Positive Psychology. Hans Henrik Knoop

but increasingly informs us in creating frameworks that improve our potential to thrive and function together and even limit the likelihood of developing mental disorders. And this, more preventive, more health and wellbeing promoting, more strength-based research, has come to be called “positive psychology”.

      NOT UNTIL THE DAMAGE IS DONE

      Since psychological knowledge is available to everyone, we might think that people would naturally accept it without reservation. As it turns out, it has not been accepted so easily. Indeed,

psychology has commonly and for many years been seen as something rather embarrassing, a concern primarily for people with problems and deficiencies, especially in their heads; triggering subsidies only if one had the right symptoms. For example, students typically have to exhibit learning disabilities or mental problems in order to be “recommended” for “diagnosing”. A general interest in psychology has rarely been a sufficient reason for requiring an appointment with a psychologist. As with medical doctors, you rarely contact them unless you are hurting already.

      Psychology and health science have thus acquired an image strongly associated with illness. This is a shame, and it does not have to be this way. It is difficult to change, however: traditions have deep roots, and public subsidies are mainly channeled towards damage that has already occurred, rather than damage we want to prevent.

      COSTLY SAVINGS

      Approximately 5% of the Danish health sector budget is currently spent on preventive, health-promoting initiatives; the rest is spent on people who are already ill. And this in spite of the fact that most health economists agree that prevention is far cheaper than treatment. Martin Seligman has shown that only about 10% of the funding for research and development in psychology and psychiatry in the USA since World War II has been spent on the study of the brighter sides of life, with the rest allocated to studies of depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTS and other disorders.

400 studies of joy versus 40,000 clinical studies of depression: these were the statistics around the year 2000.

      As a consequence, we know a lot more about illness than we do about health. We have precise and internationally accepted classifications of a steadily growing, and already countless number of diagnoses, while still lacking a common definition of mental health. Back in 1946, the World Health Organization did propose a definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Yet, as absurd as it may sound, even this definition has always been controversial, because of a disagreement about the meaning of “complete”.

      EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS

      It goes without saying that sick people need help and treatment, and it is easy to argue in favor of all the help that is available. But if urgent needs receive almost all the attention and almost all the money, not much is left for long-term considerations. And without long-term thinking, our common future obviously becomes more uncertain. Many contemporary problems are a result of past decisions that may have been made more or less in the dark.

      NO PILOT IN THE COCKPIT

      Csikszentmihalyi has compared mankind with air travelers – some in first class, some in economy, and some stowed away in the cargo hold – at the moment they realize that there is no pilot in the cockpit. It is a terrifying but not completely misleading image for thinking about nuclear weapons, demographic explosion and environmental collapse. In the big picture, some things are clearly beyond our e are also multiple signs in our everyday lives that we need more perspective. We might once more consider questions like these:

      Why do we frequently accept discipline without being given a satisfactory reason, when meaningless self-discipline unequivocally destroys our self-image, character and perspective? Why do many of us perceive a loss of influence when we are exposed to management, even though management that does not engage the staff by definition will have negative results? Why do other people’s weaknesses annoy us when effective organization presupposes that weakness is made irrelevant?

Why is it still commonly necessary to have an ailment before a consultation with a psychologist is subsidized, when everybody agrees that prevention is both cheaper and better than treatment?

      The fact that these questions are even relevant clearly demonstrates our embarrassment. And the fact that they are difficult to answer make them even more intrusive – not least psychologically.

      Yet, before we dive deeper into psychology, from the Danish author’s point of writing, it seems appropriate to take a look at the social and cultural contexts in which Danes, Scandinavians, Northwestern Europeans, but probably most significantly Danes, live: partly as a background for a more nuanced understanding of psychological conditions, partly as an introductory counterweight to all the problems listed above. There is no doubt that, psychologically, as a nation contemporary Denmark seems to have been extremely lucky in the development of the social and cultural framework. Certainly, it is not perfect: something is still rotten in the state of Denmark, but not everything. In a psychological sense we are actually role models for other nations – in several ways.