Clinical psychology aims to help people get more mentally healthy. But what does mentally healthy even mean?
Now, various people have completely different viewpoints on what mental health even is, and very different idea of how to fix it.
One approach to mental illness focuses on the importance of dysfunction. Mental illness is no more or less than people who find that their thoughts get in the way of the life they want to live.
Especially, when mental concerns get in the way of valuable social interaction or career aspirations, the idea is to help the person get through their troubles by helping them manage their thoughts and feelings.
The approaches to this vary significantly, but the success criterion are more or less the same.
This fits into my framework as a short term goal-centric interventionism
At its core, positive psychology stems from the idea that psycology can help one live a good life. It attempts to find the things that hold the greatest value in life, and find ways to improve those things in people. Proponents of positive psychology promote interventions which try to change people’s pathological thoughts and hopelessness and replace them with forward looking optimism.
Positive psychology is the idea that leading a good life is possible when you a set of feelings such as confidence, security, satisfaction, gratitude, etc. The super simplified argument is that these positive feelings lead people to make productive choices which allow them to continue feeling these emotions, and the resulting positive spiral will create a good life.
Perhaps the flagship of this idea is the Happify app which teaches people methods for building positive feelings and making positive improvements to their life.
Pathology breaking fits into the framework as bug fixing
The rest seems to be a crude and fixed true goal target. The danger and harm of this is a classic example of the insufficiency of science.
This view is that the most important part of having a good life, which can fix any kind of mental problem, is simply setting your priorities strait. This was made famous by the not giving a fuck blog.
The idea is that if you just set your priorities to be good ones, then everything else in life will start getting better. Unlike the others, it does not propose as much interventionism, claiming that individuals are always in the best place to set their priorities, and all the rest of us can do is encourage them to think about that more.
This fits in as adaptive true goal alignment
The framework of interacting feelings does not give a coherent story about mental health. Individual mental health can be evaluated, but when society steps in, even certain kinds of pathologies start to make a lot of sense.
But these other proposals can be evaluated and compared using this framework.