The Science of Happiness: Is It All Bullshit?

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted July 4, 2008.

A "Daily Show" interview that hit a chord for me was Jon Stewart's conversation with Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches "positive psychology" at Harvard and has written a self-help book. Early in the interview, a suspicious Stewart declares, "I am a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit."

Stewart, however, politely gives Ben-Shahar a chance to explain the value of his book and his course on positive psychology. Ben-Shahar is proud that his course is the most popular one at Harvard, to which Stewart gets an audience laugh by suggesting that perhaps the real reason it is so popular is because it is easy. This results in a nervous laugh from Ben-Shahar, who retorts that his exams are "actually quite difficult." Ben-Shahar then explains that there is now a "science of happiness" and offers a study to prove it, but an unimpressed Stewart quips, "How is that science?"

Finally, Stewart is no longer able to restrain his amazement that platitudes are considered profound at Harvard nowadays (the "Six Happiness Tips" on Ben-Shahar's website are about acceptance of negative feelings, positive attitude, meaningful activities, being grateful, simplifying life and physical health). Stewart ends the interview in Groucho Marx fashion by saying, "It's a fascinating subject and one that I can't believe you are getting away with."

Compared with the dangerously dehumanizing stuff in the mental health business, positive psychology is so innocuous that I almost felt sorry for Ben-Shahar. But Stewart's derision was not groundless. Even if a pretend profundity is harmless enough, it is never completely harmless when people surrender their own authority to others based solely on affiliations and advanced degrees. When people allow credentials such as a Harvard Ph.D. to cut off their own critical thinking, they will eventually buy into some truly dangerous bullshit.

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines bullshit as "nonsense, lies or exaggeration." My recent articles have been about the corrupt partnership between Big Pharma and psychiatry -- resulting in nonsense, lies and exaggerations about mental illness diagnoses, chemical imbalances and psychiatric drugs -- and thus, lately, I have neglected discussing the particular bullshit of my fellow psychologists, some of which is seriously dehumanizing.

While psychologists and psychiatrists have different bullshit, they also have overlapping bullshit, one example being the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental illness diagnoses. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, the DSM-II included homosexuality as a mental illness. The good news is that gay rights activists succeeded in getting homosexuality voted out of the DSM-III. The bad news is that the DSM-III and the current DSM-IV dramatically increased the number of psychiatric diagnoses, including more childhood mental illnesses, one of which is "oppositional defiant disorder." Kids don't get to vote in DSM mental illness elections.

While psychiatry has its own biochemical bullshit, psychology has its low-tech bullshit, some of which is quite dehumanizing. When I was a psychology major, one of the most prominent psychologists in America was the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, famous for popularizing "behavior modification" -- the use of positive and negative reinforcements to manipulate rats and people. One Skinner book that many psychology majors were required to read was Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which I remember thinking was a damn scary title.

My first institutional experience of Skinner's behavior modification came while interning on a locked ward in a state psychiatric hospital that had something called a "token economy." I recall one patient there -- I'll call him George -- who was severely depressed. George refused to talk to staff but, for some reason, one day chose me to shoot pool with. When my boss, a clinical psychologist, spotted my interaction with George, he told me that I should give George a token, a cigarette, to reward his "pro-social behavior." I fought it, trying to explain that I was 20 and George was 50, and that this would be humiliating, but the psychologist threatened to kick me off the ward. So with staff watching but not hearing from behind the nurse's station window, I asked George what I should do. Fighting the zombifying effects of his heavy medication, he grinned and said, "We'll win, let me have the cigarette." In full view of staff, George took the cigarette and then placed it into the shirt pocket of another patient. George, unlike B.F. Skinner, was not "beyond freedom and dignity."

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Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007). www.brucelevine.net.

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