TruthBook Religious News Blog

From Times Online
February 18, 2008

Binge drinking, mental health issues, adolescent suicide: how can we solve the problems that beset so many children? The answer may lie with the new science of positive psychology

In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on ... what? It begins with P ... Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”

The class is the latest experiment in a new movement called “positive psychology”, which is slowly but surely revolutionising the way that education is approached in the English-speaking world. It is the brainchild of Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. If there is one figure responsible for the deluge of books, articles and TV programmes on happiness with which we have been inundated over the last five years, it is Seligman. So, when I meet him in a hotel suite in London, it is a relief to discover that he is not some moronically upbeat figure, like the self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko.

In fact, he tells me, “I was a slightly depressive grump for the first 40 years of my life”. After considering a career as a professional bridge player, then turning down a Fulbright scholarship in analytical philosophy at Oxford, he eventually became a psychologist and forged a distinguished name for himself studying “learned helplessness”, or how animals (and people) learn to give up in apparently hopeless situations.

While researching the phenomenon, Seligman was struck by something: some people, and even some animals, didn't give up even in highly adverse circumstances. He began to be interested in the opposite phenomenon, “learned optimism” - why some people possess unusual powers of resilience and self-control, and whether those powers can be taught or cultivated in others.

When, in 1998, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, the largest body of psychologists in the world, he decided that he wanted to use his presidency to shift the discipline from its histor-ical focus on mental illness to a new focus on mental health and wellbeing.

He began to gather together his own and other people's research from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), as well as from neuropsychology, the social sciences and even economics, to try to find the secret to living well. His team discovered that about 50 per cent of our average happiness level is genetically conditioned. But the rest is conditioned by things under our control: both external factors, such as our job or social life, and inner factors, such as how we think and what values we have.

His team undertook a huge amount of life satisfaction surveys, to look at what really made people happy. They discovered that some external conditions were not as important as people commonly believed: changes in income, for example, played a marginal role in life satisfaction. Other external conditions played a much bigger role, such as having a rich social network or being married.

The team also identified the inner work that can improve your wellbeing. They incorporated many techniques from CBT that have been proved to help to overcome depression and anxiety disorders. They also tried out cognitive and pedagogic techniques from ancient philosophy and spirituality, such as the idea of character strengths from Aristotle, mindfulness from Buddhism and learning to challenge one's irrational beliefs from Stoicism, then tested these insights empirically, to see if they really worked. As Seligman says: “We took some ideas from ancient philosophy and married them to the new scientific study of happiness. Aristotle never had the benefit of the seven-point scale [used to measure life satisfaction].”

So, while positive psychology is in some ways a “new science”, and a new way of approaching education, in other ways it is a return to the norm for Western education, which for centuries, through the Roman Empire and beyond, taught young people philosophic techniques to manage their thoughts and emotions. Indeed, he may not know it, but the ABC model of emotions that Darren is learning on Tyneside comes directly from a Stoic philosopher called Epictetus, who suggested that “it is not events, but our beliefs about them, that cause us suffering”.

It has also been taught for the past two years at the £9,000-a-year Wellington College in Berkshire. There, a teacher called Ian Morris, who bears a striking resemblance to David Miliband, tries to guide his wealthy young pupils to a rounded sense of the good life. He says: “Most of them really seem to value the lessons. You occasionally get some mucking around. I sent one boy out for clowning around and he complained, ?I got thrown out of happiness classes for laughing', which I thought was pretty funny.” Harry, a polite 16-year-old whom I meet at a meditation workshop at Wellington, says the wellbeing classes have a decent reputation among the pupils. “We're a very sporty school, and Mr Morris appeals to that in the classes. For example, he teaches us a basic meditation technique which he says Sir Steve Redgrave used before big rowing races.”

Britain is, at the moment, doing badly in terms of helping its young to achieve wellbeing. The UK came bottom in a recent Unicef survey of life satisfaction among children in 21 developed countries. The Institute of Psychiatry announced last year that the number of children with emotional and behavioural problems in the UK has doubled in the past 25 years. The number of adolescent suicides has quadrupled.

To try to take the teaching of wellbeing forward, Layard organised a pilot scheme to teach “resilience” in 22 state schools in South Tyneside, Hertfordshire and Manchester. Last July about 100 teachers and local council officials spent ten days at the University of Pennsylvania, where they trained with some of the most famous psychologists in the world, including Seligman himself and Aaron Beck, the inventor of CBT. They came back enthused. “The ideas we learnt were so useful, even for our own lives,” says Diane Wood, assistant to the chief executive of South Tyneside council. “In ten days, our head of child services overcame his fear of flying, while I don't think I've argued with my teenage son once since I went on the course.”

They started to teach the subject in September to 4,000 kids ranging from 11 to 16. The classes include teaching cognitive techniques to some troubled adolescents who have dropped out of schools because of bullying or other problems. I sat in on one in South Tyneside. The teacher, Melissa, started by picking out entries from a “problem box”, into which the students had put anonymously written notes about problems they were facing.

One note that Melissa read out says: “I'm not sure I can take any more. I feel so stressed and bad all the time. It all started when I went to the new school.” The pupils then discussed the problem, empathising and asking what could be done to change things, both in terms of the person's inner beliefs and his or her external circumstances. One affable 16-year-old boy with tattoos on his arms, Geoff, said: “I lost a tenner the other day. I was stressed at first, then I figured, well, it could have been more.” The boy next to him laughed, “Yeah, but it wasn't your money, was it?” “Well, that too,” Geoff conceded with a smile.

The pilot scheme is intended to last three years, during which the children will be surveyed to check the effect of the classes on their wellbeing and emotional resilience, compared with groups who haven't been to the classes. The results so far have been good; council officials in Tyneside and Hertfordshire are already eager to roll out the subject to more schools.

Seligman tells me that nowhere else in the world have his ideas been so taken up by public policy as in the UK. “There's a real buzz here about the politics of wellbeing,” he says. He compares Britain's embrace of both positive psychology and CBT to the Renaissance government of Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, which used its wealth to help to translate and reintroduce ideas from ancient philosophy.

The Government's interest in CBT and positive psychology is, in large part, thanks to Lord Layard, who wrote an influential report in 2002, pointing out that the Government spent more money on incapacity benefits for the mentally ill than it did on unemployment benefits. Mental illness, he declared, was “the major social problem facing our country today”.

Positive psychology also seems to offer a way forward for education beyond the ethical relativism of the past 30 years when, in the words of Darrin McMahon, the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, “the only people teaching values in schools seem to be sports coaches”. The science of happiness is a way in which timeless values and philosophical techniques can be reintroduced into the classroom.

Even among the leaders of the wellbeing movement, there is disagreement over what the meaning or goal of life should be: Lord Layard thinks the goal of policy should be “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Seligman says: “There's too much emphasis on happiness, I think. I'm interested in the meaningful or virtuous life, what the Greeks called eudaimonia.”

As concepts of wellbeing are slowly introduced into the national curriculum, this pluralism of views needs to be displayed, not hidden away. Young people need to be given guidance in tried and tested ways of thinking and living, but they also need to understand that no two people (or prophets) ever fully agree on the meaning of life, and no amount of scientific data should ever stand in the way of them making up their own minds.

Labels: Britain, education, happiness, Jules Evans, learned optimism, Martin Seligman, positive psychology