Conclusion: Striving for Wellness

Abstract

In the past two decades, the psychological literature has evidenced a growing interest in Wellness, resilience and protective factors. This approach can be seen as antithetical to the pathology-based tradition in psychology that focused on diagnosis and treatment of dysfunction and disease. Eminent scholars like Michael Rutter (1987, 1994), Norman Garmezy (1994) and the late Emory Cowen (1991, 1994, 1996), have pushed the mental health field to adopt a Wellness orientation based on the concepts of strength and resilience. They maintained that the human capacity to overcome adversity has been overlooked in an incessant search for pathology; an argument revived recently by the new positive psychology movement (Seligman, 2002).