Reading through findings that societal happiness has slightly declined over the past thirty years, I wondered what would happen if you'd taken the various anti-depressants, anxiolytics, and assorted other psychiatric medications out of the mix. After all, they're in pretty wide use, didn't really exist in the 70s, and should have had some sort of positive impact on the nation's mood. But commenter "meh" replies that the scales are balanced by the extremely powerful mood stabilizer we've taken out of the mix:Any rise in mental health from improved formal treatments is more than balanced by the number of people struggling along having given up their self-medication of nicotine.That last one is really fascinating and understudied. The reality is that at a previous time a majority of the population used a drug that is medically known to improves calmness, concentration and also take the edge off hard times.And then, for good physical health reasons, we all started to give it up. But it shouldn't surprise that lacking adequate replacements our general mental health and happiness went down.Calling enterprising grad students! You could probably key happiness data to periods of particularly rapid smoking cessation (look at California right after the smoking ban, for instance) and come up with some crude numbers measuring societal satisfaction after a sharp drop in nicotine use.Image used under a Creative Commons license from HappyShooter.
