Inventive Promoters of Joy Cater to Extreme Search for Happiness : Lifestyle: Americans find a megaindustry that is more than willing to help them fulfill their dreams of making the best possible life for themselves and for their children.

Happiness is not a hot, new commodity on display down at the mall. And yet it is routinely packaged, marketed and sold to the tune of billions of dollars, a consumer banquet of options our grandparents never imagined.

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” advised the popular 1980s song.

If only it were that simple.

Billboards, some obvious and others quite subtle, are everywhere, flashing “Salvation.” Fitness gurus, New Age visionaries, televangelists, talk show hosts and self-proclaimed experts on everything add to the noise.

Some 30,000 religions promise a glimpse of the Light. Self-help book sections monopolize shelf after shelf at the local chain store. Relax, have a drink--you’ve your choice of 500 brands of beer. Or meetings at 50,000 chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The new consciousness--some would say self-obsession--born of the 1960s no longer is a fringe phenomenon. Mass marketing has put self-actualization, counseling, recovery, self-help, alternative religion, health, beauty and the notion of “quality living” squarely in the mainstream.

“The ridiculous thing about all these choices is that people who have problems don’t have time to solve them,” said Tony Rodeghier, 43, of Orlando, Fla. “It’s the rich people who go do therapy together. It’s Betty Ford and Liza and Liz.”

For those who pass the day job hunting or on an assembly line, for those who spend evenings chasing children, juggling bills or nursing one too many drinks, self-analysis may not be a priority.

And yet, talk to Rodeghier a while longer. He had some group therapy after an angry and explosive marriage. “Yeah, OK,” the tanned and macho auto salvage dealer admits. “I guess when I have another relationship, I’ll know more about how to be, what to do.”

Many have been helped, even saved, by this new awareness. But as many have bought into so much hucksterism, fallen for the latest fad diet or way-out promise made on late-night TV.

“I have this book on my night stand entitled ‘How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life and Still Love It,’ ” said Rachelle Burk, 33, a mother of two who met her husband by way of a personal ad.

She’s barely glanced at the book during six years of marriage. Perhaps it would have been helpful to a friend who called late one night, a woman whose husband left her. His reason: “Too little sex,” said Burk.

More likely, she said, it would have been no more a solution that a bevy of others that guarantee thin thighs in 30 days, a glamorous career overnight and easy remedies for any character flaw. Few trust the simple “how-to” promises. And yet the road to Utopia is hard to resist.

“I’ve been up there with the best of them,” said Burk, a social worker who for now is home full time with her children in East Brunswick, N.J. “When I was single. I tried every diet there was: Weight Watchers, the Diet Center, the grapefruit diet, the F-Plan diet, the Scarsdale Diet. . . .

“Like a lot of people, I wanted a quick fix,” she said. “Even with my background in therapy, I can see the same thing there. Most people just pick up the phone book and assume therapists are all alike and can deal with whatever the problem. They don’t realize that anybody can call himself a psychotherapist, and that there are many types and methods of treatment.”

About 11 million adults seek professional help during any six-month period, according to federal studies. At their disposal is a surfeit of disciplines from which to choose: some 450 therapies, including subdivisions of cognitive, psychodynamic, transpersonal, humanistic . . .

More than 200,000 licensed psychotherapists (including social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists), as well as countless thousands of unlicensed counselors, clergy and alternative mental health practitioners, offer help today, more than triple the number estimated in the early 1960s.

For those who find more or less traditional therapy an uncomfortable or unaffordable option, a truckload of alternatives exist. An estimated one in three Americans have turned to some 500,000 self-help, support and recovery groups for a sense of community and strength.

Many find within these groups the “quality of love, guidance and other nurturing” that Dr. Charles Whitfield, a popular recovery writer, said only 5% to 20% of Americans knew growing up.

“Some of these problems you have, you think you’re the only one. Then you find out you’re not,” said Joyce Beckmann, 45, a divorced waitress in New Orleans. “I think talking about things can help. Like for a person who comes from an abusive childhood, that person can break the cycle of anger. If you can get it out, talk it out, you might be a happier person.”

“Come on,” said her boss, Frank Billeaudeau, 60. “We’re obviously not any happier. Just look at all the booze and drugs people use. The American public is being brainwashed to think they need counseling from people who are as messed up as anyone.”

Billeaudeau isn’t alone is this opinion. The 12-step and recovery movement has exploded over the last decade to such an extent that a backlash has emerged. Dysfunctionalism and evangelistic recovery rhetoric have cowed the masses, say critics such as Wendy Kaminer, author of the new book “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional.”

Others are skeptical of the rush to label every relationship, detail every dysfunction, chronicle every co-dependency, from “Toxic Parents” to “The Cinderella Complex” to “Contagious Emotions.”

“We’re constantly pointing somewhere outside the present moment, saying, ‘This, THIS is the reason I feel so bad,’ ” said Barry Kaufman, an unlicensed therapist and founder of the Option Institute in Sheffield, Mass. “People are getting stuck in the past.”

For $395, Kaufman conducts four-day weekend seminars that promise the true secret of happiness--”the 13th and final step, which is liberation.” Sounds good, but who’s to say the program outlined in his book, “Happiness Is a Choice,” is better than those sketched in any $12.95 self-help manual?

Certainly there are plenty to choose from. An estimated 4,000-plus self-help titles on psychology, health and beauty, women’s issues and other such topics are published each year, according to Books in Print.

Then there are the motivational audio and videotapes, an estimated $50 million of which are sold annually. Many are distributed through some 3,000 New Age stores--more of which are springing up all the time.

“It’s a huge market and it’s getting bigger,” said Fran Holt-Underwood of New Leaf Distributing in Atlanta, which wholesales $25 million a year in books, audio and videotapes, periodicals, calendars and music.

“Phil Jackson has the Chicago Bulls meditating and visualizing before big games. That’s a long way from what Red Holtzman--the quintessential coach of 20 years ago--had the New York Knicks doing. Those words weren’t even in his vocabulary,” said editor Jeffrey Isbrandtsen of the Bellingham, Wash.-based “New Age Retailer.”

“It’s great, but it’s not easy keeping a spiritual center in the world. You can get hypercritical,” said Isbrandtsen, 41. “You have to remember there is no quick out. It’s a never-ending path. You never get what you want. At some level, you’ve got to laugh at yourself.”

Somewhere, rationally, most people know this. But standing in the supermarket checkout line on an ungodly hot afternoon, the glossy covers on the magazine rack beckon, as they are meant to do. Twenty-two of the top 100 are geared toward women. The cover blurbs are recycled from one to the next, dangling guarantees of a better lover, better job, better therapist.

“We believe there’s an answer to every question, provided we find the right expert,” says Dr. Joyce Brothers, a longtime staple of the how-to happiness biz. “And if we work hard enough, anything is doable.”

Onto this stage strode Phil Donahue, who 20 years ago was nothing more than a Dayton, Ohio, guy who introduced his audience to intimate topics and the microphone. Even the most wacked-out guests felt closer to home than the idealized sitcom families an estimated half of Americans inhale along with their dinner each night.

Today, Donahue is a sort of Jupiter in the ever-expanding pantheon of talk-show gods who traffic in human frailty. “Seek counseling” is common advice on these shows, and millions of Americans are doing just that.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? All this racing around full speed ahead, trying this, then trying that,” chuckles J. L. Shilling, who lives on a nice chunk of property in rural Louisiana. “Come back to Earth.”

A full moon dangles between the naked branches of a pecan tree. Shilling, 53, and a buddy have been out hunting rabbit all day. They had barbecue ribs for dinner, and now settle in for a smoke and some aimless conversation.

In Louisiana, there is one psychologist for every 345 people; in New York, the ratio is 1-to-19. Shilling believes there’s a simple explanation for this: Americans spend only 3% of their lives outdoors.

“Pressure. Stress. If I had to go home every night to a 10th-story apartment, I’d smash my head against the wall,” he says. “Space is so important. Grass. Trees. We’ve lost touch with reality, with nature, with the things that bring happiness. Simple things, like family.”

Basically, J.L. Schilling is saying, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Stop the feverish pursuit.

“Happiness is simple,” he says. “Why do so many people make it so hard?”