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Typically when a lot of people hear me talk about problems with “paradigms, models, and systems” they can end up rolling their eyes or walking around of the room, irritated, annoyed, or even offended. There is a reason for the dismay – it is challenging their existing systems. The fact of the matter is, everyone and everything needs to be upgraded eventually. The field of psychology is no different, and I’d like to set out to prove that point right now with this article. Psychology currently can be broken into a number of different subfields, but no matter how much we subdivide these different fields, they all concern human behavior and are all labeled with the field’s name: “psychology.”

So we might have Industrial/Organizational Psychology, which concerns itself with the well being and inner workings of organizations and companies, particularly the human factor in each of those companies. Abbreviated as I/O psych, I/O psychologists ask questions such as: how does employee pay affect an organization’s employee theft rate, if at all? What sorts of analysis methods are best for actually and accurately improving employee job performance? There is definitely a need for I/O psychologists if companies want to take questions like these seriously and have a human workforce. Alright, that is all fair and good with me.

Then we have two fairly closely related fields: clinical and counseling psychology. While clinical is concerned more with the extreme conditions found in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently in its 4th edition at the time of this writing), counselors concern themselves more with the day to day problems of the general population. Or, in other words: clinicians tend to investigate people on either side of a bell curve while counselors may assist more with the general, median and average portion of the population, tending to more minor anxiety disorders, problems of insecurities or self esteem, or perhaps just assisting people with more general psychological and mental goals.

No matter what field we are talking about, it is important to understand that the entire field as a whole has a huge problem: it all revolves around someone having a problem and then going to a specialist of some kind to get it fixed. Oh, I’m not debating that these specialists know what they are talking about (I better not say they don’t, I’m supposed to be one of them!), but the important thing to consider is that their model of treatment is designed around well…treatment.

Textbooks like to define personal development training for people as “prevention” in many cases. After all, if you have a set of psychological constructs within your mind that allow you to better manage your emotions and you are less likely to get depression, then we might say that you have performed preventative measures for depression itself. But is that the best way to go about it? Really all you might have received was training for mental well being or even mental growth and enhancement. Should we be calling ordinary personal development training “prevention?”

The fact of the matter is that there is another position in psychology that does not seem to have been invented yet, but I sure hope it gets invented soon, because it is what I dream of doing. In my opinion, there appears to be a growing need for us to put psychological mechanisms into the curriculum of elementary school children that will allow them to better manage their mental processes early on in life. After all, we see the basics of every other science being implemented as part of what children learn when they are at a young age – everything from basic math to reading and writing and even to biology and chemistry. Why not psychology?

Some who are uneducated or operating off century or even half century old stereotypes might argue that psychology is not a real science. Well, I will admit that there are a number of problems with many of the research studies that have been conducted since the beginning of psychology, but many of the most important ones cannot be refuted in any way possible. Ivan Pavlov and his famous “Pavlov’s dogs” experiment is something that the entire world has utilized. Without the concept of classical conditioning we would not see a plethora of different changes that have taken place throughout the medical, corporate, professional, and personal lives of people everywhere.  And thanks to those who are studying behavioral neuroscience, we are continuously getting to see how our personal decisions, constructs, and cognitions are altering our physiological selves. The gap between theory and hard evidence is shrinking every week, and it is making headlines.

When many people come to me with a problem, I have a bad habit of telling them what to do about it. But it seems as though we fancy negativity as a positivity in American culture much of the time. If someone comes to you and they are upset about a problem, suddenly you give them validation and recognition by paying closer attention to them. If you are constantly rewarding negative thoughts with increased attention and compassion but then just give people a simple “good job” when they accomplish their biggest feats, what do you think their emotional state is going to lean toward? The research shows that those who display negative emotion and are rewarded for it will increasingly give more and more displays of negative emotion, but the flip side is also true: positive emotional display that is reward will result in even more positive emotional display.

These are extremely simple concepts, but many children are not being taught them. Perhaps the biggest, ugliest, most embarrassing truth about us as human beings it that the majority of the time we are completely responsible for our own emotional and general cognitive states. We control our own thoughts, feelings, and actions and we hold a responsibility for them. Now, I know that some severe cases come along in a small percentage of the population that might have a chemical or neurological basis for which no amount of will power or simple cognitive alteration will do the trick. I understand that, but for the majority of us? How many of us need to be whining about work when we come home at the end of the day or make excuses for spending money on things we do not actually need when we are trying to save for our retirement?

The amount of problems that you can tend to on your own with the right training is overwhelming. Simple shyness can be overcome with social skills training, bad grades can often be overcome with learning better methods for learning itself, job performance can sometimes be as simple as an attitude alteration or shift in perspective and perceptions, the list can go on and on. What I hope to see is psychological training for people everywhere. We have countless different social networks that are not getting along or not connecting because of their world constructs, businesses that go out of business because of distorted perceptions or bad systems for operating and thinking, individuals that are unhappy when they do not have to be, and so much more. And it is all unnecessary and needs to come to an end.

When could we possibly see a change in our educational system? From what I can tell, not anytime soon. I would place an estimate that American schools will not change until the political system sees a severe change. One of the primary problems with the United States (and probably the world in general) is that it has shifted education down lower and lower on the priority list for years. But an interesting thing has happened within the U.S. military: soldiers are trained on every single aspect necessary to complete whatever work it is they set out to do and they are given that training as a mandate, without question. Soldiers are trained to have a specific set of tools for both their physical and mental states. People need these sorts of things for their lives, not just for protecting their country or going to war, but for living! While I might be going to school to eventually earn a doctorate in psychology, I do not think that everyone should have to in order to learn how to lead a life of good mental health.

So I will go ahead and leave you with this: what can you do on an individual level to help your local community see a collective change in how they place their education and their mental health/well being on a higher priority? How can you equip yourself with those tools so that you may be able to educate others to succeed? If the government is not doing it, and colleges are not doing it, and your employer is not doing it, then we have to start somewhere. The mission, should you choose to accept it, is really up to you. And again, we are responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. What will you decide?

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