We have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future-mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, the capacity for flow and insight, to name several. Much of the task of prevention in this new century will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to understand and learn how to foster these virtues in young people.
My own work in prevention takes this approach and amplifies a skill that all individuals possess, but usually deploy in the wrong place. The skill is called disputing (Beck, Rush, Shaw, and Emery, 1979), and its use is at the heart of "learned optimism." If an external person, who is a rival for your job, accuses you falsely of failing at your job and not deserving your position, you will dispute him. You will marshal all the evidence that you do your job very well. You will grind the accusations into dust. But if you accuse yourself falsely of not deserving your job-which is just the content of the automatic thoughts of pessimists-you will not dispute it. If it issues from inside, we tend to believe it. So in "learned optimism" training programs, we teach both children and adults to recognize their own catastrophic thinking and to become skilled disputers (Peterson, 2000; Seligman, 1991; Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, & Gillham, 1996; Seligman, Schulman, DeRubeis & Hollon, 1999).
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