EUROPEANS ARE becoming less “emotionally prosperous” despite a rise in living standards, according to research that questions why people are so badly misjudging what makes them happy.
The study, due to be published next month in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, says there was increasing evidence that "psychological health and mental wellbeing" were getting worse across Europe. The result underscored the need for the British government to measure people's wellbeing, its authors said.
The UK government intends to add questions to the existing household survey, carried out by the Office of National Statistics, to gauge people’s happiness and how well they are reaching their “life goals”. It follows an announcement last year by French president Nicolas Sarkozy that he plans to include wellbeing in France’s measurement of economic progress.
Andrew Oswald, the professor of behavioural science at Warwick University, who led the study, and a member of Mr Sarkozy’s commission investigating the relationship between happiness and prosperity, said there was an urgent need to realise that economic growth “is pointless if people are becoming more distressed and feeling ever more pressurised”.
While Britain became richer by more than 40 per cent between 1993 and 2007, the study says, measures of “neurotic symptoms and common psychiatric disorders” rose during the same period.
In Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, there has been an alarming drop-off in job satisfaction in recent decades.
In Britain, Holland and Belgium all the indicators show that people are suffering greater degrees of psychological distress.
The paper points out that an analysis of health surveys shows 15 per cent of people, or one in seven adults, were last year known to be suffering from at least one mental disorder.
Some, however, doubted if happiness, or measures of it, should be used to inform public policy.
Jill Kirby, director of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, said: “Governments should not be deciding on how people accommodate desires to make money or have relationships or spend time with family. People should be encouraged to decide for themselves, rather than government deciding what happiness is or is not.” – (Guardian service)