Dental Work, or: Why Positive Psychology Can be a Pain For the Depressed Client

Teeth cleaning. This phrase may cause some of you a little anxiety, but for the most part, nothing's wrong with it, right? You go in, someone pokes around in your mouth, and eventually does what you do every morning and night but with industrial-grade tools and a little more efficiency. Overall this is an important part of one's health. It should even be done twice a year to keep tartar under control and check for early signs of problems. 

But now imagine that you have an abscessed tooth. Pain radiates every second of every day--so bad, it's literally almost deafening. Now imagine your dentist recommends that all you need to fix it is a good cleaning. If you have had the displeasure of an abscessed tooth, then you just screamed at me. The pain a cleaning would cause is probably a sufficient excuse for murder in some states, so why would any self-respecting dental patient put themselves through this?

They wouldn't! Unless they just didn't know better.

The past semester I have been in a Positive Psychology class (if you couldn't tell from everything else I've written here), and the topic is fascinating. I love the idea of improving everyone's quality of life so that mental illness is largely prevented...but what about those who are "legitimately" depressed? Those who cannot make it through an entire day without anti-depressants, or those who self-mutilate due to the numbness caused by dissociation? What about those who stare at themselves in the mirror, begging their reflection to finally give them the strength to commit suicide? Are they going to benefit from understanding the intricacies of human happiness? What about the Hedonic Treadmill? 

A lot of what I learned in positive psych, as far as exercises and therapies go, are the psychological equivalent of getting one's abscessed tooth hit with a water pick. This is NOT to say that positive psychology cannot help someone with depression; I just think it would be in everyone's best interest if this somewhat new form of therapy was parsed out in such a way that it can be used by depressed individuals without doing more damage than good. 

But, really, you ask. How can you be so certain that positive psychology could hurt anyone? I mean, positive is right in the name! 

Well, I know because I have an abscessed tooth...of the brain. (?) Okay, so the metaphor broke down a little there, but you know what I'm saying. I am a "depressed individual" and I have just gone through months of unbridled exposure to positive psychology: its concepts, its background, its possible and future applications...and let me tell you--the days where I wasn't simply enthralled with it, it sucked.

How can I make a list of three good things everyday, when I am literally trying to find one good reason not to slit my wrists?

How can I think of ways to enter/maintain a state of "flow," when I haven't found a way to make myself shower for the past week?

And don't even get me started on the despair that can come when trying to think of someone who is a fourth degree of separation from yourself (how far someone has to be from you before their happiness stops affecting your own) when you haven't spoken a single word to someone other than your spouse in over three months.

[Disclaimer] I'm doing much better now, don't worry (hell, the biggest evidence of that is that I'm actually writing something for the first time in forever). And to my positive psych teacher (who will inevitably read this), don't you worry, either. I don't hold you nor this class responsible for any ill health I may have been experiencing. If anything, it has been my responsibility for not re-framing all the information in a way for my depressed mind to digest. Re-framing is something I'll have to master anyway, if I plan on making it through the years of learning psychology and counseling, intact. 

But my point is that, while positive psychology is AWESOME at getting people from a "0 to a positive 8," getting someone from a "negative 8 to 0" is a whole other process. This process is a delicate one--so delicate, in fact, you have to go to school in order to be legally allowed to help with it. So to those who are practicing or plan to practice psychology at some point...just keep this in mind. I plan on laying out suggestions as to how to do this in the future. These suggestions will be full of assumptions and conjecture, but perhaps will help design a "test plan" for an experimental treatment of depression one day.