The Expanding World of Social Prescribing

Take Two Aspirin, and Call Me in the Museum

If feeling good is most often about the relationship between your inner thoughts and your outer context, then why do so many treatments for unhappiness involve working on the inside alone?

This is a question that many doctors have begun asking, apparently. They have started a move toward social prescribing – giving prescriptions that involve getting their patients out of the house and into the community. At least, this what some doctors in Britain and Canada are doing. They are writing prescriptions for free admissions to museums, as well as recommending things like dance classes and chess clubs as treatments for people whose low moods are the product of disengagement from meaningful activities.

The idea that the world around us can be used as a tool for well-being shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But social prescribing does tell us something about the ways professionals are thinking about happiness.

Why does this matter?

Although a person’s context has always been seen as important to their happiness,* for a long time happiness was categorized as a psychological phenomenon. Your mood could be managed in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions or in private with your journal. And this means that the broader sociological or cultural environment wasn’t viewed as particularly significant.

And that opens the door to many other ways to deal with issues around happiness, and allows people to combine philosophies and schools of thought in the way they handle them.

If context matters for happiness, then how, exactly, did it become something  handled psychologically in the first place? A small slice of the answer might have to do with the notion of baseline happiness (see the footnote below). But there’s much more to it than that. The answer to that question is long and complicated – and best saved for another time.

* To some extent. Some theories of happiness involve a version of the notion of baseline happiness, the idea that people are biologically engineered to return to their typical level of happiness after a major change. Those theories suggest that, in the long run, your level happiness is unrelated to the world around you. Myself, I don’t buy this. I’ve experienced happier and less happy periods in my life as my circumstances changed, and that doesn’t seem to be at all unusual. It also suggests that, since it can’t be changed, as a society, we hold no responsibility for the happiness of others. So this isn’t just wrong. As I’ve been arguing throughout this blog, it’s pretty irresponsible as well.