British journalist Dominic Lawson ponders what makes people happy, and concludes that the elusive term “quality of life” can’t be measured by possessions or unemployment or taxes. He writes that the rest of us have much to learn from the work of Professor Allan Colver of Newcastle University, who found that children with disabilities are as happy as others. (See original story here.)

In an interview on The Lancet website, Prof Colver explained why this was a much less surprising result than many seem to have found it: “Someone without a disability would say that he would be unhappy if he was disabled; but for the person with cerebral palsy – that’s who they are, and as they grow up and develop their sense of self, that disability is indistinguishable from their identity as human beings.”

This insight is particularly valuable for parents-to-be or new parents. There is still a tremendous fear about giving birth to a child with a disability, based on the assumption that such a child will be wretchedly unhappy, someone to be pitied. Parents who actually have such a child – as I do – know that this is a false assumption, but are often dismissed as “making the best of a bad job”.

As Professor Colver points out, following the publication of his research, “parents whose child is diagnosed with cerebral palsy can now be reassured that most children with the condition who are capable of providing information have a similar quality of life to other children”.

His use of the phrase “quality of life” is especially telling: it demonstrates that this term is often wrongly thought to be made up of objective criteria, when in fact it is entirely conditional on the view of the subject. For example, if I were to have a stroke and find myself unable to leave a wheelchair for the rest of my life, I would grieve for what I had lost; but if I had known no other existence I would not feel misery at my inability to walk – just as I do not now feel grief at my inability to fly.

Nobody has yet come up with an entirely satisfactory definition of what constitutes happiness – although I think that Sydney Smith’s “To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence” will do to be getting along with. A state of unhappiness could be described as the opposite of that, but we might also define it as a life whose reality falls far short of its owner’s expectations.

That is perhaps at the heart of the modern malaise, which has resulted in an unprecedented growth in clinical depression in countries such as the USA and the UK. We have increasingly allowed ourselves to think that happiness is ours by right – it’s written into the American constitution – whereas in fact we can’t find it: it finds us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 6:56 pm and is filed under cerebral palsy, public attitudes, quality of life, research news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.