringing of these Americans grant them choices about how to live their lives and also encourage them to express their preferences and personalities through the choices they make. Most Americans, however, are not from the college-educated middle and upper classes. Working-class Americans often have fewer resources and experience greater uncertainty and insecurity. For them, being free is less about making choices that reflect their uniqueness and mastery and more about being left alone, with their personality, integrity and well-being intact.
There are some provocative examples that show why having a plethora of choice can bring about paralysis of action. It is possible to extend this work to account for why uncertainty and axiety about making choices can bring about
learned helplessness.
read more | add new comment | positive psychology | freedom | choice
Submitted by tonyplant on February 23, 2006 - 14:52.
GeekNurse has posted a tracing of a baby’s heart activity. It’s one of those occasions where a straight reading might have prompted concern that there was a major cardiac problem. However, with the nurse’s special understanding of the context, the trace is correctly interpreted as innocent of any sinister problem (I’m not giving the solution here, it’s a nice surprise). [April 2006 edit. Sadly, this excellent blog has been taken down so this example is no longer available. The solution was that the nurse had been present when the baby hiccoughed, causing the irregularity in the trace.]
I’m attracted to this example because it is a striking instance of the need to understand the full context of data before interpreting it appropriately. And this is yet another re-working of my continued thinking on the topic of whether unhappiness is a symptom or a passing phase.
Unhappiness is inevitable as a response to life events: it is appropriate in the current context of that life. There may come a point when the degree of unhappiness paralyses a person’s ability to function on many levels, both socially and economically. Somewhere on that continuum unhappiness became a symptom in need of a remedy or intervention, whether pharmacological or psychosocial. Identifying that point of cross-over seems to be an art-form.
Positive psychology emphasises the many benefits of positive emotions, from greater personal success to better immune systems and improved longevity. One of the most repeatable findings seems to be that unhappiness is inevitable, but it is our resilience to life events and circumstances that governs our outcomes. It seems that we can cultivate resilience by cultivating positive emotions.
read more | add new comment | unhappiness | positive psychology | positive emotions | nutrition | happiness | food
Submitted by tonyplant on February 20, 2006 - 12:58.
I’ve been advised to look at Paul Stiles Is the American Dream Killing You?. It’s a passionately written exploration of the author’s belief that the market/corporate interests are shredding our quality of life and human values.
Although there looks as if there is a lot with which I would disagree, Stiles does make some arguments that match my own recent thoughts about the role of FEAR in undermining people’s sense of well-being. Stiles discusses stress in terms that sound very like FEAR:
the word stress, as applied to people, comes form the word stress as applied to metals. The result is physical, mental and spiritual breakdown. Stress is thus the critical missing link between the market economy and human health.
According to psychologists, stress is caused by ‘any circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten one’s well-being and thereby tax one’s coping abilities. The threat may be to one’s immediate physical safety, long-range security, self-esteem, reputation, or peace of mind.’ Such stress stems directly from all the market pressures we have just described. In effect, it is our response to the Market’s efforts to make the economy more productive. And to some extent, that response is natural and healthy. It is only the hypermarket that pushes us over the edge.(pg 35)
The book is an impassioned outcry against the shredding affect of market manipulation on life and society. Stiles claims that road rage, urban sprawl, latch-key children, obesity, depression and even waning sex drives are the collateral damage of being enslaved to the demands of the market/corporate interests. It doesn’t seem as if Stiles is arguing for conspiracy theories that are aimed at destroying quality of life: he comments that the impacts he deplores are collateral damage. However, the absence of malice probably doesn’t do much to improve the quality of life experienced by those who sustain most of the collateral damage.
read more | 1 comment | stress | learned helplessness | happystance | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on February 19, 2006 - 23:09.
Both in everyday encounters and during workshops, I frequently come across the power of FEAR (False Expectations Appearing Real) and how it can blight our current experience of our life. I described a visit to a pre-school group that had prompted me to consider the topic of chaos theory and happiness. It does seem as if some people’s current unhappiness is grounded in apprehensions about the future and a sense of helplessness about influencing those wider concerns and future events.
So, I recognised the phenomenon when I read Dr. Sanity’s tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations and the creation of FEAR. We need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis.
In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Friedman argues that the financial and social anxieties created by living in a stagnant economy lead people to look for explanations and answers in intolerance and fear. Furedi provides his own explanation for this behaviour. He claims that the phenomenon is responsible for the widespread internalisation of conspiracy theories: "[t]oday, acts of misfortune are frequently associated with intentional malevolent behavior".
Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the:
read more | add new comment | positive psychology | happystance | friedman | economic growth | command hallucinations
Submitted by tonyplant on February 16, 2006 - 17:48.
I’ve previously written about the varying health costs of caring. Today, the New England Journal of Medicine published the largest study ever to quantify caregiver burden and the widower effect.
The findings pretty much reflect your intuition on the subject. Carers are most stressed/vulnerable when a loved one is admitted to hospital. And, as per previous research, carers well-being is related to the degree of cognitive or physical disability in the person for whom they are caring. The BBC carries a good summary of the paper. And the findings of the paper are robustly lampooned over on NHS Blog Doc (which is rapidly becoming an addiction). However, the paper will be worth a look when it is available online for what it says more generally about the impact of caring on social networks. And for the observations around the impacts of different illness and varying levels of disability on the well-being of carers.
Accounts like this reaffirm what I want for the Happystance workshops for carers. However, I’m very aware that such interventions or activities have to be offered appropriately. Which works against offering it at the riskiest time, as recommended by these authors. And possibly reinforces my belief that the workshops should be available on a regular basis and to offer a way of strengthening carers’ own stress-management and resilience techniques.
read more | add new comment | happystance | dr. crippen | carers | caregiving | caregivers
Submitted by tonyplant on February 16, 2006 - 16:43.
There are many entertaining workplace blogs. Many of these give disgruntled workers a place to vent and to exercise their creative writing talents. Others offer a fascinating insight into:
Blogging is a new creative outlet for many people. There are blogs that detail life in diverse families. And blogs that provide remarkable accounts of what it is like to live with a terminal illness or a disabling condition. There are audio blogs and video blogs of such remarkable quality that they amount to personal mini-documentaries.
I know a number of people who have learned a lot about their lives from blogging about it. It is like adopting a different perspective and considering aspects of your life that may typically go unconsidered.
Depending on the age-group (and the available resources), imagining that you were going to contribute some written, audio or video blogs entries about your life, is one of the exercises that I use in Happystance workshops. I was recently working with some young carers. Some of the participants were reluctant to join in some of the laughercises. They seemed to be very grave, and quite anxious children: some the self-reports indicated that they were experiencing distressingly little happiness in their lives. However, when I introduced this exercise, the difference in some of the children was remarkable. They enjoyed being the presenter of a mini-documentary about themselves. They came up with a host of ideas about items that interest them.
read more | add new comment | Haroun and the Sea of Stories | happystance | happiness | dr. crippen | blogs
Submitted by tonyplant on February 15, 2006 - 16:56.
There are several classic experiments that are summarised and commented on in Prof. Seligman’s Authentic Happiness. The consistent result is that positive emotion allows us to be more flexible, creative and open to new ideas.
I was thinking about this today when I read the explosion of comments on the topic of ME on the excellent NHS Blog Doc. The original article discusses the dilemma that faces Dr. Crippen when asked to provide a sick note for a patient with ME, a condition that he does not “believe in”. Take a look at the comments and the references that are provided in them. They are truly fascinating, and they seem genuinely to be contributing to a desire to learn by the GP in question. Dr. Crippen seems to be taking a real-time journey of listening and discovery that leads to him discussing a new assessment of his patients who currently have the label, ME.
I was recently lamenting that depression and anxiety statistics should not be used to comment on the prevalence of happiness. And I was exposing my thinking on various matters (such as the diagnosis or treatment of depression). I’m actually quite comfortable with holding “on the one hand this, on the other hand...” opinions. I just find it difficult when talking with people who want a definitive viewpoint.
read more | 2 comments | Seligman | positive emotion | happiness | dr. crippen | depression | Authentic Happiness
Submitted by tonyplant on February 12, 2006 - 20:26.
I am troubled by a recurrent practice in the popular literature on the theme of happiness and the economics of happiness. It’s an intellectual sloppiness that I try to guard against but it happens from time to time. The practice is this. There are many articles that comment on happiness by dragging in statistics about anxiety and depression to bolster the perception/argument that unhappiness is endemic. One proof that is frequently aired is the sheer volume of prescriptions for anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications that is dispensed in the UK, US, name the country under discussion.
Horwitz and Wakefield have offered an excellent overview of what my wife would refer to as the semantic shift of the word depression and what used to be understood by it. Apparently, 300 years ago silly used to mean innocent or blessed rather than its current connotations. In a much faster variation of this process, depression seems to have shifted from a medically defined term to one that is readily used (almost as a metaphor in its own right) to describe any negative emotional state: no matter how appropriate that reaction might be under the circumstances.
It is not unusual to come across reports that claim more than half of the population will develop a mental disorder at some time over the course of life. This immediately raises the issue of what constitutes mental health and mental illness. Although there are internationally standardised criteria for the latter, their application varies enormously. And even psychiatrists can not provide a united front as to where the boundary lies.
3 attachments | read more | 18 comments | Wakefield | unhappiness | McClellan | Horwitz | happiness | depression | Cutler | anti-depressant
Submitted by tonyplant on February 12, 2006 - 18:03.
A while ago the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy issued a press release that criticised some of the Layard proposals: specifically those calling for the training of more therapists (BACP argues that a sufficient number already exist), and those that emphasis the importance of the cognitive behavioural therapy approach above other strategies.
Economists argue that anxiety and depression are a burden on the economy. Mental Health specialists (among others) counter that they are an unaffordable burden on society. Layard says that happiness should be seen as more than a health issue. The BACP unhelpfully offers the counter-claim that
Unhappiness is the consequence of more than a diagnosed condition and always arises from a life situation.
And they offer counselling etc. as part of the solution. Which still looks like medicalisation of a psychosocial issue to me. I will put more about this in another post.
Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project
add new comment | unhappiness | Layard | happiness | depression | cognitive behavioural therapy | CBT
Submitted by tonyplant on February 12, 2006 - 13:26.
I’ve just listened to a R4 programme, Hecklers, on the topic The Welfare State Is a Mistake. The format of the programme is that one person (James Bartholomew in this case)puts forward a topic, and speaks to defend it, against four ‘hecklers’ who have a professional interest in the topic.
It is worth following the links from Bartholomew’s site to listen to the archived programme. It was fascinating to hear a discussion of this topic. The short format still only allows for 2 min arguments but it was longer than the sound-bites that are usually traded in news programmes or the typical interviews.
Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project
add new comment | welfare state | james bartholomew
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