Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived

Is an individual to be defined by his or her strengths or weaknesses, resilience or vulnerability, creativity or deviance, flourishing or languishing? The editors and writers of this volume propose alternatives to the deficit-driven, medicalized model of mental disorders of which the DSM is an exemplar. Psychiatry, as an heir to philosophy, must consider what mental health consists of to understand and treat mental illness. Is mental health merely the absence of mental illness, or is it something more? What interventions and institutions support the development of mental health? Is it even possible to operationalize mental health, i.e., is it a condition that may be entirely understood and examined with the tools of science?