Rafa Euba studied medicine in his home base in Bilbao in the Basque country before turning to psychiatry, a branch of Medicine that treats mental illness, which he then studied at the Maudsley Hospital in London.
“I always found myself more interested in the human side of medicine, the softer side, as opposed to the more biological and harder aspects of medicine. So, I gravitated towards psychiatry and I came to this country precisely in order to train in psychiatry. Now I have been a consultant for over 20 years and I have come across all kinds of human suffering in all this time and this is what motivated me to write this book… A few years ago, I found myself specializing in treatments of depression, so for quite a few years, I had a large number of patients who had tried different treatments for depression which didn’t work. So, I have been exposed to an equally large amount of human suffering and that is one of the reasons why I began to think about the nature of happiness. I think that the main reason is that I keep coming across this idea… in everything really, especially in popular culture, in films and in novels and so on… the idea that one should strive to become happy … probably mainly in self-help books.”
Euba is particularly concerned that being inundated with ‘how to be happy’ information can have its downsides: -
“Happiness is not only an unrealistic goal, [with the pressures of] you ‘should’ be happy… [but it implies that] if you are not [happy], then you’re doing something wrong, so it’s something that you need to fix in the way you approach life, in order to become happy. In my view that is simply not so…. not true! I feel sorry for all the thousands of people out there buying self-help books and expecting to be able to become happy if only they can do this or the other. When, in fact, they’re never going to manage it because we are not ‘designed’ that way.
Rafa Euba as a student at the Maudsley Hospital in 1988
Not one to say he's not in favour of trying to improving our lives, to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but he has realized that happiness is not a 'state’ you reach and then you just stay there.’
There is a suggestion here, that failing to achieve happiness as we perceive it, could then lead to feelings of guilt, failure and even depression. There could well be something in this. Maybe that is what Rafa Euba means by ‘stop trying’.
Historically, it seems to be a relatively new objective that has entered our lives;
“…within the Christian tradition the idea was that we were meant to suffer in this world and if we do all the right things, we will then enjoy paradise in the afterlife… I suppose it’s very human to be forever complicating our lives… pursuing phantoms and ghosts… but that’s okay… that’s the way we are and I am not trying to fight it, as long as we’re aware that we’re not trying to reach a point in which, having done all the right things… we’re going to be happy.”
Book as published by Crux Publishing
In the Amazon, the Yanomani Indians make beautifully carved birds and creatures that they place on sticks and place them around the villages in the immediate forest. A filmmaker, (Carlos Pasini Hansen) who was living with them to shoot a documentary, assumed they were designed to ward off evil spirits, but when he finally enquired what they were for, he was told that they were’ nutrition for the mind and the soul.’
This begs the question of what role art can play in the search for happiness. Euba feels that the appreciation of beauty, though hard to establish, must have a link:-
“I think life without beauty would be unbearable! Much of what moves us, has to do with appreciating the beauty in the world… absolutely!”
In all this, there is a place for some religions, such as Buddhism, which for Rafa Euba is attractive on a personal level, precisely because “it accepts the world as it is, and accepts suffering as a part of human experience and I can relate to that… it has a way… a discipline or doctrine that allows you to tolerate the suffering that is inevitable in life.”
In Rafa Euba’s book, he comments how a 10th Century Caliph of Córdoba in Spain decided to count the days he had felt ‘happy’ and discovered there were only 14! Are those ‘happy’ days times when we were able to be ‘in the moment’ rather than dwelling on the past, or future?
“It’s very topical at the moment, because ‘mindfulness’ has become so prevalent and it’s a way of living ‘in the moment’. The problem is that to be able to live ‘in the moment’ is not that easy! … I think I mention in my book, that if happiness exists, it is a ‘still’ moment … like a still photo… not a film or a video… I think it’s ‘an instant’, that can become corrupted immediately if you add a narrative… it becomes complicated and is no longer pure. I suppose that from a semantic point of view it’s down to the difference between’ joy’ and ‘happiness’.
Euba's position on happiness has provoked some controversy within the fields of mental health and thearpy as some took issue with it.
Rafa Euba today.
One psychologist asked: “What do I experience, then, when I’m watching a very beautiful sunset, or some music by Bach?”
Euba:
“Even though I can completely relate to that, I think that that’s not Happiness, it is ‘Joy’…which is an emotion… not a state of mind….a fleeting, fragile emotion… but not a state of mind. But, thank God it exists, otherwise life would be completely unbearable of course.”
Perhaps the ephemeral quality of joy or happiness is because we experience it, but do not have to ‘deal’ with it as we would do with pain, which unfortunately usually hangs around a lot longer!
“We revere nature so much that we tend to assume that anything to do with how we have been designed and how the natural world has been designed is amazingly wonderful, by definition, and we wouldn’t want it to be any other way… well, I do! I would prefer certain aspects of nature and our lives and how we are designed… to be different! In particular, I wish we didn’t need to suffer and endure so much pain, but it seems that we do… so we might try to make the most of it!
In his book, Euba talks about the need for fear in terms of our survival and even our progress. Yet, it could be interesting to observe that there are generational fears that permeate whole periods. For instance, in the 1950s and 60s, people had a terror of being annihilated by the Nuclear Bomb. People were building bomb shelters like there was no tomorrow. Some religions could be said to feel threatened by ‘Western Values’, there is probably some male terror, when faced with the #metoo feminist movements, and now the prevailing fear seems to be that we will all end up cooked by the sun with climate change.
“‘Fear’ is, again, a part of life and I suppose we have individual ‘fears’ and then ‘communal’ fears that are being expressed now, in the growth of Populism… a fear of the foreigner and so on. It is curious that we feel nostalgic about times like the 50s for instance, when, if one watches American films, when anyone talks about nostalgia, they always refer to the 1950s because it was a time when America grew enormously from an economical point of view, there was a lot of prosperity and they had a stable society. Yet, they were terrified that they were going to be bombed any minute, so it seems that even the times that we feel most nostalgic about, had their own ‘fears’ …about being wiped out… There is a certain comfort in fears that we can share… that we can have in common, whereas individual fears and threats that we live with, are particularly difficult… the [truth] is that most of us don’t share that actually, we tend to suffer in silence.”
Perhaps taking his own advice, rather than seeking the satisfaction of welling in teh success of his book, Euba is already toying with the idea of a new project: -
“A subject that fascinates me is about ‘mad’ kings. Kings. presidents, leaders and dictators with psychiatric disorders. People have written about it already… there have been studies, but it is such a fascinating field that it would be interesting to write about…. some of these psychological disorders, if anything, make it a little more likely that one will become a leader. Being a bit psychopathic, for instance, helps… a bit narcissistic helps, undoubtedly, being a bit bi-polar, to some extent… there are many traits that help someone become a leader. From an evolutionary point of view… it makes sense, that some of us are like that, in order to lead the tribe wherever they need to go.”
Will they be happier then? That remains to be seen.
‘You are not meant to be happy, so stop trying’ by Rafa Euba is available on Amazon.uk
Corina J Poore and Rafa Euba chatting on skype
