The benefits of a more positive approach
What can we learn from positive psychology?
Health and safety is not the only discipline that has had to grapple with a focus on the negative and move toward a more positive approach. The psychology discipline, which is often a source of inspiration and empirical data for health and safety specialists, has undergone a transformation. Throughout most of the 20th century, psychology focused on the pathology of disease (i.e. looking at and understanding an illness like depression and attempting to cure it). Proponents of the 'positive psychology' movement, leading psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2000) explain: "What psychologists have learned over 50 years is that the disease model does not move psychology closer to the prevention of these serious problems in the first place. Indeed, the major strides in prevention have come largely from a perspective focused on systematically building competency, not on correcting weakness. Prevention researchers have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, and the capacity for flow and insight, to name several. Much of the task of prevention in this new century will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to understand and learn how to foster these virtues in young people." (emphasis added) 3 F iv The same could be said of all of us who have a passion for prevention of harm to people in the health and safety context. As Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi would say:
"treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best." 4 F v
7
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs