Quality-of-life in nations is measured using an index of ‘Happy Life Years’, developed at Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. This index combines average appreciation of life with average length of life. Costa Rica is on top with 66,7 and Zimbabwe at the bottom with only 12,5 happy life years. The USA rank in the sub-top with an average of 58 years lived happily.
Rank lists are published periodically on the World Database of Happiness. The latest rank list counts 148 nations and covers more than 95% of the world’s population. These findings are presented at the 3rd OECD World Forum, 27-30 October in Busan, South Korea. The focus of this conference is on measures of social progress other than GDP. This measure of Happy Life Years is such an alternative measure.
Having children improves married peoples’ life satisfaction and the more they have, the happier they are. For unmarried individuals, raising children has little or no positive effect on their happiness. These findings by Dr. Luis Angeles from the University of Glasgow in the UK have just been published online in Springer’s Journal of Happiness Studies.
Previous research suggests that increasing numbers of children do not make people any happier, and in some cases the more children people have, the less satisfied they are with their lives. Rather bleakly, this has been attributed to the fact that raising children involves a lot of hard work for only a few occasional rewards. [continue reading…]
An investigation published in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics explores the link between child sexual abuse and inability to express emotions in adulthood.
Alexithymia, a clinical condition typified by a reported inability to identify or describe one’s emotions, is associated with various forms of psychopathology, including depression. Highly alexithymic (HA) outpatients are more likely to be female, less likely to have children and are characterized by more somatic-affective symptoms of depression and interpersonal aloofness. [continue reading…]
A searingly honest and moving account in The Telegraph by a writer who has witnessed her mothers slide into dementia.
When I was about 10, she made me promise that I would kill her if ever she became either disabled or demented. She would say: “I have no fear of death, you know. But I want a dead death, not a living one.”
She has begged each of us in turn to take her to Switzerland, but we tell her that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we helped her to die, and she understands that. So we cowards get on with our own lives and try not to think about her too much. There used to be a time when she could have explained herself to her doctor. They could have given her morphine for the pain, just a little too much. But how much easier it is to innure oneself to someone else’s pain than to risk being struck off the medical register; how much easier it is to hide than to bear a bad conscience.