(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter).

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psychology

A review of Mar­tin Seligman’s lat­est book, Flour­ish: A Vision­ary New Under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it. He called for a psy­chol­ogy that would uncover what makes peo­ple cre­ative, resilient, opti­mistic, and, ulti­mately, happy. The “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy” move­ment was born.

Yet in his lat­est book, Flour­ish, Selig­man tries to pro­vide some­thing of a course cor­rec­tion for pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy. Read the rest of this entry »

What started as an aca­d­e­mic dis­pute regard­ing dis­clo­sure of con­flict of inter­est is now snow­balling into the main­stream media, due to the over-reaction by JAMA edi­tors as reported in this Wall Street Jour­nal blog post, JAMA edi­tor calls Critic a “Nobody and a Noth­ing”

In sum­mary, Dr. Jonathan Leo, the “Critic”, dared to draw atten­tion to 2 impor­tant points regard­ing a study com­par­ing the effi­cacy of ther­apy vs. med­ica­tion pub­lished in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Med­i­cine (JAMA) — one of the most pres­ti­gious sci­en­tific publications:

1) The study results were pre­sented and reported in a biased way, since they favored one spe­cific inter­ven­tion, a drug, while ignor­ing another one, therapy-based, that had equally sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant effects.

2) Both the lead author of the study and one of the main experts asked to com­ment on the study in sev­eral media out­lets had undis­closed and unre­ported con­flicts of inter­est. JAMA could have done a 5-minute Google search to iden­tify and report the con­flict of inter­est of the lead author (received a vari­ety of rev­enues from the drugmaker).

Dr. Leo has sum­ma­rized the con­tin­u­ing mat­ter in sev­eral impres­sive let­ters. The 2 main ones, in chrono­log­i­cal order:

Clin­i­cal Tri­als of Ther­apy vs. Med­ica­tion: Even in a Tie, Med­ica­tion Wins(BMJ)

- “Cen­tral to the idea of evidence-based med­i­cine is that the choices made by patients and doc­tors to use a cer­tain treat­ment should at least in part be based on sci­en­tific stud­ies pub­lished in peer reviewed aca­d­e­mic jour­nals. For a patient diag­nosed with Read the rest of this entry »