An Insight into The Nature of Happiness

             For the first 18 years of my life, I considered myself very lucky to have good mental health, especially since I witnessed multiple people around me struggle with depression. The closest of them being my mother. Both before I was born and after, my mother has had several bouts with depression. It would come over her like a storm and bring about a lot of suffering. As a teenager, I never understood the extent of her struggles and couldn’t help but occasionally wonder why it was so hard for her to be happy. It certainly felt simple for me, until my luck ran out and I got to taste the bitter stuff. My recent struggles with my mental health and my mother’s struggles have made me ask the question, what does it take to truly stay happy? The challenge of our mental health, as I have come to realize, is multi-faceted and yet incredibly simple.

    Martin Seligman, a pioneer of positive psychology postulated that the three components to happiness are pleasure, engagement and meaning. We derive happiness from pleasurable experiences, greater happiness in facing challenges and overcoming them and true lasting happiness by finding a meaning to lead purposeful lives. This seems simple and frankly irrefutable. Yet, we find ourselves in intricate social circumstances and unhealthy environments that we have become accustomed to. We seek pleasure in the wrong outlets, engage ourselves in detrimental activities and feel a lack of a grander purpose. Some of us eventually end up deep inside the dark cave of depression where we forget the sight of light and the journey out of the cave feels impossible.

    Addressing the challenge of the journey to overcome depression is paramount. Seligman’s theory of happiness seems to emphasize the importance of our intention in life and the environment that we put ourselves in. Unfortunately, the first answer that many mental health professionals suggest are anti-depressants. Anti-depressants are prescribed under the generally accepted notion that the cause of depression lies within chemical imbalances in the brain. Their benefits, if any, are debatable. Peter Simons, a researcher in psychology mentions on the Mad in America webzine article “Non-drug Therapies: Adult Depression” that “in the antidepressant era, depression is understood to run a much more chronic course”. He also quotes research that states, out of those who used anti-depressants, “only 3% were well” at the end of one year. This is a staggeringly low number and unacceptably so for a treatment that is so widely propagated among medical society. I have seen the failure of anti-depressants with my own mother, who was on and off them several times. Yet they never quite seemed to solve the problem.

    Returning to my mother and Seligman’s ingredients to happiness, my mother expected to gain pleasure in the wrong relationships, did not keep herself engaged in the activities she was passionate about and ultimately felt purposeless. The treatment that did help her reframe her approach to finding happiness was psychotherapy. Psychotherapy helped her replace false beliefs about herself and reassess her attitudes towards her relationships. This isn’t to say that psychotherapy itself was the sole solution to better mental health but rather an honest analysis of her own attitudes and expectations towards people helped her reconstruct her perspective of finding happiness. Over time, her sources of pleasure, her choice of engagement in work and the purpose she found in her life changed. She began to take back control of her happiness.

    I firmly believe we are all in control of the course of our mental health. We can all make decisions that either help or damage it. It is a skill to be happy, one that can be practiced by occasionally evaluating the sources of pleasure, engagement and purpose in our lives. Yet, to those around us who are suffering, what they need is not a lecture about Seligman’s ingredients of happiness or a prescription of anti-depressants. What they really need is some compassion. Listening to their suffering, empathizing with their struggles and being a caring person can go a long way and in due time, they can learn to take back control of their happiness too. We can all practice a little more kindness and a little less judgement.

Aashutosh Kulakarni