Will Davies - The Happiness Industry
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 213 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2018
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When we discuss the issue of forced treatment, coercive mental health interventions like involuntary commitment, forced drugging, and electroconvulsive therapy usually come to mind. But force and coercion can be much more subtle. Many researchers and thought leaders have argued that our society mandates us to be happy and perform well-being at all times through cultural norms, media depictions, and workplace and school regulations.
This week on MIA Radio we interview Will Davies, Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths University of London, and author of The Happiness Industry, a book that explores the rapidly growing culture of mandated happiness and well-being surveillance. In this interview, we discuss the increasing pressure people face to be happy and think positive, and how this pressure serves the interests of the corporate elite and the State.
In this episode we discuss:
- What the "happiness industry" is and the history of its development
- How the notion that happiness can be quantified or measured, as well as advancements in neuroscience and medicalized frameworks of depression, have influenced our culture
- How employees are increasingly pressured to be happy or perform happiness within the workplace
- How people receiving welfare or government benefits are required to engage in positive thinking programs or cognitive behavioral therapy
- That holding individuals responsible for attaining their own happiness relieves responsibility from structural and institutional determinants of well-being
- The coercive and forceful aspects of the "happiness industry," including surveillance in workplaces and mandatory self-help programs in schools
- The role that positive thinking and self-help culture play in upholding neoliberalism and capitalism
Relevant Links:
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
The Power Thinker: Why Foucault's Work on Power is More Important than Ever
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
Dr. Davies' next book, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason will be published by Norton in early 2019.
© Mad in America 2018
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice. |
| 0:13.6 | Hello, this is James, and welcome to the Mad in America podcast. |
| 0:17.7 | And this week, Emily Shearer Cutler interviews Dr. William Davies, author of The Happiness |
| 0:23.4 | Industry. So welcome to the Mad in America podcast. This week, we're going to be interviewing |
| 0:30.1 | Dr. William Davies. He's a reader in political economy at Goldsmiths University of London, |
| 0:36.7 | and he's the author of a renowned book |
| 0:39.4 | called The Happiness Industry. His next book, Nervous States, Democracy, and the |
| 0:45.5 | Decline of Reason will be published by Norton in early 2019. So thanks so much for joining us, |
| 0:52.5 | Dr. Daviesuse. Pleasure. |
| 0:55.0 | Can you go ahead and define the happiness industry for our listeners? |
| 0:59.1 | Sure. |
| 1:00.1 | I think many people will recognize a development on various fronts, both in the business world |
| 1:08.4 | and in the health world and in the public policy |
| 1:11.3 | world and in the realm of self-help, a rising set of techniques and a set of ideas that treat |
| 1:20.1 | happiness as something that can be measured, something that can be monitored, managed, and |
| 1:27.4 | ultimately can be optimized in ways that will make |
| 1:30.8 | us healthier, more productive, more socially successful, more confident. And that happiness |
| 1:39.1 | can become not just an ethical achievement, as it was for many philosophers over thousands of years, |
| 1:46.9 | or something that happens to us, and that's where the word happens originally comes from, |
| 1:52.1 | is that it's something that kind of happens to us, it almost is by accident, |
| 1:55.3 | but that we can actively inculcate it, and we can actively pursue it |
| 1:59.8 | in the way that we might pursue other types of |
... |
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