PSYCHIATRY WORKING TO FIND THINGS THAT MAKE US HAPPY

Saturday, March 27, 2004

If you could make yourself happier, would you?

Setting aside some obvious reservations about avoiding things that would be harmful to you or to others, you might at least be tempted to ask, "What would I have to do?"

And the curious answer is, nobody really knows. That is, there are lots of things people do at least in part because they expect to be happier as a result (though they may very well be wrong about that). They take up meditation or aerobics, they go shopping or get married, they drink or take drugs.

Do these things work, in the sense that antibiotics or tranquilizers work? They certainly haven't been tested for safety and efficacy, the way medical interventions are. But what would a test for efficacy in enhancing happiness look like?

Martin Seligman is trying to conduct one.

Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Psychological Association. His interest is in positive psychology, whose goal "is to find out what's really right with you -- something you may not be aware of -- and to get you to use it more and more" (search for his name at www.edge.org). Psychology and psychiatry have been largely focused on ways of making miserable people less miserable, and have been reasonably successful at that, and, Seligman writes, his hope is "that in the next 10 to 15 years we will be able to make the parallel claim about happiness; that is, in the same way I can claim unblushingly that psychology and psychiatry have decreased the tonnage of suffering in the world, my aim is that psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world."

Seligman has collected more than 100 interventions, things people can do that someone claims will make them happier. He expects 90 percent of them have no effect, but he is testing them, one at a time, to find out what works, with the same random assignment placebo control procedures that are used in other scientific tests.

At the Web site authentichappiness.org you can register to try out a number of questionnaires gauging happiness and depression, he says, and then sign up for an intervention. "We're going to randomly assign you to an intervention. You won't know if it's a placebo or not. And then you will carry out this intervention, and you will journal it, and then we will follow you for the next year."

He won't disclose what the placebo intervention is, but he is eager to have people try one exercise, that, to his surprise, does work. It's called a "gratitude visit."

First, "think of someone in your life who made an enormous positive difference, who's still alive, whom you never properly thanked." Next, write a brief testimonial to that person, about 300 words, "telling the story of what they did, how it made a difference, and where you are now as a result." Then ask that person if you can come by for a visit -- and if he or she asks why, say, "It's a surprise."

When you arrive, read the testimonial -- everybody cries, Seligman says -- and he discovered that people who have made a gratitude visit say they are happier and less depressed when they are tested, up to a year later, compared with people who were assigned the placebo intervention.

If there is such a person in your life, you might want to go do that, in the same spirit as deciding, on your own, to start taking regular small doses of aspirin to lower your risk of heart disease (though some people can't take aspirin, for most people it is safe).

Over time, Seligman wants to identify a set of such interventions that reliably make people happier, that they can do themselves without necessarily having to go to a therapist.

For the first 30 years of his career, Seligman said, he worked on misery, especially on a phenomenon called "learned helplessness." Whatever the experiment, about a third of the subjects never learned to be helpless, "and about a tenth of them were helpless to begin with and we didn't have to do anything."

The people who gave up immediately thought that bad events they couldn't prevent were permanent, uncontrollable, pervasive and their own fault, while naturally optimistic people thought they were temporary, controllable, local and not their fault. Optimists do better in life by many measures (as well as enjoying it more) and there are interventions that help people learn how to be optimists if it doesn't come naturally to them.

A well-tested tool kit of happiness enhancers would be a very handy thing to have around.