Social Anomie, Abandonment of Self

"People can be their own best resource for their health and well-being, when they're connected to each other and the right services."
"Social prescribing changes our lens from seeing individuals as patients with conditions, to understanding them as patients with gifts."
Kate Mulligan, director of policy and communications, Alliance for Healthier Communities,Toronto

"[Social prescribing] engendered feelings of control and self-confidence, reduced social isolation and had a positive impact on health-related behaviours including weight loss, healthier eating and increased physical activity."
2017 U.K. study, BMJ Open

"Is it yet another unwanted role to be foisted onto [general practitioners], or a welcome path away from the medicalization of society?"
Janet Brandling, health researcher, University of the West of England, Bristol

"The prophecy was we are going to create a hyperreality. That prophecy [1960s French philosophy] is coming true."
"In real life, we are no longer just people. We are always an audience. We are always part of this spectacle [of 'authentic' life]."
"We are the content. Social media are not just tools. They are a world. They are an environment. This is an environment we are in."
"It's an experience that can be simulated [emotions], that can be built artificially in a laboratory. Happiness is not just a kind of emotion, a mindset. Essentially, happiness can be conceived as a product, as a business."
"Social media provides us with a 24-hour stage where we must show the best part of ourselves."
"I strongly agree, the Happy Place is everywhere. Because everywhere, generally speaking, people search for ... the opportunity of turning that ordinary experience into an extraordinary experience -- into something with more beauty than the normality, more beauty than the ordinary way of living."
Paolo Granata, assistant professor in media studies, University of Toronto 

The Happy Place makes no pretension to be art and instead cuts directly to the social-media chase.

Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

Existence, for people, has become extremely difficult. Life has not been kind to us. We are confused between real life and imagined life as it could be, the kind of life that appears so appealing that eludes us and comforts those that have it. And we know that people are happy, exuberant about life and their place in it, those public figures and celebrities who are always smiling, giving advice, flaunting their beauty and talent, inviting envy and gloating over their success. Social media is replete with their images, their sparkling presence. And you can have a bit of it each time you buy a product that they praise.

And then there is everyone else. For whom life and their presence within it is boring, gloomy, miserable, without promise. Depressing. And how the mind feels, the body soon follows. What is there to live for? That imagined height of pleasure in self, certitude in self-value, confidence, that aura of having made it in a world that favours those whose personalities have lifted them above the fray, lauded their accomplishments, laden them with honours, eludes ordinary mortals who can but dream...

The British health system is re-tuning itself, changing gears, recognizing that people who present to their medical practitioners with symptoms of loneliness, despair and poverty of opportunities are in desperate need of new measures for uplifting them from the valley of hopelessness they have descended to enable them to clamber up the slopes of hope to the summit of satisfaction in life. Overburdened family doctors faced with the ever-growing prospect of failing patients begging for some formula to balance life's emotions hardly know where to turn.

At the centre of Happy Place is a giant plastic cookie with chocolate chips that swing open so you can put your head through the hole.   Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

Enter an ages-old tried-and-true prescription that urges people to venture outside routine; take a vacation, begin an exercise regimen, take up classes in pottery, cooking, gardening, knitting, take long walks in natural surroundings. Go out to a national gallery of art. In Quebec visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are entrance-free with physician prescriptions. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is preparing a similar launch in collaboration with social workers and health care professionals.

These alternate-to-drugs therapies are being viewed as intuitively effective for elderly people and those that fall into the category of the "worried-well". Mild depression, some digestive and metabolism ailments are known to respond positively to exercise. And then there is the recognition of social isolation representing a deterrent to good health. Social prescriptions are being given a new lease on life, as it were, along with those they help. Studies to gauge their effectiveness in blood chemistry measurements and the efficacy of social connectedness now boost these regimens.

Janet Brandling, a health researcher in Bristol, England, reviewed published science on social prescribing to discover that almost all patients came with a history of mental health problems as "frequent attenders" at doctors' offices; many with chronic conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. Mostly female, medical interventions had limited benefit to them.

The Alliance for Healthier Communities in Ontario representing a network of community health centres also launched a recent program to measure the use and effectiveness of a strategy of social prescribing.And then there is the "happiness" industry, putting on showpiece displays and charging a hefty price for attendance at their events that guarantee attendees will experience true happiness. "We believe that our world today can use a lot more happiness", organizers of the Happy Place state.

The Happy Place staff member Karlena Waught in the rubber ducky portrait spot.

Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

Adults are now paying fees of $40 for entry to events showcasing rooms dedicated to casting a glow of happiness over the viewers who can pose alongside giant candies, swirling confetti within glass domes, colossal artificial flowers, oversized shoes that an oversized adult can clamber into; large, colourful bathtubs surrounded by colourful rubber duckies' chambers full of infinity mirrors, to take selfies and post them on Instagram to achieve an instant glimmer of notice.

The Happy Place appeals to the child in adult visitors.  Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

Reality and normalcy was never so much fun. Disneyland and Santa's Villages have become stale simulacrums of innocent childhood delights. That was when childhood discoveries of the world in all its natural splendour was something children living in urban settings were divorced from and an alter-world of fantasy and glamour was the substitute of choice. Substitutions of reality verging into a world of wonder, of the imagination enticing adults to reject reality are now exemplified by social media constructs.

We want the spectacular not the ordinary. Give us Jurassic Park. All the thrills of escaping the world we live in to venture into another world far more special where we can take photographs of ourselves in a background of delight, and experience happiness in the process. Ask not what happiness is, on the other hand, for few know the answers and even fewer may know what it feels like while expressing their delight on feeling it because they're convinced that they should and they will as long as they follow instructions and pay the entrance fee.

The day before The Happy Place opened in Toronto, staff members show off some of the Instagrammable spots.

Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail