A Brief Review of Flourishing Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Mood and Anxiety Disorders

The onset of common mental illnesses, such as mood and anxiety disorders, often begins in adolescence and young adulthood. While traditional clinical care focuses on reducing psychiatric symptoms, it is important to simultaneously promote positive psychological states (i.e., flourishing). In this brief review, we synthesize the published literature on flourishing among adolescents and young adults with mood and anxiety disorders. Using VanderWeele’s flourishing model domains, we developed search terms that we applied to PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar databases. We identified four articles that met the inclusion criteria for this review. Each study identified in this review used distinct flourishing scales to examine various flourishing domains. Overall, incorporating techniques to promote positive mental health in clinical care decreased psychiatric symptoms and increased flourishing. More research is needed to examine how incorporating flourishing into clinical care can reduce suffering and promote positive mental health in patients.