Pentagon's Advice to Traumatized Veterans: Think Happy Thoughts!

Tired of hearing about all those military suicides? It just keeps getting worse and no one seems to have a clue how to stop the horror.  Are you feeling news fatigue coming on, with compassion exhaustion and depression close behind? Want to change the channel, scroll down, turn the page?  

That, says Martin Seligman, is because you, like too many American soldiers, are leading with negativity.  You could  instead be using “learned optimism” to dispute your catastrophic interpretation of the events that trouble your soul, the source of your PTSD.  

It’s really quite simple. “The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary,” Seligman says. 

Seligman chairs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has managed to convince Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen “that it (is) possible to teach soldiers how to properly respond to distress, and help them emerge emotionally stronger” (italics mine).

Seligman calls that “posttraumatic growth.”   

Barbara Ehrenreich calls it “pseudoscience and flapadoodle.”

It's hardly surprising that the author of Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed, and one of the most imaginative chroniclers of class injustice in America, would take issue with positive psychology. 

The suggestion that “learned optimism” (also the title of Seligman’s first best seller) could bring about success in a world where so many lives are determined by forces beyond their control was bound to push her buttons.

In her latest book, Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich frames her dispute with positive psychology in general, and Seligman in particular, in very personal terms—her own experience with breast cancer.  

She takes obvious pleasure in skewering the “kitschy positivity of American breast-cancer culture,” with its smiley face mantras, pink pride paraphernalia, and all the hype about “spiritual upward mobility.”      

But she is deadly serious when she takes on positive psychology’s insidious promise that it's possible to learn “to be happier — to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances” (italics mine).

Hey, all you quitters and whiners: If it’s bad and it hurts, even as it keeps getting worse, you have to try harder, have faith, and above all, think positive!  

But the core of Ehrenreich’s argument against the positivists is their belief that, “If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure.”

The message that individual initiative and a positive attitude can trump any unfortunate pop quiz the universe tosses your way has saturated every aspect of our culture, from the popular to the corporate, from the intellectual and medical to the spiritual, Ehrenreich argues. And it is used by those on top to justify their success, their privilege, their health--and their budgetary priorities.   After all, why throw money at failure?  

Though Ehrenreich doesn’t specifically apply her analysis to the military, its implications for traumatized soldiers are apparent.   

“The Army is discovering that most Soldiers endure the stress of combat and emerge from those experiences stronger and more resilient,” Brig. Gen. Ed Cardon, deputy commandant of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, optimistically proclaimed when he formally announced the new Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program in October.