Positive psychology, mental health, and the false promise of the medical model

Over twenty years ago the British clinical psychologist Richard Bentall (1992) offered “a proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder.” Noting that happiness is “statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms” and, further, that “there is at least some evidence that it reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system” (p. 97), Bentall argued that it meets the most fundamental criteria used to justify many psychiatric diagnoses.