Why is Depression Highest for People in the Richest Countries?

 Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus asked the question what constitutes a happy life? Since his time our technological achievements have been vast, and yet our society as a whole is none the wiser about what makes for a happy life, in fact arguably if anything it is probably less so.
  If happiness is on one end of the spectrum then depression is on the other. Depression is the number one mental problem in Western industrialised nations, and it is no respecter of status or income. How many actors or singers who seem to have it all have we he seen splashed across newspapers checking into clinics citing depression?. Rates of depression are continually rising and increasingly striking younger people. The highest rates of depression are in America, also the wealthiest country in the world. Surely the wealthiest nation should be the happiest?
   One of the reasons why our society doesn’t know how to be happy is because the blind are leading the blind. The people we look to for answers are often even more misguided than we are.
 Our next generation, our children, crave guidance and leadership. They are incredibly impressionable and malleable. If a father places Manchester United on the pedestal for worship, it would be unthinkable for his children to worship any other team. Whoever we place on the pedestal for children to admire and emulate, they will do so unquestioningly. So we have to becareful about whom we teach them to look up to and take after.
   Who do we present our children with as the epitome of aspiration for fulfillment and happiness?
  Do we offer them the thinkers who have actually studied happy people and deduced the elements we could all cultivate more to be happy?  Hardly, we have them look up to actors, singers, footballers and their WAGs, Big Brother, X-factor contestants and other ‘celebrities’.
  We have chosen many social icons who are variously irresponsible, immature, vain, self-obsessed or just plain clueless. There is an emphasis on the `me' with a decreasing lack of commitment to other people and  to social responsibilities. We are increasingly conditioning ourselves to put our own happiness first, and how this affects other people is not our concern. These attitudes undermine family and social stability and undermine relationship skills.
There are a generation of young girls who consider marrying a footballer or appearing on a reality TV-show as a viable career ‘aspiration’. Lacking any discernible talent is no obstacle to this career path. One need only act in outrageous, attention-seeking ways to be fawned on by the media, and able to justify huge fees for appearances.  Scrolling through the options of my cable TV a while ago I saw no less than three different programmes devoteed to Jordan.
 Is it any wonder then that our young people aspire to be like Jordan when messages are hitting them from every media angle, effectively saying ‘this is what we pay attention to. This is what we value’.
Investing in the latest makeup worn by TOWIE stars becomes more important than any investing in the mind. Working on oneself comes to mean staying slim and cosmetic surgery. Not being good enough equates to not being slim or youthful looking. These are the hangups that preoccupy so many people, especially the young, and from increasingly younger ages.
   The fault doesn’t lie with our children but with the examples we are setting them.
When I was a child, unsocial behaviour was looked down on by opinion-makers as setting a bad example. Airtime was given over to more inspiring things. Nowadays even governments, the ostensible leaders of our society sycophantically drool over celebrities and rush to rub shoulders with them.
  Now by way of contrast consider for a moment the tiny South Pacific insland of Tanna. In the Channel 4 programme ‘Meet the Natives’ a few years back, 5 middle-aged Tannan men were invited to the Uk to stay with English families. One of the most obvious things about these men (apart from they all looked fit and healthy) was that they all seemed so happy. Indeed, they often remarked to the camera that ‘people of Tanna are happiest people in the world’. They didn’t look enviously at our iPhones and widescreen TVs. Indeed they pitied our lack of community, our need to work so hard to impress others, the fact that we even though we had children, we never had any time to spend with them, so they didn’t feel close to us and we didn’t feel close to them.
  We may look down on such uncivlised societies but I can assure you of one thing the Tannans have over us. In Tanna the people look up to the venerable village elders to gain from their collective stored wisdom and guidance. They do not place some precoccious 19-year old flavour-of-the-month singer at the head and ask her for advice on politics or relationships or social issues the way we do. What they must think of us one can only wonder.
  At the heart of our social icons lies the unquestioned assumption that happiness merely equates to fame and fortune, that it is about having money to spend and party. We too want to have money to spend so we can shop and party. It hasn’t crossed our mind to question that if fame and fortune are all the keys to happiness, then why are so many of these people who ‘make it’ still so unhappy? We have been fed the same illusion but convinced it would be different in our case, (as I am sure the celebrities were too when they subscribed to the same illusion). We need to listen to people who have evidence-based answers, not the ones who have car-crash lives.

By Jenny | Published: theinfluential.org

 Felix Economakis is a chartered psychologist, clinical hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner. He has made numerous appearances on both TV and radio, including putting his techniques to the test on BBC 3’s ‘The Panic Room’ and the most recent series of ‘Freaky Eaters’. He specialises in combining therapies to produce rapid and powerful change for a range of conditions including self-confidence, depression, anxiety, traumas, relationship issues, and is considered to be one of the country’s leading phobia practitioners.

What interested you in psychology?

My mum had several popular psychology books lying around the house, and since we didn’t have internet or video games back then, I started reading those books from about age 12 onwards and got hooked. These books often described and my experiences and behaviours or those of family members around me and helped me understand them. It was as if there was a wise person around guiding me or telling me what was going on. I kept reading personal development books from that time. At the age of 27 I finally sought to combine something I was interested about with a career and decided to train as a psychologist.

How did you first get into TV work?

I’m on the psychological society media database (for psychologists who don’t mind journalists asking them for comments), and that was where the producers of my first TV work the Panic Room found me. With my second TV work (Freaky Eaters), a talent scout saw a workshop of mine in a brochure and asked me if I would be interested in an audition for the new series of Freaky Eaters. I auditioned again and I got the part.

You specialise in neurolinguistic programming and have a book coming out soon based on these NLP techniques. What does NLP involve?

NLP was put together by two men who researched the methods of three master therapists in their fields. The researchers then tried to find the ‘active ingredients’ underlying all the change work they witnessed and sought to reduce it to simple principles that they could be replicated. In short they wanted to see if they could copy the principles of excellence and best practice from leaders in the field and then teach others the same techniques to achieve the same high levels of performance. In therapy terms NLP is very creative and solution-focused and seeks to cut straight to the techniques for change without any diversions into speculation or analysis. It works on the process or underlying mechanisms of behaviour rather than on the content itself.

Can you tell us a little bit about Virtual Resolutions Therapy? It’s something you have developed yourself isn’t it?

VRT is my own adaptation of a technique from NLP but with a couple of key creative additions drawn from other fields I have studied.  This format allows me to achieve multiple therapeutic goals: understanding, acknowledgement, validation, cognitive challenging, processing of suppressed emotions, empathy for other perspectives, and leading and expanding the direction of thought to more useful perspectives. Recently I worked with one couple who had been to a Relate counsellor for over 10 sessions without a resolution for some of their conflicts. When I led them through the VRT format, they processed each of their main threads of conflict in just a few minutes each. They couldn’t believe the difference in therapies.

You’ve helped many people suffering with severe phobias. On BBC 3′s ‘The Panic Room’ in particular you dealt with some extreme cases. Do you think phobias are a modern-day malady? I ask because I can’t imagine a caveman having a fear of spiders or wide open spaces.

Yes I believe it is a modern day malady. The less exposure we have to the natural world the more ignorant we are of it. Ignorance and fear go together and we imagine all sorts of dangers associated with house spiders from the scary things we have seen on TV with tarantulas and truly dangerous spiders. In agrarian countries like Cambodia you see young children routinely handling spiders as big as my hand, so cavemen would have been the same. Asides from that, we still have an outdated ‘stone age’ defence response (releasing adrenalin in the face of danger) that doesn’t help us deal with modern age ‘threats’ such as job interviews, public speaking, traffic jams, deadlines etc. Adrenalin in these situations freaks us out and we start making inaccurate attributions about ourselves (e.g. we have ‘faulty wiring’ or ‘chemical imbalances’).

Why do you think more of us suffering from anxiety and depression?

There are many contributors to why anxiety and depression are on the rise. Part of this was for the reason mentioned previously, in that our evolutionary coping response are out of sync with the kinds of demands facing us now and we don’t understand them and panic when we experience them. A second reason has been the attempt to medicate our way out of our problems rather than resolve them at source. A third reason has been the rapid rate of technological change, meaning everything is faster, more rushed and stressful. We don’t have time to think, we are just fire fighting demands on several fronts. Things are changing so quickly we feel confused and uncertain because we don’t know how to handle all the new changes and options for lifestyles available to us. In addition we are more isolated due to the breakdown of traditional communities. Our brains are social brains and respond best to living in a community rather than relying on social networking media.

Have you ever suffered from a phobia?

Not a true phobia. I’ve had aversions to things but would face them when I had to. A phobia on the other hand is an uncontrollable state of panic with the only option being to avoid or flee. I don’t even have those aversions any more.

You’ve spoken a great deal about how we can find happiness in our lives. What is happiness for you personally?

Happiness for me needs a combination of several things needing to happen.

Firstly, to set yourself free of the patterns, habits, traumas demons or skeletons haunting you from the past. It’s hard to focus on anything else if you are preoccupied with anxiety or traumatised. Once you do, your attention is freed up to focus on more constructive and beneficial pursuits.

Secondly, to find a sense of completeness from within rather than trying to find this externally. In one sense we are all looking to feel loved and we look for this love by mindlessly pursuing unsuitable relationships, drugs, status, consumer goods. And then we become slaves to these things. Once you understand and accept yourself you have found self-love which feels completely different. You feel you are living rather than existing. Once you have a greater connection within yourself, you also develop a greater connection to others and the world around you by extension.

Thirdly, to become the measure of your own worth rather than comparing oneself to the standards society blindly promotes. This frees you up from needing to conform to someone else’s different expectations and allows you to create your own agenda and path for yourself. A happy person is one who is able to pursue and express themselves, their own unique blend of creativity and aptitudes in whatever form that takes, free from interference until they find the right match for themselves in their environment.

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By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, The Independant Monday, 6 June 2011

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The Pursuit of Happiness - Part 1

Obtaining and measuring happiness is something that the UK government has been actively researching for a while now. It's rather curious that at this stage of our advancement, the notion of understanding and incorporating something so fundamental as happiness sounds as challenging as sending probes to Jupiter to try and fathom its nature. It just shows us how clueless we are emotionally and spiritually regardless of our technological advancement. For many people the 'big' questions are not 'what constitutes a happy life? but transient and fleeting issues, such as 'when will Cheryl Cole get back with her cheating footballer ex-husband?'. Fortunately there are people out there who have taken the big questions seriously and have researched them. Psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrell propose a very common sense conclusion which is that happiness is a function of a person understanding and meeting their emotional needs. Some of these needs are universal, such as the need for security, friendship, love, status, intimacy, being stretched and challenged, and to achieve a sense of personal meaning. When these needs are met, we are in balance. Where do we learn to do this? When we look to society for guidance and leadership, what kind of role models does society present to us to emulate? - actors, celebrities,sports people, pop and rock stars (and other dubious celebrities who seem to have no discernible talent other than a willingness to do anything to promote their fame). These people may have financial security, fame and fortune, but that's not enough otherwise they wouldn't wreck it all the way we have seen so many of them do. There is a missing 'X' factor to this formula for happiness. If we want to copy what works, we should look to success stories rather than to people who have it all but who keep perpetually ruining it. If we interview people who have a high rating of self-happiness, then suprisingly money doesn't actually factor into happiness that much (providing there is the presence of a basic income that can buy basic necessities, life shelter, food, heating and a few simple amenities). Crucially people who rate themselves high on the happy scale tend to have their own happiness compass which they follow. Whereas unhappy famous people are always trying to please or impress society at large, trying vainly to stay young and beautiful and make time stand still, truly happy people are clear about their values in life and they follow their values without caring what others think about them. In short happy people are the measure of their own worth, not what society is trying to tell them they should aspire to be. The first step to happiness therefore begins with breaking free from the unspoken and unelected rules of our tribe. If we aren't clear about our own needs, then there are plenty of others who will tell us how we should live our lives and what we should aspire for.
The second step to happiness will follow in the next article.