The Commodification of Happiness

Cards on the table- this probably isn’t going to be a post laden with popular opinions. But not a whole lot of my other opinions are especially popular so at least I’m not bucking any trends.

A whole industry has arisen designed to help us help ourselves- self-help books, mindfulness, meditation apps. I’m not for a second suggesting that these things have no merit because they obviously do for a lot of people. My problem is that the happiness industry has been harnessed and appropriated by entirely the wrong people and organisations. It has infiltrated healthcare, employment and our understanding of mental health.

Often, where welfare or corporate social responsibility should exist we are instead palmed off with a mindfulness session here or a yoga class there. Doctors who should be able to offer us a clear and structured plan for our healthcare can now get away with asking “have you tried mindfulness?” without having the foresight to even properly Google it. The responsibility for recovery (no matter what your mental health problem may be) now rests on your illness being viscous enough to pour into a quite narrowly constructed cookie cutter.

Healthcare

Almost every single interaction I’ve ever had with a mental health professional has included an exchange about mindfulness or meditation, and rarely do doctors offer much of an indication towards what these practices actually mean. I’m certain that I could have asked every single doctor I’ve ever seen what mindfulness involves and they would all give a completely different answer. And that’s totally fine- clearly, it means different things to different people. When we start to imprint very broad-ranging and vague Buddhist teachings onto 21st century health problems, we can’t expect an immediate consensus. And yet, for whatever reason, we do expect a consensus. Not only that, but we find it utterly mindblowing when a sufferer isn’t on board with mindfulness or meditation.

We know that NHS staff are stretched and I understanding why some mental health nurses and doctors use mindfulness and meditation as their go-to advice during what is probably one of hundreds of mental health appointments they have scheduled that week. The last thing I am is a doctor and my problem doesn’t lie with the fact that they- individually- try to help people by suggesting a technique that doubtlessly benefits a huge number of people. My problem is the fact that it’s part of front line mental health treatment at all, and also that (in my experience) any resistance to it as a legitimate form of treatment for every patient means you’re not trying hard enough to do it correctly.

Repeatedly telling a patient to try mindfulness or meditation when they have said they haven’t found it helpful just makes them feel like a failure. And what do people with mental health conditions love more than anything? Feeling like a failure. When a “treatment” is presented to us as simply a word or a book recommendation, the responsibility falls onto the patient to immediately and unquestioningly engage with the content or technique. In mental healthcare, it seems to be the case that if something doesn’t work for you it’s your own fault for not doing it right. This is absolutely no more evident than in the rambunctious shove towards mindfulness and meditation.

This approach also homogenises us. I struggle with something like meditation because my panic attacks give me heart palpitations. The worst thing I can do for myself is focus on my breathing because it just draws greater attention to the fact that my chest really fucking hurts.

The difficulty with something like mindfulness when it’s presented as part of a doctor’s treatment plan is that it is just SO vague. One of the problems with the way my mind works is that I often need to have a pretty well rounded understanding of something if I’m going to have any faith in it working for me, so mindfulness is quite a tough one for me to get behind. I’m not about to throw myself head first into thousands of years of Buddhist teachings underpinning the medical etymology of mindfulness practices just so that I feel I can successfully count all the lines on a fucking leaf. I’d rather just listen to a podcast about what the deal is with the JonBenet Ramsey case.

Employment

I’m lucky because everywhere I’ve worked has been pretty inclusive, understanding and- probably most importantly- hasn’t used empty gestures of fleeting awareness drives or occasional mindfulness sessions to make up for the fact that management would quite happily push us in front of a train to save themselves from stepping in a puddle. I know I’m very lucky in this respect because I have friends who don’t see mental health awareness days at work as anything other than employers papering over the cracks they themselves created.

This is another way that facets of the happiness industry have been appropriated by those who have no business with them. Companies with hardly any discernible social responsibility policies, paper thin mental health measures for employees, withered job security and poverty wages have absolutely no business trotting out a mental health day or two a year to unconvincingly paint on a caring and conscientious mask. I’d honestly rather they matched their words to their actions by pinning up a couple of suicide prevention nets round the building.

Do you know what would also be cool to see in workplace mental health awareness measures? Something addressing illnesses that aren’t depression and anxiety. Depression and anxiety are fucking dreadful and, blessedly, we seem to be reaching a point at which more and more people understand that a colleague with depression and/or anxiety isn’t necessarily going to go postal. Clearly there is more work to be done to integrate sufferers of depression and anxiety into the workforce, but huge steps have been and are being made socially and culturally- perhaps to the point where maybe it’s time to widen the scope of our workplace awareness days to encompass illnesses that carry the same stigma they did 10 years ago?

If companies really want to open up dialogue, increase inclusivity and create a genuinely welcoming environment for all sufferers of mental health conditions, I’d say that it would have greater long-term benefits to discuss a wider range of mental illnesses. People don’t have to come forward and tell the whole office about their eating disorder, OCD, BPD or bipolar disorder- we’re clearly not there yet- but it would be insurmountably helpful to sufferers to see that their illness isn’t too gnarly to be discussed in a professional environment. When we talk about the crippling stigma surrounding depression and anxiety, I think it can work to further alienate those with other, less common conditions. Perhaps alongside a fairly innocuous mindfulness session that any and all employees could join in with, companies could find a way to talk about some of the more overlooked mental illnesses.

Our understanding of mental health

It’s difficult as a patient to tell a doctor you think they’re talking bubbles. The thing is, I was never the type to do that before I was treated for depression and panic disorder. I had been through a litany of doctors, nurses, crisis centres, university treatments and private psychiatrists before I realised I could pipe up and say “actually, I HAVE tried mindfulness and I think it’s a proper load of shit. And I can’t meditate because I have this compulsion that means that when I try and clear my mind all I can think about is the time Jesy from Little Mix did that Jamaican accent.”

I think this is because we are taught to internalise these conceptions of our own treatment and the ways in which we engage with something that- on paper- should work for us. We simply aren’t trying hard enough. I don’t accept that any longer and neither should anyone else. These techniques are sort of thrust upon us and when they are a square peg to our mental health’s round hole it’s difficult to escape the feeling that we’re to blame.

What we’ve got to remind ourselves of is the fact that, while we have a vast amount of unifying characteristics and we mostly have the capacity to understand these techniques at a similar human level, we won’t all receive it in the same way. To give you an example, I thought Lady Bird was shite but loads of people didn’t. We all sat there understanding the narrative and visual devices in a very similar way, but I didn’t receive the film in the same way as a lot of my friends. Similarly, I could sit and watch the remake of The Wicker Man every day until I die in the unblinking recognition that it is an objectively bad film many people don’t like. Every piece of our social and personal understanding contributes to how we receive absolutely anything- especially if that thing is deeply personal and/or subjective- and if something like mindfulness doesn’t work for me that doesn’t mean I’m lacking or I’m not trying hard enough- it just isn’t for me.

This is the trouble I have with self-help books. I always find self-help books (particularly those that top bestseller lists) a little too much like blanket statements for me to take on board. They’re quite similar to horoscopes for me- very general pieces of advice are given and they could apply to literally anyone. Where I believe that mental health should be a dialogue, a self-help book reduces it to a lecture. This is fine for many people, but I find homogenisation of something so wildly diverse a little difficult to engage with. I see mental health as a devastatingly and gorgeously personal part of our selves, and the treatments or self-care techniques we employ should reflect this. They should be patchworks woven by taking different aspects of our needs and interests, drawing bits from this doctor or that friend, this one line of this one book, and creating whole new layers to rifle through when we need them.