The perilous pursuit of happiness

Society’s constant reminders to ‘be happy’ only make us more depressed

Depression is listed as the leading cause of disability worldwide, a standing to which it has progressed steadily over the past 20 years. Yet research shows a rather interesting pattern: depression is far more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern ones.

This shows that depression is a modern health epidemic that is also culture-specific. Yet we mostly continue to treat it at the individual level, with anti-depressants and psychotherapy. This assumes treatment lies in correcting individual biological and psychological imbalances.

Public health experts know living in an environment where fast food is readily available is a large contributor to the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease — we need to understand the context, not individual behaviour alone. In the same way, as depression reaches epidemic proportions, the sole focus on individuals no longer makes sense.

We have been investigating whether Western cultural values play a role in promoting the depression epidemic for several years now. In a series of experiments, we found the high value we place on happiness is not only associated with increased levels of depression, it may actually be the underlying factor.

Cultural ideas of happiness

To examine the downside of culturally valuing happiness, we studied the extent to which people feel others expect them not to experience negative emotional states. We found that people who scored higher on this measure had lower levels of well-being.

In follow-up studies, we found when people experienced negative emotions and felt social pressure not to, they felt socially disconnected and experienced more loneliness.

While these studies provided evidence that living in cultures that value happiness, and devalue sadness, is associated with reduced well-being, they lacked clear causal evidence these values might be promoting depression.

Do cultural values of happiness contribute to depression?

it was not that depressed people thought others expected them not to feel that way, but that this felt social pressure itself was contributing to symptoms of depression.

We then tried to recreate the kind of social environment that might be responsible for the pressure. We decked out one of our testing rooms with happiness books and motivational posters. We placed sticky notes with personal reminders such as “stay happy” and a photo of the researcher with some friends enjoying themselves on holiday. We called this the happy room.

As study participants arrived, they were either directed to the happy room or to a similar room that had no happiness paraphernalia.

They were asked to solve anagrams, some sets of which were solvable while others were largely not. Where participants had solved few anagrams (because they had been allocated the unsolvable ones), the researcher expressed some surprise and disappointment saying: “I thought you may have gotten a least a few more.”

Participants then took part in a five-minute breathing exercise that was interrupted by 12 tones. At each tone, they were asked to

indicate whether their mind had been focused on thoughts unrelated to breathing and, if so, what the thought was, to check whether they had been ruminating on the anagram task.

What we found