This is the BBC.

It's Mental Health Awareness Week.

So in this episode of Late Night Woman's Hour, we're talking about happiness.

Not because we can help you find it, but because looking for it in the first place might guarantee you can't.

Everybody's happy nowadays. Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was ahead of his time with that lyric in 1979.

In 2018, it's truer than ever. We're all hashtag blessed.

But is this constant pursuit and performance of happiness getting us down?

Joining me to discuss our mental health campaigner Natasha Devon. Welcome.

Thank you. Thanks having me.

Psychotherapist Philippa Perry. Hello. Hello.

And on the line from America, author Ruth Whitman. Hello, Ruth. Hi. So what do you think then? This idea of, you know, looking for happiness, striving for happiness and having to exhibit it all the time. Is it a good thing? It's very odd, isn't it? Because we've just picked up one emotion out of millions of other ways of feeling and decided this is the one we're supposed to feel.

I mean, in the medieval times, they were very keen on being melancholic. And there were self-help books about how to do melancholy in the best possible way. That's amazing. But now, now, we've got this thing about happiness. And

the thing is about happiness or any emotion is that you can't feel one at the expense of all

the others. I mean, if something's going to make you happy, it's also going to make you miserable.

If, you know, if you love someone, yeah, they'll make you happy, they've got the

power to make you sad as well. So it kind of turns all of your feelings up, Philippa?

You can't have one without the other. Right. Okay. Natasha, what do you think? I mean, I think

first of all, it's really important to define what we mean by happiness. I've just, I've got a book out

today called A Beginer's Guide to

Being Mental and one of the things that prompted me to write the book was looking at emotional

vocabulary and how we use different words and we mean different things. So if I say I feel depressed

today, I'm using it probably in a different way than you would use it if you were saying it.

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