Preparing for the unthinkable? The prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder and the limits of positive psychology

Abstract: This chapter revisits the controversies surrounding the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) initiative, a program developed in 2008 by a team of psychologists led by Martin E.P. Seligman to prevent mental health problems among U.S. soldiers after their deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq. In the following sections, several aspects of these controversies are placed in their broader historical and theoretical contexts, including the ethical objections the initiative has raised, key concepts that underlie its rationale, as well as Seligman's efforts to promote it through his popular writings. Although Seligman describes the program as based on objective empirical findings, I argue that it nevertheless carries with it normative implications. Not only does it perpetuate problematic ideas about what it means to fall mentally ill, it also relies on implicit assumptions about human development that are equally questionable. Positive psychologists such as Seligman, I contend, endorse a vision of psychological growth that imagines it as unfolding along a linear trajectory that is both continuous and predictable. Ironically, the plausibility of this vision is challenged by the very experience of trauma, the effects of which the CSF program is supposed to inoculate against. I begin my discussion by providing some historical context for the emergence of the contemporary notion of posttraumatic stress and psychiatric prevention programs in the U.S. military.

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