Monday 15 March 2010

New Statesman happiness piece

Here's a piece on happiness I've written for this week's New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/health/2010/03/positive-psychology-happiness
I'm very critical of positive psychology courses and the teaching of happiness, which is being enthusiastically imported to the UK directly from the US. There these courses are part of a multi-million 'Resilience' programme teaching happiness in the US army while over here they've started to be rolled out in our schools. The piece shows how this approach originated during the cold war, with management guru Abraham Maslow.