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One of the most common critiques I hear about the field of psychology from the college students in my courses concerns its tendency to put people in boxes. A few months ago, one student shared her recent experience of visiting a therapist. “After about fifteen minutes, she labeled me depressed and charged forward with treatment,” she told the class. “It was like all she saw was what was wrong with me. I know she was trying to help, but I felt like she overlooked everything good about me.”
Though this critique is a bit extreme, given that most psychologists wouldn’t jump to conclusions so quickly, diagnosis is nonetheless one of the first tasks many perform. Traditionally, if you visited a psychologist’s office, he or she would thoroughly assess your symptoms within the first couple of sessions. After getting to know you, the psychologist would determine whether your symptoms met the criteria for any of the disorders contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), often called the “Bible” of mental illnesses. To qualify for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, for instance, you must have at least five of the nine possible symptoms listed in the DSM. So, if you were to complain of a few weeks of intensely sad mood, loss of interest in things that previously gave you pleasure, staying in bed all day, feeling worthless, and contemplating suicide, the psychologist might diagnose you with Major Depression.
The DSM is perhaps the best-known document in the field of psychology. The current fifth edition catalogs an astounding 265 ways that people can experience emotional, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties. The DSM does a lot of good, of course, having helped mental health professionals to better understand and treat millions of suffering people over the decades.
But some psychologists believe there may be a better way.
Since the turn of the 21st century, positive psychologists like Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman have significantly expanded our scientific understanding of psychological assets. In 2000, they embarked on perhaps the most ambitious attempt to define and measure character strengths ever undertaken. They read the literatures of spiritual traditions including Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They consulted the writings of luminaries and world leaders like Charlemagne and Benjamin Franklin. They even examined greeting cards, bumper stickers, personal ads, song lyrics, and the profiles of Pokémon characters.
Based on what they learned, Peterson and Seligman proposed a taxonomy of human virtues known as the Values in Action (VIA) classification system. Among other things, the VIA system highlights 24 character strengths that are believed to exist across world cultures, including creativity, curiosity, good judgment, bravery, kindness, and hope.
Increasingly, psychologists believe that an assessment of these strengths can augment the historical diagnostic system, changing the way they think about clients’ issues.
Traditionally, psychologists have defined “illness” by the presence of problems and “wellness” by the absence of such problems. Christopher Peterson, one of the developers of the VIA classification system, wanted to reverse this trend. He asked an intriguing question: “If positive psychology is to complement business-as-usual psychology, which uses the lens of abnormality to view normality, then why not use the lens of normality or even supernormality to view abnormality?”
To fully appreciate this argument, it’s important to understand how Peterson believes character strengths work. He asserts that most strengths represent the “golden mean” half-way between two unhealthy extremes. A person best exemplifies a particular strength when he or she displays just the right amount of that strength. But, someone can also display the opposite of that strength or an exaggerated version of that strength, both of which could lead to problems in life.
The character strength of good judgment, for example, falls along a continuum from gullibility (its opposite) to cynicism (its exaggeration). People who exercise good judgment are appropriately skeptical yet open, often asking for reasonable evidence before believing things. In contrast, people who are gullible believe everything that is told to them, while people who are cynical are suspicious of others, believing only the worst. It’s easy to see how both of these latter extremes could be considered unhealthy. Thus, Peterson argued that therapists not only should diagnose their clients with traditional disorders when appropriate, but also should attempt to understand their character strengths.
Advocates of this approach argue that therapists can use this understanding of their clients’ strengths to augment traditional therapy. After all, most of us don’t simply want to reduce our problems, we also want to nurture our strengths and increase our satisfaction with life.
The DSM is unlikely to go away any time soon, of course—nor should it. It offers a useful way to understand people’s problems. But, the VIA system offers an intriguing example of how insights from positive psychology can complement and inform “traditional” approaches to diagnosis and treatment. None of us is merely a conglomeration of problems, nor are we simply an embodiment of strengths. In all our human complexity, we’re a little of both.
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