[MUSIC] Last time I left off talking about the different interventions that have been discovered that build well being and fight depression. And most interventions led to a new field called positive education. This is the question not of doing the interventions and therapy, not of doing positive interventions when people are in trouble but taking people when they're healthy. And teaching them skills of resilience and positive psychology and asking if you can prevent depression and anxiety and if you can build well-being. So to start this off, I'm going to give you all a quiz. So there are two questions. I'm going to ask you to tell me your answers. The first question is in two words or fewer, what do you most want in life? Floor is open. >> Love fulfillment. >> Love fulfillment, yeah. Peace and flow. Peace and flow. >> Peace and. >> Flow. >> Flow. Good. What do you most want for your children, for yourself in life? >> Meaningful work. >> Meaningful work. >> Happiness. >> Happiness. >> Success. >> Success. Okay, that's question one. Question 2, and this is a question I ask parents, school children, ministers of education, what does schools teach in two words or a few words. Testing? >> Testing. >> Achievement? >> Achievement. >> Life lessons? Life lessons. >> Life lessons. >> Problem solving? >> Problem solving. Literacy, numeroucy, discipline. Notice the lack of overlap between the two lists. What you most want in life, happiness, health, peace, fulfillment, satisfaction, and what's taught in school. Literist testing, literacy, numeracy, discipline don't overlap. So, what I want you to imagine is positive education. What we have learned in positive psychology up to this point were interventions of That built well-being and that prevented depression. So, the question we're about to ask is can you teach children, healthy children in school these interventions and will that prevent depression and anxiety and build well-being? So that's half of it. The other half is what schools traditionally teach which is doing well on tests and getting a good job. And the question then is can you both teach life satisfaction and the traditional roles of school. All of this begins almost 30 years ago, and it begins at the University of Pennsylvania, and in Abington, one of the suburbs north of here, when Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham and Lisa Jaycox asked the question, can we prevent depression in children? So, where we were in the mid 1980s, is we had found that 8-11 year old children who were pessimists, children who when bad events occurred, thought it's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything I do. It's my fault That when we followed these kids into puberty, these kids were at least twice as likely to get depressed when they went through the troubles of puberty. So we said, what if we took the cognitive therapy interventions, in which you teach people to recognize the catastrophic thoughts that are occurring, and to argue against them. What if we taught kids how to do that, and then followed them through puberty? Now just to illustrate that, if you're a nine-year old girl, and you walked into the cafeteria, and Or your friends ignore you, they're all sitting alone. Here's what we teach 8 to 12 year olds to do. Okay, what are you thinking? He says, well, I'm a loser. No one loves me, I'm unlovable, okay. We teach them first to recognize the catastrophic thought and that's the thought that produces depression, anxiety, anger. And then, we teach the kids to argue realistically against the thought. So Well, they're all member of the volleyball team, and I'm not on the volleyball tem. So they're not talking to me not because I'm a loser but because they're having a volleyball meeting. And that kind of realistic disputing of catastrophic thoughts reliably prevents, reliably counters depression in therapy. So, we wrote manuals to teach kids the tricks of cognitive therapy to use while they're healthy and in advance, and then we followed them through puberty, and we asked what were the effects? So that's really where positive education begins and here's what we found. What we did was, we wrote manuals for middle school children and, unlike the way we do it in therapy by talking to you, we had cartoons and role play and comedy and the like. And so, in a typical cartoon what you have is a bully saying, "Get out of here, you wimp". And then the child's task is what are you thinking. And if the child is thinking I'm a loser, I'm always being picked on. What does that lead to? And you have face, they draw a face, not draw sadness, or anger in the face. And then, we have the child take the cartoon, get out of here you wimp. And substitute a different thought that doesn't lead to depression. That these people just lost their baseball game. And they're in a terrible mood and they're picking on anyone. And what does that lead to? Well, it doesn't lead to depression. So basically, we create a manual with cartoons and over a period of 18 hours, an hour and a half a week for 12 weeks, we essentially teach 8 to 12 year old kids how to be cognitive therapists on themselves and in advance. So that's what you do. You got it so far? Okay, then we simply, and we've got a control group. So in the first study we did there are, I think, 70 children in each group up in Abington. And then we follow the kids for the next several years through puberty, and we come back and we measure every six months how depressed are you. And what we find is that the kids who have been through, we call it the Penn Prevention Program, have half the rate of depression as they go through puberty. And almost half the rate of anxiety. So, we found that the skills that are employed in therapy with people in trouble can be perfectly well taught to normal kids. And the kids could use them in rehearse them through puberty. And then, that halved the rate of depression. So that was the beginning of positive education.
