What Public Health Campaigns can glean from Positive Psychology

Traditional psychology studies the broken masses, and for all its efforts, mostly just compiles a compendium of great ways to break people. By contrast, Positive Psychology studies the achievers and gathers success strategies worth emulating. It's a "build what's strong" approach that augments the "fix what's wrong" talk typical of a psychiatrist couch session. The field's rapidly gaining acceptance among academics and general public alike. The research gods smile favorably upon it too. A 2013 review on the effectiveness of P-squared (what I'm calling Positive Psychology) looked at 39 interventions (6,000+ participants) and concluded: yep, it works, participants' well-being improved.

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