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Psychology can and should do more than reduce mental suffering, argues positive psychology guru Martin Seligman in his persuasive book Flourish

I FIND relentless optimists a real pain, but there is no denying they are better off when it comes to health and well-being. They are, for example, less likely to get cardiovascular disease or to catch flu, and are at less risk of dying from any cause.

, founding father of the discipline of positive psychology, is a relentless optimist and as such should be a healthy man indeed. I expected to find him annoying in the preacherly way of many behavioural gurus, but I finished his new book, , a convert, at least to his core message that changing certain psychological attitudes can have a transformative effect on people鈥檚 lives, and that well-being amounts to more than just positive emotion: relationships, meaning and a sense of accomplishment are just as important, he says.

For Seligman is a rational optimist, in the sense that his recipes for increasing well-being are founded on empirical tests. So when he asks you to set aside 10 minutes in the evening to write down three things that went well that day, you sense it might be worthwhile.

While he offers plenty of advice, Flourish is not a cookbook for a better life so much as a personal witness to what psychology can achieve beyond reducing suffering. If you can get through the somewhat pedestrian first chapter, you will find how he came to realise that focusing exclusively on pathology can be, well, depressing. 鈥淥nce in a while I would help a patient get rid of all his anger and anxiety and sadness. I thought I would then get a happy patient. But I never did. I got an empty patient.鈥�

You will also learn that he nearly become a professional bridge player, has seven children and a huge regard for the US army (鈥渢he force that stood between me and the Nazi gas chambers鈥�). None of this is directly relevant, yet it gives context to Seligman鈥檚 calling, which is less an academic or therapeutic enterprise than a game-changing crusade. He wants well-being taught in schools as part of a 鈥渞evolution in world education鈥�. In 2005 he started teaching the first at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to professionals seeking to apply the skills in their workplaces. And he has been assessing the psychological fitness of the entire US army and designing courses to improve soldiers鈥� mental resilience.

Occasionally, Seligman鈥檚 enthusiasm gets the better of him. At one point he doesn鈥檛 seem to register the absurdity of his observation that people who have been through an awful event such as rape or torture score higher on his well-being scale than those who haven鈥檛. He is making a point about human resilience, but this is the psychological equivalent of GDP rising after an earthquake, and it illustrates the dangers of relying on well-being scores as a tool of policy-making.