By Mikayla Chadwick
Mental health problem is something we have all, at one point, tried to deal with
through finally taking the advice of just having a bath. We are encouraged to take control of
our negative mental health by employing the power of positive thinking, positive vibes and
taking life slow. This message is called positive psychology. Positive psychology encapsulates
the application of therapeutic programs that aim to utilise the potential in individuals to
control their own happiness; innate in this new field of psychology is the notion that
happiness is the result of cognitive outlooks of individuals, plasticised by the altering of daily
emotional states. Sam Binkley, Associate Professor of Sociology at Emerson College in
Boston, Massachusetts, explores the legitimacy of the foundations of positive psychology in
the context of the economic framing of mental health and considers the implications of
making individuals responsible for their own happiness.
Binkley’s assessment of positive psychology essentially contends that positive
psychology’s outlook is that melancholy is to be rejected in favour of happiness. He
proposes that a society which is realistic about the underwhelming and unsatisfactory parts
of life will be without fortitude, and therefore unwilling to capitalise and expand the society
as it is; which is bad for the economy and thus bad for the government. This
disenfranchisement of society, Binkley argues, is what the government, in employing
positive psychology, attempts to counter, therefore benefitting the social powers already in
place. Thus, positive psychology can serve to reinforce individual unhappiness as the
individual’s problem, rather than addressing the responsibility the State has to create
opportunity, and a satisfying life, for its people.
Heather Love’s work on homonormative standards of happiness, in which the
homosexual community is encouraged to perform heterosexual relationship norms of
happiness, can be compared to the likes of positive psychology. Positive psychology aims to
replace sadness with optimistic and opportunistic approaches which override melancholy
and negative thought. In and of itself, positive psychology encourages the normative ideals
of a happy relationship, compromising the merit that negative emotions can offer in bad
situations. Negative feelings can be felt for external reasons that should be addressed.
Further, the idea that a suffering person must be an unhappy person, prevalent within
positive psychology, is something Binkley contends is flawed, as it induces its subjects “to
work on themselves and their emotional states as open-ended problems of self-
government” disallowing the flexibility of genuine fluctuating emotions such as love,
happiness and sadness, replicating routine and rigid positivity as the answer to all problems.
Thus, positive psychology removes responsibility from the wider structural problems
at hand and places it on the unhappy individual to fix their own life. Though mental illness
can certainly benefit from the power of positive thought, it cannot be framed as the only
solution to a deeply complex and widespread problem.
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