Is positive psychology all it’s cracked up to be?

an article by Joseph Smith published in The Highlight

Kaiser Permanente commissioned a mural on a downtown Denver building to encourage people to talk about depression and other mental illnesses. 

RJ Sangosti/Denver Post/Getty Images
Just over 20 years old, this field has captivated the world with its hopeful promises — and drawn critics for its moralising, mysticism, and serious commercialisation.

The story of positive psychology starts, its founder often says, in 1997 in his rose garden.

Martin Seligman had just been elected head of the American Psychological Association and was in search of a transformational theme for his presidency. While weeding in his garden one day with his young daughter, Seligman found himself distracted and frustrated as Nikki, then 5, threw flowers into the air and giggled. Seligman yelled at her to stop, at which point Nikki took the professor aside. She reminded him how, from ages 3 to 5, she had been a whiner, but on her fifth birthday, had made a conscious decision to stop. If she could change herself with an act of will, couldn’t Daddy stop being such a grouch?

Seligman had an epiphany. What if every person was encouraged to nurture his or her character strengths, as Nikki so precociously had, rather than scolded into fixing their shortcomings?

He convened teams of the nation’s best psychologists to formulate a plan to reorient the entire discipline of psychology away from mostly treating mental illness and toward human flourishing. Then, he used his bully pulpit as the psychology association’s president to promote it. With Seligman’s 1998 inaugural APA presidential address, positive psychology was born.

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