Prescription for positivity

UND grad Harris Jensen shares his advice for breaking the cycle of negative thinking.

“Growing up in North Dakota, I was taught not to be selfish, not to promote yourself,” smiled Harris Jensen from his office in Fort Collins, Colo. “It was just ingrained in me: Midwesterners don’t do that.”

This upbringing is why it was such a challenge for the 1992 graduate of the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) M.D. program both to talk about the book he published in 2022 and to reach out to his alma mater about his recent history, he said.

“I have some friends who are in marketing and they told me to put posts about my work on social media and talk about the book,” he laughed. “But that feels like I’m being selfish!”

But it’s not selfish, Jensen’s non-Midwestern friends reassured him: if your book might help people experiencing depression, loneliness, or addiction, they will want to know about it.

“My friends helped me though that,” he said.

Promoting self-promotion

And good thing too. Because a world that feels increasingly negative needs more positivity, said the psychiatrist.

This increase in negativity is the reason why Jensen wrote and published his first book, Prescription for Positivity: Life skills to live your best life, in 2022.

Filled with suggestions and tips on how those suffering from anxiety, depression, and a lack of self-esteem can help themselves turn their lives around, Prescription shows readers how they might break the cycle of negative thinking and embrace a “healthy positivity,” Jensen said.

“We live in a country that’s truly been polarized along all sorts of lines,” he said, noting the rise in mental illnesses of all subtypes in the U.S. over the past two decades. “There’s a war going on in our minds between the side of us that wants us to do well and believe good things are going to happen, and our pessimism that the future is doomed.”

But there’s no reason why pessimism is destined to win that war, Jensen said.

Building on his own clinical emphasis on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), Jensen explains that as challenging as our environment gets – from economic hurdles to political conflicts that can divide communities – we can work to control our attitude and our reaction to the world around us.

“There is a rise in depression and a rise in suicide,” he admitted. “Anxiety is off the chart. People thought it was because of COVID, but even after COVID it persisted. But if we help people develop the skills to manage these things, we can control them. These are game-changing skills.”

Even more, we can change our habits to better control our lives in ways that help us avoid the chronic pessimism that contributes to some mental health disorders, Jensen said.

“Flow charts and to-do lists and meditation and exercise: all of these things can help us stay focused and organized, which helps us stay positive,” he said. “It’s a way to open doors with people.”

‘I was crying and I couldn’t stop’

The North Dakota-born, Jensen said that he too struggled with mental health, particularly right out of college.

After earning a degree in journalism in the 1980s, Jensen said that he took a position as a newspaper reporter in Southern California. Government beat. But something wasn’t right, he said.

“I was crying and I couldn’t stop, and I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 5, one of the busiest highways in Southern California,” he confessed on the first page of Prescription. “I’d become a reporter to help people, but really I could do very little to help others. I just wrote stories about people’s problems…. I was stuck.”

So Jensen quit his journalism job and went back to school – specifically medical school at UND. After graduating with his M.D. in 1992, Jensen completed a psychiatry residency in Minnesota and ended up in Fort Collins, Colo., where he practices to this day.

“In my freshman year, we took lectures on psychiatry, and I just thought it was fascinating,” Jensen continued. His professor “talked about the biopsychosocial model – how the brain doesn’t just react to biological things, but reacts to psychological events – and that just fired up my intellectual curiosity. He talked about how the combination of counseling and medication got much better results than just prescribing medicine alone or CBT alone.”

Attitude determines altitude

So that’s how Jensen has approached his practice for the past 25 years: counseling plus medication (when necessary).

“Once we have the attitude discussion, that really helps patients,” he said. “Not always, but the attitude question often helps people tap into the natural optimism they used to have.”

After patients understand this, they tend to open up about how they can reimagine their lives and the agency to affect their direction of their lives. Jensen’s book is just another way of having that conversation with people, he said, a way of helping those suffering from chronic anxiety, depression, or low self-esteem understand that they can turn their lives around, and how they might envision doing so.

“Where can a person start if they feel overwhelmed by adversities?” he concluded Prescription. “I suggest keep it simple. Just try to make a little progress every day.”