UK: A Disheartened Nation?

Is the UK a happy country? Does the society in which we live contribute to our happiness or detract from it? Are we capable of measuring how happy we are compared with how happy we once were? Here we explore the societal aspects of the question and some very clear indicators of societal happiness, or more accurately, unhappiness and depression.

Let’s start with suicide rates. Obviously, someone who is happy and contented in their life would not want to end it. When suicides trend to zero, then it is an indicator that people are not desperately unhappy. When they start to rise, then that is a warning of serious problems within society. If suicide rates remain stable, we could infer that the general situation is on balance neither worsening nor improving. So, what are the trends in the UK?

During this century, there has been a notable trend, with suicide rates (expressed per 100,000) down to 9.4 around 2008 from roughly 10 at the turn of the century. From 2009 they rose to around 10 where they remained roughly constant until 2017, when they rose again before ratcheting up to 11.4 in 2024. They have remained above 11 throughout the 2020s with a relative increase across this period of 21%. This is no small rise and suggests a deep malaise, especially when the absolute numbers are revealed: an increase of 1,200 suicides in the UK annually.

Furthermore, and tellingly, the gender split is very significant. The average rate for males is 17.6, compared to 5.7 for females. A ratio of 3.1 times more male suicides to female suicides. 

So right from the outset we see two very significant trends and areas of concern. Suicide rates have risen sharply over the last 10 years and there are vastly more male suicides than female.

Looking further back than 1980 becomes problematic because definitions and recording methods changed significantly and we lose precision in the data. But it would seem the long-term average during the 19th century was roughly 10. This suggests that 25 years ago was a period of relative happiness in the UK, and the period post-2017 is one of significant societal unhappiness. 

If we now make a comparison with those European countries which rank among the happiest (Denmark and Iceland), we see a different trend. Both countries had very high suicide rates in the 1980s — 29 and 16 respectively — and demonstrated a steady decline in suicide rates throughout the 21st century, down to around 9 in 2024. We see a very clear difference in trajectories across the last quarter of a century between Iceland and Denmark, where suicides are steadily declining, and the UK where they are steadily increasing. In all three countries, male suicides are far higher, although Iceland stands out where the gap in gender suicides is somewhat lower than most countries in Europe.

One accepted contributor to the fall in Iceland and Denmark is increasingly difficult access to lethal means, such as guns, coupled with wider treatment for depression. If deeply unhappy and depressed people can be treated with anti-depressants, this will obviously tend to drive down the suicide rate. 

But in the UK, and despite access to lethal means becoming harder and an increase in treatments for depression, suicides in the UK are heading up dramatically, suggesting that societal unhappiness is even worse than the rates suggest.

Let’s now look at depression figures, using a consistent diagnostic tool (CIS-R) for England. In 2000, the percentage of the population officially diagnosed with depression was 2.8%. This rose to 3.8% by 2023, a relative increase of 36% over the period, or an increase of about 455,000 people.

In 2024 in England alone, there were 8.8 million identified patients taking anti-depressants — roughly 18.5% of the adult population. These patients were prescribed a grand total of 88.5 million anti-depressant prescription items in 2023. This figure is more than three times greater than for 2000 when only 5.5% of English adults took anti-depressants (about 2.1 million). This has generated annual sales of at least £300 million for the drug companies supplying anti-depressants to England on its own. 

It is a terrible indictment of the unhappiness of our society when such a large proportion of the population takes anti-depressants. And, of course, not all those suffering depression seek medical intervention.

Now if we compare with Iceland, with its lower suicide rate, we see that in 2024 15.7% of the population there took anti-depressants. This suggests that Iceland is probably keeping its suicide rate down, despite an unhappy population, by administering more anti-depressants. It also shows us that suicide rates alone are not a reliable metric of a country’s happiness. Furthermore, if Iceland is one of Europe’s happiest countries, with 15% of the adult population taking anti-depressants, that paints a grim picture for modern European happiness as a whole.

In 2010, Lord David Young, senior advisor to David Cameron, repeated former prime minister Harold McMillan’s famous quote: ‘The vast majority of people have never had it so good’. This provoked a storm of protest and within a day he had resigned. And this was back in 2010, when general levels of societal unhappiness were very much lower than today.

People have their own ways of dealing with unhappiness, one of which is by taking refuge from the hardship of everyday realities in drugs and alcohol. Interestingly, the prevalence of alcohol dependence in the UK has remained roughly stable over the course of this century. By contrast, according to the most recent Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Study, drug abuse has risen from 3.4% of the adult population in 2000 to 6.7% in 2024, a relative increase of 76%. In other words, it has nearly doubled this century. 

So, whereas in 2000 the total percentage of the English adult population taking anti-depressants, plus those with drug addictions and those with alcohol addiction, was about 9.9% (5.5% + 3.4% + 1%). By 2024, that percentage had risen to an eye watering 26.2% (18.5% + 6.7% + 0.9%). 

What on earth has gone wrong in our society that those figures could rise from one in 10 to one in four, over just 25 years?

If we extend the criteria to those who are generally unhappy but are not at the point of taking anti-depressants or becoming drug addicts, we might even be looking at more than half the population. We just don’t know.

The UK cannot be described as a happy nation; it is demonstrably not that. And whatever Parliament may pretend to be doing to make the country a better place, it is clearly not working. Quite the opposite, things are getting worse and getting worse fast. A number of studies have examined the correlation between happy populations and birth rates and fertility.  Nick Parr (2010) and Ceter, Clarke and Senik (2016) asked the question in a multi-nation study: ‘Are happy people more likely to become parents, or does parenthood make people happy?’ They found that people who are already happier are somewhat more likely to become parents. In another study, by Kim & Kim (2023), the authors analysed more than 130 countries between 2005–2019 and examined whether national happiness levels correlate with fertility. In ‘An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Happiness and Fertility: A Country-level Analysis’, they found a positive association between national happiness and fertility. This relationship remained after controlling for factors such as income and education.

Given this correlation between societal unhappiness and a drop in fertility, it should therefore come as no surprise therefore that the birth rate for UK-born mothers is declining significantly. (We aren’t allowed to know the birth rate for indigenous British mothers). While societal stresses may not be the only factor involved, this trend does closely follow the increase in national unhappiness. 

In 2004, the fertility rate was 1.75 children per mother declining to 1.54 in 2021, a 12% reduction. This figure compares to 2.8 in the 1960s. To preserve a stable population of British people, that figure would need to be at least 2.1. In other words, the unhappy British people are slowly dying out. 

Of course, for Neo-Malthusian supporters, this is good news: populations and useless mouths need to be whittled down dramatically. Over half a century ago, in 1972, The Club of Rome published a report advocating an urgent control of the birth rate to prevent a further increase in the world’s population. Of course, our current generation of globalist leaders, as represented by the World Economic Forum, maintains this Malthusian view by promoting the 1972 Club of Rome report here. It may thus be inferred that the continued increase in the UK’s unhappiness and consequent indigenous population decline may actually be the result of global policy success rather than policy failure.

Even if the current birth rate remained stable at 1.54, this already means that the indigenous population reduces to 73% of its former self every single generation, leading to a population extinction in around 700 years and less than a million in just 400 years! If the birth rate continues to fall, then that extinction will obviously happen sooner.

Of course, a decrease in birth rate is not the most severe or immediate impact on health for a society suffering from increased unhappiness and depression. The European Heart Journal published a report showing that people with depression had a 25%-30% increase in morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases. They also experienced a 22%-30% increase in coronary heart disease and a 25%-35% increase in strokes.

Worse still, all-cause mortality increases hugely. A large 2025 meta-analysis covered 268 cohort studies involving 10.8 million people with depression and 2.8 billion controls. The headline result was that all-cause mortality had a relative risk of 2.10, meaning that people with depression had about double the overall risk of dying compared with the general population. Furthermore, depressed people also diagnosed with cancer have a much higher risk of dying from the disease than happy people.

So, as the percentage of increasingly depressed English population rises (currently 18.5%), so does the incidence of early death from heart disease and a variety of other diseases. We neglect the severe consequences of unhappiness and depression at our peril.

But what makes the British people so unhappy? We don’t need to look much further than the thrice-weekly UK Column News, where the presenters frequently add a comment at the end along the lines of, ‘This news programme has been particularly depressing, but that is because of the current state of the nation’. Frequently explored factors include:

• Increased family breakdown
• Increased societal breakdown
• Large numbers of outsiders being foisted on communities
• Subjection to daily coercion, propaganda, and fearmongering
• Police more interested in protecting the state than the people
• Forever wars and warmongering
• Foreign interference in domestic politics (eg European Union, World Health Organization, or any number of think tanks)
• State and police surveillance
• Falling living standards
• Dependence on technology that we don’t understand
• Systemic sexual exploitation of our youth
• Being told men are evil, and white men are even more evil
• Deprivation of freedoms, including the freedom of speech
• Cultural destruction.

And so on, ad nauseam. 

Most of the above has nothing to do with traditional left/right politics but is imposed by a political class which treats the population with utter disdain. A recent poll by The Times showed that 61% of the population believed the social contract was broken and 58% believed that politicians were untrustworthy or corrupt. 

It would be futile to sum up all the UK’s societal dysfunctions in this article — the UK Column News already has that job well in hand, and regular viewers will have a good idea of what is wrong with the nation today. But it is worth making the direct link between the documented dysfunctions of society as described in detail by the UK Column and their effects on the unhappiness of UK society as a whole. 

The UK is a desperately unhappy nation, even if it prefers to keep the upper lip stiff and pretend that everything is fine.

Image source: Pexels