Economists are also fond of measuring wellbeing. But the very idea that we can rely on a subjective measurement of how we feel at a random point is a new one. And it's the result of a trend over several decades.
In the history of happiness as an idea, the main tension has been between thinkers who hold a life must meet some objective standard to be considered happy, and those who hold that happiness is merely the subjective state of being pleased with one's life.
In ancient times, happiness was deemed a transcendent, almost godlike state, attainable only by the few. Today, however, the concept has become democratised: anyone can be happy. It is more about feeling good than being good.
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The catch is, with happiness supposedly in the reach of everyone, it is pursued with a frenzy that, perversely, often gives rise to its opposite: unease, discontent, even guilt.
The nature of the psychological sciences and the way they have been sold to the masses in the past 50 years has been critical in this transition - in particular, the central place of the modern clinical psychologist as confidant to patients. Today, counsellors are the new friends.
At the end of World War II, the average psychiatrist was administering an asylum and the average respectable psychologist was dressed in a lab coat experimenting with animals, putting together theories about behaviour. Clinical psychologists counselling their clients were looked down upon by their academic peers.
The real boom in short-term psychotherapy came with the growth of community mental health centres in the 1960s. It grew out of a defiance of the experts.
Since feelings were much easier to measure in a client than abstract psychological criteria determined by the therapist, from the 1980s they became the standard against which all therapeutic methods were judged. The result was an entirely new literature within psychology called "empirically supported treatments", which enabled therapies to be judged according to whether they made clients feel better.
As a result, today we see questionnaires are handed out to patients in psychology rooms and GP surgeries, which entirely lack context but are referred to as if hard science, as well as ubiquitous ''happiness studies'' and a plethora of happiness experts.
Meanwhile, psychiatrists and the medical profession have kept viewing the prism of mental illness through biology and chemistry, giving them a well-differentiated niche - but reducing them over time to mere medication managers.
So a new breed of therapist slowly emerged - sympathetic, friendly, light-hearted, warm, and caring. Gone was the transcendent manifestation, the abracadabra of therapy and the detached psychotherapist using complex Freudian terms to describe everyday problems.
Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories that shaped our broader culture. But psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. It has assumed a new role in the form of the modern "caring" professions, which provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
A US sociological study has reported on the proportion of people who said they lacked a confidant. In 1985 the study identified one in 10 people. Twenty-one years later the figure had jumped to one in four.
Is it any surprise, then, that the Medicare bill for psychological services blew out to $1.5 billion this year, twice the budgeted amount, forcing the government to cut the subsidised number of sessions with psychologists?
Who dispenses this psychotherapy is growing increasingly irrelevant, as a short-term therapy or counselling session is the same regardless of whether the therapist is a psychologist, a social worker or a counsellor. In the US, more social workers administer therapy than either psychologists or psychiatrists.
Psychologists in Australia are increasingly behaving like the medical profession in demanding extensive training and more onerous barriers to entry now they have access to the rivers of gold that is Medicare. But if a growing part of their work is to administer a sort of privatised friendship, new obstacles to carrying out their work, be they masters degrees or doctorates, are getting harder to justify.
by:Tanveer Ahmed