Seligman on Prevention

Martin Seligman, one of the most influential modern psychologists in the world, tells us what works in prevention and human growth. It is not scare tactics, hell fire and brimstone sermons or anxious warnings.

I've worked in prevention for the last 15 years or so, and I thought when I started that what prevention would be about was what this group of prevention experts told me it was about; it was about the medical model done early. And then as the prevention literature started to emerge on what worked and what didn't work, it turned out that virtually nothing that we had learned about the biology of mental illness or the psychotherapy for mental illness was applicable to prevention, that prevention wasn't about repairing damage.

Rather, the things that worked, in my own life will work with kids. I changed my attitude and it changed my behavior and my feelings. I decided to become more optimistic. We taught young people how to deal with Adversity in a positive manner.

We taught children the skills of thinking about bad events as local and specific problems. They became accurate in their attributions. By doing that one simple thing we can cut the rate of depression by about fifty percent.

Prevention, is not about repairing damage. It's about taking the human strength, hope, optimism, future-mindedness and building it and using that as a buffer against depression.

... if you're interested in preventing schizophrenia in kids that are genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia, if you're interested in preventing drug abuse in kids that are vulnerable to it because they live in the wrong neighborhood, if you're interested in preventing depression for people who are going to come across awful events, it's not the medical techniques, it's not the psychotherapy techniques that are useful, but rather there are a set of human virtues, human strengths, which are the great buffers against these conditions.

Courage, hope, interpersonal skill, perseverance, honesty, work ethic, capacity for pleasure, future-mindedness, capacity for insight, just to name a few.

These three remain, faith, hope and love but the greatest is love. I Corninthians 13