It has become increasingly common in recent years for government agencies and employers to give advice on 'wellbeing.' This often amounts to prescriptions for health (exercise ; fresh air ; sleep ; balanced diet ; social contact ; avoidance of too much alcohol) that have been known to humanity at least since the time of Hippocrates and that are intuitively known to everyone with common sense. When someone cannot follow this advice, it is often because of onerous caring responsibilities, unsocial working hours or serious health problems. The question has to be asked: What is the purpose of this constant flow of advice (and, in the past few years, it has become a relentless torrent) when those who are in a position to follow it are obviously doing so, and those who are not, cannot ? To take the example of exercise: time, money, and body image are all factors which either encourage people to take exercise or deter them from doing so.
All this is not to deny the fact of individual moral agency ; only to point out that every individual is embedded in a social context. That may seem obvious, but the implications of this fact are not often appreciated. This was revealed in the most stark terms yesterday, in a debate in the House of Lords, when a peer of the realm suggested, in all seriousness, that overweight employees of the NHS be 'fat-shamed' (to use his own charming terminology), because their body shape sets a bad example. (This could be seen as yet another argument for abolition of that insult to democracy - see my blogpost on the subject earlier this week - but I was relieved to hear that his idea did not meet with universal assent). Professor Michael Marmot, a leading scholar of health inequalities, has shown that the lower down the hierarchy at work you are, the more likely you are to suffer from ill health, because of the absence of control over one's work. In the case of many NHS employees, this problem is exacerbated by long and unsocial working hours. No amount of 'fat-shaming' is going to correct that.
There is another point following on from this. This never-ending discourse about 'wellbeing', by making individuals focus on their own failings, actually causes discontent and anxiety. It assumes that, however difficult your circumstances, your own lack of 'wellbeing' or health is somehow your own responsibility. As the sociologist William Davies has shown in his book, 'The happiness industry' (2016), this is connected to long-term trends in psychology, neuroscience, psychopharmocology and marketing, which seek to quantify, measure and ameliorate 'happiness' (a term so culturally determined that it is impossible to define) at the individual level, based on the assumption that of neo-classical economics that individuals are rational, calculating and utility-maximising. The causes of ill health, whether classified as 'mental' or 'physical', are in fact never simple, and often not amenable to a quick fix, whether it comes in the form of mind-altering prescribed drugs, or the maxims of 'well-being' gurus. They are often social, and often lie deep in an individual's history. That is why Sigmund Freud said, toward the end of his life, that psychoanalysis for individual clients often needed a very extended period to do its work properly. He had come to this conclusion through his own bitter experience of cases such as the 'Wolf Man', whose own analysis he had ended prematurely. Freud had learned that any technique which does not account of a human being's complexity (or unfathomability) is ultimately not worth anything. That observation applies in spades to the facile assumptions of 'wellbeing.'