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Positive Psychiatry: What Is It and Why We Need It
By Erick Messias, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.
Traditional psychiatry aims to restore people to their usual function. Positive Psychiatry hopes to help people move to a higher level of functioning.
Psychiatry is one of the oldest specialties of medicine. For millennia we’ve tried to understand and modify abnormal behavior and care for those with mental disorders. During this time, the tradition has been to restore people to their regular level of functioning. In recent decades, along with psychology and psychotherapy, psychiatry has started to develop the expertise to understand and modify good performance in order to support people moving from their baseline to a higher level of functioning.
A New Science of Human Strengths
Officially, two presidential addresses mark the start of this new direction and tradition. First, in 1998 when Martin Seligman, as president of the American Psychological Association, talked about “a new science of human strengths”. In that address, an infrastructure for Positive Psychology was sketched with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
Second, in 2013, psychiatrist Dilip Jeste called for a broader role in psychiatry in his presidential address as president of the American Psychiatric Association — thus…
