PERSPECTIVE ON THE NATIONAL MOOD : To the Optimists Will Go the World : The rise in teen suicides is only a symptom of a debilitating national pessimism. At least it’s a curable condition.

One million American teen-agers tried to commit suicide during a recent 12-month period, a new federal report tells us. This grim news comes as no surprise to researchers who have been tracking, with mounting dismay, mental depression in America during this century. For about 10 years we have known that depression is 10 times as frequent now as it was 50 years ago. The nation is in the middle of an epidemic of depression.

This epidemic is but one reflection of a national pessimism that has blanketed America since the end of the Eisenhower era. This pessimism began as a reaction to footless boosterism (“Every day in every way I’m getting better and better”; “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative”) that followed World War II. It became fashionable to espouse pessimism.

Pessimism is, unfortunately, more than just a posture. It has consequences for the mental health of the nation, its economy and productivity.

The fundamental difference between optimists and pessimists is that they look at the causes of troubles in opposite ways. The pessimist ruminates on permanent and pervasive problems: an endless struggle between rich and poor, an implacable hostility of Arabs toward Israel, a national debt that grows continually, a steady withering of American initiative, the long history of dictatorships in Russia. The optimist focuses on temporary, changeable and local causes: this year’s poor Russian wheat harvest, an evil dictator in Iraq, Japanese trade barriers, Federal Reserve policy, President Bush’s new world order.

Hundreds of studies over the last 20 years involving hundreds of thousands of people have shown that this kind of optimism confers four benefits. When bad things happen, optimists fight off depression better than pessimists. Optimists achieve more at work, at school and on the playing field than measures of their talents predict. Americans elect optimists to high office and turn away from pessimists. And optimists have better physical health than pessimists. These are consequences of optimism as well as causes of it.

The mechanisms of optimism are not a mystery. It works simply through increased persistence in the face of problems. When defeated at any stage, the pessimist tends to give up, while the optimist keeps trying.

What are the consequences of pessimism for a nation? A pessimistic nation, like a pessimistic individual, will have lower achievement than its resources warrant. A pessimistic nation will have rampant mental depression among its people and a high suicide rate among its teen-agers. A pessimistic nation, like a pessimistic individual, will not persist in the face of troubles. It will be all too ready to give up when thwarted. Before glasnost, East Germans, for example, had a much more pessimistic style, much more depression and far lower productivity than West Germans. On the other end of the spectrum, the irrepressible optimism of the Polish people must have helped Solidarity persevere to eventual victory in the face of one defeat after another.

I worry that national pessimism in America will prolong the recession beyond what economic grounds alone dictate. I worry that the American worker and the American executive will, on average, be less productive than their more optimistic counterparts elsewhere. I worry that national pessimism will sap our will to overcome domestic problems almost as daunting as any foreign war that we’ve ever fought. I worry that our national pessimism will lead us to fail to grasp the opportunity to lead the reshaping of the Soviet Union.

Optimism, it must be said, has one major drawback. Pessimists see reality accurately, whereas optimists have self-serving illusions that keep their optimism intact. Optimists believe that they have more control than they actually do; they see themselves as more skilled than others see them, and they remember a more positive past than actually happened. Pessimists, in contrast, are more accurate in judgments of their control, their skills and their past.

At a national level, being clear-sighted and so acutely aware of one’s limits seems cold comfort, balanced against the loss of initiative and the mental and economic depression that follow from pessimism. Even so, flexible optimism allows us to use optimism when achievement in the face of obstacles is the issue, and to use pessimistic realism when catastrophe is to be avoided.

We should remember that, in a stunning failure of nerve, we are the nation that turned away from space after reaching the moon. A nation of pessimists will not be prepared to endure the hardships needed to maintain a Pax Americana. A nation of pessimists will not have the initiative and adventurousness needed to compete successfully in a global economy.

We should also be aware that pessimism, at both the individual and national level, can be permanently changed into optimism. Personal optimism can be learned, and once acquired becomes a self-maintaining skill.

The long night of national pessimism brought on by Vietnam, by the assassinations of the 1960s, by Watergate, by the ordeal of our Mideast hostages and by the exhausting battle with Marxism could be brought to an end. A renewed national optimism could have as its seed crystal our stunning victory against Iraq and the self-destruction of European communism.

At this moment of political choice, the psychological choice is also ours.