Policy watch
| Date | 14 February 2011 |
| Published date | 14 February 2011 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.5042/mhsi.2011.0051 |
| Pages | 3-6 |
| Author | Simon Lawton‐Smith |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Mental Health and Social Inclusion • Volume 15 Issue 1 • February 2011 © Pier Professional Ltd 3
10.5042/mhsi.2011.0051
like an eager terrier. Melanie Phillips in The Daily
Mail was particularly vitriolic about the suggestion,
comparing the Prime Minister to an understudy for
comedian Ken Dodd, suggesting that any question
about ‘what makes people happy’ was absurd, and
stating that such ‘imbecility in government only makes
the population angry and sad’ (Phillips, 2010).
The idea does have its supporters, though. As
I write, over 20 MPs have signed an Early Day
Motion tabled by Jo Swinson MP, Chair of the All
Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics,
arguing that ‘promoting happiness and well-being
is a legitimate and important goal of government,
and noting that measurement of well-being will help
facilitate research, identify groups in the population
who have low levels of well-being, and allow the
Government to evaluate the impact of its policies’
(Swinson, 2010).
Measuring well-being (or even that elusive
happiness) is hardly a new idea. Pollsters Ipsos MORI
(2007) have posed a question along the lines ‘In
general, how happy or unhappy are you with your life
at present?’ to polls of 1,000 people over the last 20
years with the results shown in Table 1 (overleaf).
This might suggest that we are consistently, and even
increasingly, a pretty happy lot regardless – but it
is hardly a sophisticated tool for designing future
government policies.
What does all this mean for mental health? Well,
there is a strong read-across between general well-
being and better or poorer mental health. The new
public health white paper, Healthy Lives, Healthy
In the last issue I spoke of my happiness that
parliamentary bodies across the UK closed up shop for
the summer holidays, giving us a welcome break from
major policy announcements. But that seems a long
time ago, as I write this from a snow-bound office,
with new reports, announcements and consultation
papers once again flooding my email inbox.
From this deluge, three items strike me as of
particular interest. First, the Prime Minister’s proposal
that we should develop measurements of national
well-being across the UK; second, the new public
health white paper for England; and third, a critique
of the Work Capability Assessment, which is so
important for people claiming benefits while they try
to get back to work.
Are we happy?
The media extensively covered the UK Prime Minister
David Cameron’s pre-Christmas proposals that we
should measure general well-being across the UK,
and not just think of Gross Domestic Product (GDP
– the value of goods and services produced in a
country in a year) as the arbiter of how well the UK
is doing. Economic growth is important, he said,
but this well-being measure ‘could give us a general
picture of whether life is improving’ and ‘lead to
government policy that is more focused not just on
the bottom line, but on all those things that make life
worthwhile’ (BBC News, 2010).
The Prime Minister’s efforts to downplay
happiness in all this was lost on the media, some of
whom jumped all over the idea of a ‘happiness index’
Policy watch
POLICY
Simon Lawton-Smith
Head of Policy, Mental Health Foundation, UK
Abstract
A quarterly review of recent and forthcoming developments within mental health policy.
Key words
Mental health policy; Public mental health; Well-being
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