Positive psychology in psychological interventions in rehabilitation medicine.

Giuseppina Majani

Human beings have always tackled their problems and the adversities of life by drawing on their own resources, resilience, and values, and yet the focus on pathology has effectively long dominated the cognitive approach of psychologists to ill-being. Psychological interventions in rehabilitation medicine were formed around the codification and containment of the ill-being, in an almost surgical or antibiotic sense of "correcting" the negativity: identifying and removing or combating the ill-being, or, if possible, its sources; the distance to be covered was from negativity to zero: absence of ill-being as a synonym for well-being. But what makes a 20-year-old tetraplegic look to the future? Where does someone who has been waiting for heart transplant for one, two or three years find the strength to carry on while living on 18 drugs and no more than two little bottles of water a day? In its use in the context of health care, positive psychology is that part of psychology that takes on the task--among others--of deciphering the mechanisms through which it becomes possible to adapt to a chronic illness. But not only. Positive psychology also offers the opportunity to systematise knowledge concerning the possibility of overreaching the distance from negativity to zero, of going beyond, of nourishing positivity, enriching and improving oneself, despite the presence of an organic disease or a disability. Positive psychotherapy does not negate painful or unpleasant experiences, but encourages the use of resources to understand weaknesses and it is contributing substantially to drawing our attention back to optimism, courage, positive emotions, flexibility, creativity, faith, hopes, honesty, perseverance, flourishing and on their relationships with physical health. A different language from the one that years of pragmatism have accustomed us to. If positive psychology can help our patients to see, through the pain, anger and fear, something that makes their life still worth living, it only remains to add it to the tools of our trade.