Martin Seligman's Journey (continued)
The Child Optimist
One psychology program whose effectiveness won't require
much study to ratify is Seligman's brilliant Penn Depression Prevention
Program, which broke new ground in 1990. Detailed in his fascinating 1995
book The Optimistic Child, this remarkable program was developed
by Seligman and three young psychologists at Penn -- Dr. Karen Reivich,
C'88, G'92, Gr'96, Dr. Lisa Jaycox, G'89, Gr'93, and Dr.
Jane Gillham, G'90, Gr'94. It has, in several different situations
and over several years, repeatedly reduced the occurrences of depression
in children by half.
The program, which has since been renamed the Penn Resiliency
Project, was inspired by a life-changing discussion that took place in
1984, when Seligman attended a conference at the MacArthur Foundation.
He describes those meetings as a "face-off between prominent psychologists
and immunologists." The issue was what to do (and in particular,
how to fund) a fledgling discipline called psychoneuroimmunology, a field
of science widely investigated today, which basically studies how the
mind affects the body's immune system.
Among the many celebrated participants at this 1984
conference was Dr. Jonas Salk, whose polio vaccine had changed the world
decades before. Being the most famous immunologist in the world, the elderly
Salk attempted to arbitrate the heated arguments being waged between the
biological immunologists and the psychologists. And his private words
to Seligman, recounted in Learned Optimism, resonated:
"If I were a young scientist today, I would still
do immunization. But instead of immunizing kids physically, I'd do it
your way. I'd immunize them psychologically. I'd see if these psychologically
immunized kids could then fight off mental illness better. Physical illness
The Penn Resiliency Project typifies how Seligman was
able to switch his scientific gears away from learned helplessness and
toward psychological immunization. By then, his work on learned helplessness
had already made him an expert on depression and pessimism. He had created
powerful tools capable of diagnosing how a person's level of pessimism
could measure their risk for developing depression. Inspired by the work
of Penn's legendary "depression wizard," Dr. Aaron T. Beck,
the University Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Seligman had also spent
years refining a number of cognitive techniques and exercises which helped
to relieve and heal persons with depression, and prevent future recurrences
of that ever-more-pervasive illness.
To vastly oversimplify the very complex field of cognitive
psychology, its fundamental, revolutionary concept, first articulated
by Beck in the late 1960s, is that severely negative or depressed emotional
states are caused by the negative thoughts we tell ourselves. This may
seem like simple common sense, but at the time it was revolutionary, and
its implications staggering.
Since Freud invented psychotherapy, the basis of all
therapy rested on the nature of events that had affected people
in their lives, and the behaviors and emotional states that people developed
as a consequence of those events. Beck, soon joined by Seligman, postulated
that it was not the events themselves but the thoughts we used to explain
these events to ourselves that were the major determinants of whether
or not, for example, we might develop depression. If so, Beck and Seligman
maintained, then people at risk for depression should be able to fend
it off by intellectually "disputing" the severely negative thoughts
they think to explain various events in their lives.
For example, with the benefit of treatment to alter
his or her "self-explanatory style" and develop a reflex of
disputing negative thoughts, the ruminations of someone going through
a painful divorce might sound something like this: "I failed at my
marriage -- well, there's nothing particularly unusual about that, marriages
fail half the time Š in the end, it was my fault: I could have saved it
-- well, then again, my lousy spouse could have saved it too, and now
that I think about it, what I'm missing most about our marriage were those
terrific early memories when it was good; in fact, if we were still together
right now, we'd probably still be at least as miserable together as we
were the last few years Š I made so many terrible mistakes -- well, I
wasn't the only one in this marriage, and after all, to err is human Š
With astounding scientific power, Seligman and a host
of collaborators around the country (and even beyond) have proven that
learning these inner "disputation skills" can speed the recovery
of depression, and, perhaps more important, can actually prevent it.
Feeling Good Versus Doing Well
The Penn Resiliency Project has for the past eight years
proven that cognitive therapy can not only help adults, but also can successfully
immunize children against depression. It recently earned a five-year,
$2 million grant from NIMH to continue its work.
Even the most jaded critics of government-funded science
would be hard-pressed to object to this use of their tax dollars. Whereas
childhood depression (in a strict, clinical sense) was a relative rarity
just two generations ago, American children are now suffering from a full-fledged
epidemic of depression. Today, about one in four children experiences
serious, debilitating depression before reaching adulthood.
What's gone wrong? Seligman has a few answers. To again
oversimplify a complicated argument, Seligman lays a lot of blame on the
"self-esteem" movement for replacing the old-fashioned goal
of "doing well" with the contemporary goal of "feeling
While the Penn Resiliency Project has earned the attention
of child- psychology experts around the world for its effectiveness, its
cost-efficiency has also earned the admiration of school administrators,
whose focus is the bottom line. The program consists of just 12 sessions,
held once a week for about 90 minutes, with children whose answers to
a questionnaire indicate that they are particularly susceptible to depression.
Employing an engaging series of exercises utilizing stories, cartoons,
group discussions, and other techniques, the program ingrains powerful
reflexes in pessimistic children -- to change what they tell themselves
about failures and to encourage them to persist in the face of those failures.
In essence, the project tries to re-imbue today's children
with the values taught a generation ago. In his speech to the North Carolina
psychologists, Seligman touched upon what was my own favorite book as
a child. "Thirty years ago," he said, "the most influential
children's book of the time was The Little Engine That Could,"
the endearing tale of the little locomotive engine who wasn't sure if
she could pull a train over the mountain but who kept telling herself,
"I think I can, I think I can" and prevailed.
"Think for a moment about what you are most proud
of," Seligman asked his audience, then paused briefly. "I'll
bet that what you just thought of now has something to do with some goal
at which you at first encountered failure, but which you persistently
kept pursuing until you achieved your goal, whether it was love Š work
Š or play Š "
This sense of persistence in the face of failure forms
the heart of Seligman's vaccine against depression in children. It involves
not only sophisticated disputation skills but also a lot of good old-fashioned
hard work. Seligman's emphasis on hard work clearly separates, and elevates,
him from his more popular, less scientific peers in the wide world of
popular culture's optimism gurus.
"A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted
as to be permanent," Seligman writes in the introduction to his profoundly
realistic 1993 mass-market book, What You Can Change And What You Can't.
"I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. Pessimists
can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like
whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes Š "
By putting a happy face on failure, he argues, the blind
optimism pushed by the self-esteem movement is actually counterproductive.
"Optimism that is not accurate is empty and falls apart," he
writes in The Optimistic Child. "Life defeats it." In
the long run, he says, encouraging your child to work harder to achieve
his or her specified goals will be far more effective.
As he writes in The Optimistic Child, "The
feeling of self-esteem is a byproduct of doing well. Once a child's self-esteem
is in place, it kindles further success. Tasks flow more seamlessly, troubles
bounce off, and other children seem more receptive. There is no question
that feeling high self-esteem is a delightful state to be in, but trying
to achieve the feeling side of self-esteem directly, before achieving
good commerce with the world, confuses profoundly the means and the end."
January/February Contents | Gazette
Copyright 1999 The Pennsylvania
Gazette Last modified 1/4/99