ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique



Article Critique

Introduction

In this essay we have reviewed 10 articles which have discussed that striving for excellence is an admirable goal. Adaptive or healthy perfectionism can drive ambition and lead to extraordinary accomplishments. High-achieving people often show signs of perfectionism. However, maladaptive, unhealthy, or neurotic perfectionism, where anything less than perfect is unacceptable, can leave individuals vulnerable to depression. In both personal and professional relationships, nurses need to understand how accepting only perfection in self and others is likely to lead to emotional distress. This paper reviews perfectionism as a personality style, comments on perfectionism and high achievement, discusses vulnerabilities to depression, identifies how to recognize perfectionists, and presents balancing strategies perfectionists can implement to lessen their vulnerability to depression.

Article Critique

All the articles studied indicated that striving for excellence in any endeavor is generally considered an admirable way of thinking. Setting high expectations and conscientiously striving to achieve difficult but attainable goals usually leads to feelings of satisfaction. However, when thinking shifts towards perfectionism, defined as “setting excessively high standards of performance in conjunction with a tendency to make overly critical self-evaluations”, emotional distress, particularly negative affect and depression, often results. Perfectionism differs from a healthy attitude of striving to achieve. Maladaptive or neurotic perfectionism impacts individuals from all walks of life, and yet the construct is seldom addressed in the nursing literature. This paper reviews perfectionism as a personality style, comments on perfectionism and high achievement, discusses vulnerabilities to depression, identifies how to recognize perfectionists, and presents balancing strategies perfectionists can implement to lessen their vulnerability to depression.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR, major depression is defined by depressed mood, markedly diminished interest or pleasure, significant weight loss or gain, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, diminished ability to think or concentrate, and recurrent thoughts of death. Symptoms of depression vary, and while some can present as mild responses to distressing life events, others are severely disabling and persistently distort how individuals' view themselves and the world around them. Understanding these distorted views is not straightforward. However, research revealing positive correlations between depressive symptoms and perfectionism begins to offer important insights.

Perfectionism has been conceptualized both as a stable personality trait, where individuals habitually engage in the same patterns of behavior and a thinking style, or the ways in which individuals think about those behaviours. A perfectionist personality style is not viewed as a disorder, but rather as a vulnerability factor in producing depression and other psychological problems in adults, adolescents, and children. The following explanation of three subtypes or components of a perfectionist personality style begins to illustrate how this worldview has personal as well as social ramifications for afflicted individuals.

Hewitt and Flett viewed perfectionism as a multidimensional construct with three elements: self-oriented perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism, and socially-prescribed perfectionism. First, self-oriented perfectionism is an intrapersonal dimension that involves requiring perfection of one, constantly striving to achieve unrealistically high standards, and critically evaluating one's own ...