Q :  I have read about Positive Psychology and how it focuses on the positives, is Positive Mental Health the same thing ?

A : Positive Psychology is a movement taking place within psychology and academia, and a welcome one. It is finally swinging the pendulum in the direction of positive human traits and scientifically measuring them. In this respect, it can be most helpful in classifying, understanding and measuring approaches that lead to health.

As I understand it, positive psychology is not a therapy nor a personality model, but analyzes a variety of approaches for positive outcomes such as the human capacity for resistance, or the benefits of gratitude. It is the birth of a new field analyzing tools and methods, which can help measure human strengths.

Positive Psychology can of course study the Lifetrack model of positive mental health which is an integrated personality model based on health (see criteria for positive mental health models by Jahoda).  The model is a step in the direction of a science of health, and defining and quantifying wellbeing.

While the Lifetrack model is not born of the positive psychology movement, it admires its founders Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Dr. Seligman for taking psychology and academia in the right direction. Our hope is that psychiatry will soon follow.

The Lifetrack model of positive mental health is developed by a Japanese psychiatrist Dr. Yukio Ishizuka.  Dr. Ishizuka developed his model on insights from both the East and West and tested it daily by treating a large number of patients over the last 35 years.

The approach uses breakthrough intimacy to help patients in distress overcome and go far beyond a previous best level of adjustment (close relationships, achievement and self).  With the predominance of the pharmaceutical industry, the bias of psychiatry towards the disease model, and the focus on the disbursement of medication, Ishizuka has remained happily isolated from the mainstream.  With only recent awareness of the positive psychology movement, he hopes new doors and directions can be opened.

Towards an understanding of the Mind in Optimal Health and Disease

The Lifetrack model of human personality model can be used to understand both optimal health and disease.  It has been tested on the well, and those in dire distress with ‘psychological illnesses’ such as borderline personality, deep depression and others.  Due to the model’s breadth, it provides fundamental insights on the mind at its best and worst.

Such an understanding of healthy human beings can be taught to psychiatrists and non psychiatrists, it can be applied to the sciences, and used by the general public.

At the same time, because psychiatry is prepared to deal with important symptoms of distress, should the field of psychiatry transform its understanding of health, psychiatrists may be ideally suited to help extremely defensive individuals such as those with borderline personalities (or with other overwhelming defenses) change fundamentally.

The reason psychiatrists may be useful in this role is because they are comfortable with dealing with certain distress signals such as anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis.  In highly defensive individuals, such symptoms may initially escalate as one attempts to surpass a previous best level of adjustment.  In this sense, a past understanding of distress and disease can be a useful tool.  Should psychiatrists be capable of re-orienting their practice beyond mere symptom relief to the greater goal of building inner health and happiness, this dual expertise will be particularly effective.

Naturally, one does not have to be a psychiatrist to integrate a better understanding of health and happiness or the functioning of the mind.  It is knowledge that should be accessible to all.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

Ready Made Descriptions to Link to This Page:

Positive Psychology, Lifetrack, Happiness and Health
A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist explores happiness and health, and discusses the positive psychology approach, constructs of positive psychology.
http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com

Dr. Yukio Ishizuka was born in 1938 in Hakodate, Japan.  He experienced WWII as a child and grew up during the American occupation.  It was a time of cross-fertilization of ideas of East and West.

In 1961, he entered Keio Medical School in Tokyo, where he taught himself English and founded the Japan International Medical Student Association (JIMSA) with the support of Dr. Taro Takemi—the long-standing President of the Japanese Medical Association and a well-respected physician and nuclear physicist.  Upon his graduation from Keio, Ishizuka informed Dr. Takemi of his plans to pursue post-graduate training in the United States.  “You should not return to Japan,” advised Dr. Takemi.  Yukio Ishizuka understood that he was being set free.

In 1965, the young graduate left Japan to complete a rotating internship at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia.  The following year, he was one of 25 physicians accepted for residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School.  Elated, Dr. Ishizuka took a trip to Europe on a two-week discount ticket, spending much of his savings in the process.  During this trip he fell in love with a French woman, Colette, who would follow him to the US several months later, marry him, and inspire much of his work.

Towards the end of his residency in Boston, Harvard Professors Elvin Semrad and David Riesman encouraged Dr. Ishizuka to undergo further training in psycho-analysis.  Dr. Ishizuka briefly considered going to Mexico City to study under Erich Fromm.  Unconvinced, however, that psychoanalysis could enable people to become healthier and happier, he left psychiatry and was hired by McKinsey, and international business consulting firm.  After several years of consulting for McKinsey in Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, and New York, he did mergers and acquisitions.  It was during his fourth year of mergers that one of his work colleagues became depressed.  Dr. Ishizuka’s rewarding experience helping his friend led him to return to the field of psychiatry in 1976.

Having been taught to approach complex problems as a whole by defining and measuring ‘objectives’ critical for organizational survival and success, he returned to his own field eager to understand the existing criteria for positive mental health.  Instead, he found a growing list of mental diseases and disorders (Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Psychiatry).  Whether one suffered from anxiety or depression, successful psychiatric treatment demanded the elimination, reduction, or containment of disease.  To be healthy is not to be sick.  There was little if anything on positive mental health, well-being, and happiness.

At that time, Dr. Ishizuka remembered the work of the American psychologist Maria Jahoda, who in 1958 published “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health.”  The monograph introduced guidelines for the evaluation of models of positive psychology.  Unfortunately, in 1976 little work had followed.  No model of positive psychological health was developed or tested with patients.  It was his mentor, Dr. Jack R. Ewalt, the man who was in charge of the study by Jahoda, who pushed him and others not to give up on health.  As Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ewalt continued to challenge his students to question prevailing medical doctrine and conceptions on health by learning directly from patients, rather than using their own words to define and treat illness.

Dr. Ishizuka, drawing both on the East and the West, his experience in psychiatry, and most importantly, his patients, developed a science of health.  That paradigm incorporates both an understanding of the mind in distress and optimal well-being.  Over the years, he used and tested the model with different nationalities and people from all walks of life.  Rather than examining stress, disease, and illnesses, Ishizuka asks different questions of his field: What is the objective of therapy?  What does it mean to be well? How do we measure wellbeing as a part of a cycle of life?

The model of human personality and experience that he developed incorporates man’s search for self, the need for intimacy and the quest for achievement.  It also incorporates peak positive and negative experiences and an understanding of physical health.  The tripod model has withstood the demanding criteria put forth by the American psychologist Maria Jahoda in 1958 on “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health” for the creation of new models of health defined in positive terms.  Dr. Ishizuka’s work helps us to build health far beyond a previous best level of health, happiness and optimal adjustment.  Working to overcome a fear of the unknown, he has defined and quantified the subjective nature of wellbeing and one working model of positive mental health and human personality (objective subjective).

Dr. Ishizuka’s has been using, refining, and testing the model of positive mental health with over 2000 patients in the last 35 years of his daily practice.  With a good sense of humor, a great sense of balance, and over 40,000 session hours examining millions of graphs on health and happiness, he has fine tuned a science of health and well-being.  His approach on healthy human beings has been presented to numerous fields including economic man, war/crisis/health, national health, Japan and organizations.

Today through his busy private practice, he continues the work that Dr. Ewalt incited him and other residents to undertake.  He hopes that insights that arose during Lifetrack therapy can contribute to each person’s life purpose ; the experience of much higher levels of self, intimacy and meaningful achievement.   Through this website and future books he hopes to share with other psychiatrists, psychologists, practitioners, academics, and most importantly the general public.

Dr. Yukio Ishizuka graduated from Keio University Medical School, Tokyo, Japan in 1964.  He completed his residency in Psychiatry at Mass Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School in 1969.  He is the founder of Japan International Medical Students Association (JIMSA), which received the coveted Japanese Health Culture Award in 2007 by the Minister of Japanese Health at the Japanese Imperial Palace. Happily Married for 44 years with three children, he is also a member of the Salmagundi Club of N.Y. as a resident artist.

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

Ready Made Descriptions to Link to this Page:

Happiness and Health
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a new model of Health and Happiness. Explore a science of happiness, the cycle of life, life purpose, objective subjective, stress types, and a life way that integrates both East and West.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health, Excellence and Well-being
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, a Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist who left psychiatry to work at McKinsey (management consulting) and later mergers and acquisitions, returns to his field with a new question: what does it mean to be well?   Explore individual and organizational excellence and wellbeing.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a science of happiness, a new life way or life purpose.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/