As coaches, we need to approach mental health as both positive wellbeing and positive mental functioning, appreciating that people with mental illness can still experience wellbeing while those without mental illness can still have poor wellbeing, said leadership trainer, executive coach, and professor Giselle Timmerman.
“Best practice, and this irks me a lot, tends to point to a continuum of mental health from mental illness to positive mental health and wellbeing”, said Timmerman, in her keynote on The cutting edge of positive psychology applied at work. She said the widely used Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (Cantril, 1965) or Cantril’s Ladder, is an example of this.
“As a practitioner, I don’t see it as a diagnostic or developmental tool. It gives us no indication of what to do or how to enhance or sustain thriving.
“I think there’s a better way to measure this, I think we have a call to embrace complexity over simplification, and the constructs of mental illness and mental health are not bipolar opposites as we tend to talk about. It’s not just severe mental illness to really thriving,” said Timmerman, former president of the International Positive Psychology Association’s Work division.
Timmerman prefers Keyes’ Dual-factor Model of Wellbeing, which proposes mental illness and positive mental health or wellbeing as two separate but related concepts, not two opposite ends of the same spectrum (Keyes, 2005). Keyes’ two axes are mental illness (struggling to absence of illness), and wellbeing (thriving to low).
“Changing how we measure, changes how we intervene and how we speak about it, and this has been for me a complete mindshift in how I speak about wellbeing.”
With clients, she’ll simplify this and talk about “folks just getting by” or “languishing”, citing a recent article in the New York Times (Grant, 2021). “And these people are quite vulnerable. And then you have people who are thriving despite the struggle of mental illness. You can be symptomatic but still content.”
Timmerman also explored mental health and wellbeing in the pandemic, which has meant, she says, that “mental health has lost some of its stigma – it’s OK not to be OK.”
She presented various studies, including a meta-analysis (Donaldson et al, 2019) which showed positive psychology interventions can help improve positive workplace outcomes like performance, job wellbeing and engagement, with strengths and gratitude interventions showing the strongest links to wellbeing and engagement. It also showed that despite what many think, they help reduce “undesirable work outcomes” including negative job performance, wellbeing, stress and emotional exhaustion, “which is really exciting”.
One study (Okabe-Miyamoto & Lyubomirsky, 2021) shows that “individuals can endure high levels of distress in the pandemic yet still experience positive mental health, good functioning and feeling good,” with social connection as a protective factor for wellbeing.
Another (Waters et al, 2021) looked at 22 global studies from the start of the pandemic to date and found that mental health and mental distress can not only co-exist but can also interact: buffering, bolstering and building.
“This has completely changed my vocabulary – buffering, bolstering and building. As practitioners, even looking whether we are trying to buffer, bolster or build a client’s wellbeing can be helpful.”
References
- H Cantril, The Patterns of Human Concern, Rutgers University Press, 1965
- S Donaldson, JY Lee, and S Donaldson, ‘Evaluating positive psychology interventions at work: a systematic review and meta-analysis,’ in International Journal of Applied Psychology, 2019
- A Grant, ‘There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling: it’s called languishing’, The New York Times, 2021
- C L Keyes, ‘Mental illness and/or mental health? Investigating axioms of the complete state model of health,’ in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73(3), 539-548, 2005. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/0022-006X.73.3.539
- K Okabe-Miyamoto & S Lyubomirsky, ‘Social connection and well-being during COVID-19,’ in World Happiness Report 2021
- L Waters et al, ‘Positive Psychology in a pandemic: buffering, bolstering and building mental health,’ in The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1-21, 2021