From understanding perfectionism to promoting mental health: is perfectionism literacy the next frontier?

Abstract

We are living through a particularly challenging historical moment: Western culture has systematically valued excellence, productivity, performance, and achievement, while simultaneously bombarding us with messages about the importance of caring for our physical and mental health. In contexts where effort is required and being merely good is not enough, perfectionism is widely regarded as a positive quality, reinforced across various spheres of our lives. However, the scientific literature accumulated over the past decades presents a substantially different scenario. Multidimensional perfectionism can be defined as the tendency to establish and pursue extremely high and rigid personal standards, accompanied by frequent and excessive self-criticism, constant concerns about failure and mistakes, negative self-evaluation, and tying self-worth to achieving these standards (Flett & Hewitt, 2020; Frost et al., 1990). Taken together, research conducted in different contexts and involving diverse outcomes and age groups largely points—unlike what we tend to hear in a job interview or in a casual conversation at a bar—to the deleterious effects of high levels of perfectionism. Perfectionism has been consistently associated with anxiety- and depression-related conditions and symptoms, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, obsessive-compulsive disorders, marital dissatisfaction, social isolation, burnout, chronic pain, and poorer quality-of-life indicators (Flett & Hewitt, 2020; Limburg et al., 2017; Pinto et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2018; Stackpole et al., 2023). These findings underscore the importance of placing perfectionism at the center of mental health care. The marked increase in perfectionism further reinforces the need for strategies to identify and prevent it, as well as to develop effective interventions. Curran and Hill (2019) state that levels of perfectionism have increased dramatically over the past three decades and estimate a 32% increase among adults between 1989 and 2017.