The Dual-Factor Model of Mental Health in Youth

Suldo and Shaffer (2008) should be roundly applauded for pursuing an empirical examination of relations between the presence of wellness and the absence of psychopathology in adolescents. The possibility that psychopathology and wellness make related but distinct contributions to has been widely recognized in the American Psychological Association's agenda on positive psychology (Keyes & Haidt, 2003), in Rutter and Sroufe's (2000) descriptions of the challenges facing the science of developmental psychopathology, and in Greenspoon and Saklofske's (2001) empirical description of a two-factor model of with a Canadian sample of elementary students. Despite its importance, psychological wellness has not been incorporated into the day-to-day practice of psychology in any notable ways. Outside of public agencies like schools and juvenile justice, access to services is linked to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text revision; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) diagnoses, which are based predominantly on negative symptoms and dysfunction. Most items on prominent measures of psychosocial adjustment (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) describe maladaptive behaviors, and even when subscales assess positive behaviors, the subscales' scores are more sensitive measures of the degree of maladjustment (the presence of pathology and the absence of well-being) than adjustment (the absence of pathology and the presence of well-being). The omission of psychological wellness from operational definitions of mental is particularly striking when preventive interventions are examined. The National Institute on Mental Health (1998) has generally restricted the national research agenda to the prevention of psychopathology, omitting references to the promotion of wellness. This narrow definition has been challenged by leaders in prevention research, who argue that services must necessarily include promotion, youth development, and competence enhancement (Weissberg, Kumpfer, & Seligman, 2003; Weisz, Sandler, Durlak, & Anton, 2005). The stakes are high for school practices. School settings are among the least restrictive settings for the provision of preventive services, and school practices would benefit greatly if the National Institute on Mental Health adopted a broad model for research that also examined preventive interventions targeting peers, families, or communities of affected youth. One of the most ubiquitous signs of pathology-dominated is the widespread use of logically inconsistent terms like disorder or diagnosis. If a phenomenon represents health, it should not be simultaneously cast as a disorder. An alternative term, disorder, firmly embeds the phenomenon in medical or disease models of psychopathology. Still, it also allows for the possibility that is not defined solely by the absence of maladjustment. In their article, Suldo and Shaffer (2008) join other researchers in proposing that subjective well-being might be a reliable, valid, and practical index of the positive dimensions of health in health. They appropriately indicate that, to date, there are only a few empirical tests of the relations that exist between the presence of psychopathology and the absence of psychological wellness. As such, their study provides a valuable first step towards accruing empirical evidence indicating that measures of subjective well-being can add important predictive power to school-based assessments of children's needs for school services. Their study's rigor is commendable in a number of other respects: They were careful in their measurement of key variables, using both teacher ratings and student ratings to assess psychopathology, incorporating both externalizing and internalizing disorders into their operational definition of psychopathology, and including existing school data to assess the outcome of academic success (e. …