It may only be a coincidence, of course, that political interest in ideas of happiness has grown as cuts in social care, welfare benefits and healthcare have deepened. In public policy, we have been encouraged to move away from traditional models of illness and deprivation, to broader ones of well-being.
Happiness has become the subject of serious academic study. There is talk of a science of happiness, happiness studies, discussion of the morality and economic value of happiness. Naturally, there is a concern with the psychology of happiness and those of us who experience mental distress may be found particularly wanting in the happiness department. This may be especially so when economic connections are made and we are seen to be living on welfare benefits and cast as skivers rather than strivers.
You might think that some particular difficulties would be recognised with a concept like happiness, which is inherently value-based, with a tendency to vagueness. Notions of happiness and well-being are not readily amenable to the number-crunching purposes they tend to be put to. But this hasn’t halted the exponential interest in them among policymakers.
The irony is that this interest in happiness is burgeoning at a time when it seems to be in short supply. The radical restructuring of UK social policy has had an extreme impact on the chances of some of us being “happy”. Welfare reform has been associated with an upsurge in suicide. It has forced people to leave neighbourhoods they have lived in for years, losing friends, networks and support services. It has been linked with hate crime against disabled people stigmatised by government and media “anti-scrounger” campaigns. Between 2010 and 2014, prescriptions for anti-depressants increased by a quarter. An additional irony is that as the emphasis on well-being has increased, it has been accompanied by disproportionate and increasing cuts in funding, services and support for people with disabilities, learning difficulties and mental health needs, many of whom can be expected to be under most pressure in our society.
The impact of increasingly harsh neoliberal social policies in the UK has not stopped there. It seems to be giving rise to a broader sense of desperation which isn’t confined to those who are experiencing the sharpest end of the government’s policies; hence popular discourse about the pressed middle, the over-advantaged 1% and increasing uncertainties facing the 99% who comprise the rest of us. It is a new “overclass” rather than an imagined “underclass” that most bothers many of us.
Under present policies, desperation rather than happiness is a popular state of mind. More and more, disabled people and other service users who do have jobs talk about how new managerialism increasingly imposes constraints on their lives and well-being. People discuss the way their jobs are undermined by expanding controls, bureaucratisation and surveillance. People who don’t have jobs –mental health service users and disabled people particularly – live in growing fear of the stigma and arbitrary exclusions resulting from harsh welfare reform. Parents worry about the prospects for their children; the growing housing difficulties they face as house prices and rents go through the roof; and the rising tide of debt that accompanies young people who go on to higher education. Older people, supposedly privileged by present social conditions, are attacked as selfish baby boomers. But they worry about their children’s and grandchildren’s futures – What jobs will they get? What security will they have? Where will they live? – while increasingly serving as a key source of support for those younger than themselves.
Uncertainty, insecurity and constant change have become defining features of our age, especially for the most disadvantaged. Jobs for life, secure housing and adequate pensions tend to be presented as outmoded ideals of a welfarist age.
This argument can of course be dismissed as impressionistic, apocryphal and anecdotal. We can reasonably be asked, where is the evidence? We know though that there is always a problem with politically contentious and unpopular issues, like levels of anxiety and concern in a society. There tends to be a delay before research is carried out and evidence is actually available. But that hardly means that there isn’t a problem. What it should mean is that, first, policymakers need to take more notice of experiential knowledge than they are used to doing. And second, it is a powerful argument for more research on public states of mind in modern Britain – particularly more independent and participatory research drawing on lived experience.
It is interesting that individualised ideas of happiness and well-being have found particular expression under neoliberal politics. Especially since the rising inequality in this neoliberal society seems to make so many of us unhappy and unwell.
