A backlash against happiness?

Newsweek has a particularly interesting article on the backlash against the obsession with happiness (2 February). This blog has already mentioned some of the key references but it adds more as well as some illuminating details:

* Allan V Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (see 22 December 2007 post). In the foreword Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the psychiatrist who oversaw the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, expresses doubts about the medicalising of sadness: “To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one’s life”.

* Eric Wilson Against Happiness (see 17 January post).

* Also Ed Diener, a veteran happiness researcher, has evidently co-written a book with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, called Rethinking Happiness. It is due for publication later this year.