Believing in bringing therapy out of the therapist’s room
An advocate of ‘Positive Psychotherapy’ Dr. Tayyab Rashid from the University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada talks to Kumudini Hettiarachchi
He is recognised around the world and though he has been to major trouble- spots including Lebanon to make the lives of numerous folk better, it was a first visit to Sri Lanka recently.
It is in Piliyandala’s SOS Children’s Village that Dr. Tayyab Rashid ( 50) shared his expertise on a Strength- Based Resilience ( SBR) Training Programme, with more than 40 teachers, curriculum developers and teacher educators and 25 artistes of a beleaguered Sri Lanka.
The programme hopes to cause a tiny ripple effect and covered important life- skills such as mindfulness, growth mindset, character strengths, cognitive accuracy, problem solving, empathy, gratitude, communication and positive relationships. ‘Learn for Life Lanka’ (L4LL), a social enterprise comprising Sri Lankans who want to ‘make a change’, sponsored the programme.
L4LL hopes to achieve such change through teaching social and emotional skills, built on academic skills, to create a new generation…..and what better trainer than Dr. Rashid, who along with two others has developed the SBR programme.
We meet this licensed Clinical Psychologist of the Health & Wellness Centre, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, for an exclusive interview in Colombo 3. An advocate of ‘Positive Psychotherapy’ (PPT), for more than 15 years, he also helps people who are experiencing complex mental health issues including severe depression, debilitating anxiety and suicidal behaviour.
Dr. Rashid’s expertise has been honed not only on qualifications but also life experiences, growing up in Lahore, Pakistan.
It was his older brothers who sacrificed much and found the money to send him to a private English school, one among many “turning points” in his life. Another was falling in romantic love with books.
“Books became a telescope into the larger world,” to the boy living within a traditional religious social fabric, in a country ruled by military dictators. He was an introvert, an indoor-type who preferred to bury his nose in a book. Not for him were the street games of cricket-mad peers.
He yearned to be an actor but a male actor defied the stereotype! Instead, young Tayyab wielded the pen and at 15 won an award for creative writing.
As Tayyab journeyed into the prestigious Government College, Lahore, “an island within a society”, it gave the rebellious youth creative oxygen to defy social norms. He majored in English Literature and Psychology, followed by a Master’s in Psychology.
“I opted for psychology because I wanted to understand,” for Tayyab knew he was different. “Not a typical male, I had a shrill voice and was effeminate” which led to “serious bullying”. But he used reading as a crutch.
Reading also led him into journalism as he loved history and the 1947 Partition of India with graphic images of trains full of dead people made him try his hand at translating a book on the ‘History of India’ which was published in 1992. “Somehow, I couldn’t hate India,” he says.
History and his experiences widened his world, while his degree in psychology made him understand the social connotations, making him more enamoured of Indian philosophy.
In his personal life, with some people labelling him as gay, he carried out the very first survey of homosexuals in Lahore in 1993. It was not just to show support for this stigmatized group but also a little bit of rebellion.
He dubs his “last adventure” in Pakistan, his 1996 stint as Editor of ‘Ravi’ (River) in the footsteps of many Nobel Laureates.
Just two years before, his Master’s dissertation was on the controversial ‘ Psychological Profiles of Fundamentalists’ after interviewing them at a camp in the city’s outskirts. The revelations were shocking with one answering the query: “Tell me the time you were happiest,” with “When I killed three people”. His supervisor was too afraid to place his final copy in the college’s library.
However, when the abstract was sent to the World Congress of Psychologists in Montreal, Canada, it was accepted. After his presentation, an American Professor invited him to work with him.
The rest fell into place, with some bumps along the way, while also being tinged with sadness and guilt as he missed the funerals of his parents. He slid down the slippery slope to clinical depression.
Ups and downs he has had – with a highlight being selected, in a very competitive process, for a two-year residency programme ( 2003- 2005) under famous Psychologist Prof. Martin Seligman. His guru invested attention and funding, allowing Dr. Rashid the freedom to experiment with positive psychotherapy – it was a “small but decent” study in which depressed clients were exposed to positive psychotherapy along with treatment and others treatment alone, which showed that positive psychotherapy improved the clients’ well-being.
There followed another ‘up’ when Dr. Rashid’s paper on Positive Psychotherapy was published in the respected journal ‘ American Psychologist’ in January 2006. It is the third most cited paper on this subject.
Now Dr. Rashid, his wife Dr. Afroze Anjum who is a school psychologist and Dr. Jane Gillham have woven positive psychotherapy into a resilience curriculum that teachers can impart to children.
Having moved to Canada, Dr. Rashid had been inundated with emails whether he had a manual on these life skills. He did publish a manual in 2018 with the base being how to use the strongest resource a person has to tackle the toughest issues. The first step is how to take strengths and build on them rather than struggling to eliminate deficits. How despite low mood, anxiety or anger, there is a capacity to be grateful for specific things.
Bringing therapy out of the therapist’s room, Dr. Rashid wants to make young people, caught up in the rat race of life, realize that happiness is not moving towards the top, but making progress while moving to the top.