For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about integrating virtues into mental healthcare.
The past 30 years have seen the emergence of positive psychology — the study of fostering virtues like gratitude, forgiveness, and humility — as a counterbalance to psychology’s tendency to focus largely on describing psychological problems, or what happens when things go wrong. While positive psychology has made headway in fields like education, its findings have yet to be integrated into many psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ mental healthcare practices. “Thus far, the vast amount of positive psychology research has had a pretty limited impact on frontline clinical practice,” says Steven Sandage, a professor of the psychology of religion and theology at Boston University. “There’s tons of research on various virtues, but very little of it is in clinical studies, so it’s had a limited impact on clinicians. What hasn’t been considered is how psychotherapy can contribute to people being able to live more meaningful lives.”
In an effort to build out psychotherapists’ toolkit for understanding the role of virtues in psychiatric patients’ well-being, Sandage and University of Denver psychologist Jesse Owen are leading a multi-year, multi-site investigation to measure whether growth in gratitude, forgiveness, and humility can predict — or even help to cause — growth in general flourishing and well-being among mental health clients.