Positive thinking - A disorder?

I was doing some random searching online and came across an interesting article with the title:

"Evaluating bizarre-idiosyncratic thinking: a comprehensive index of positive thought disorder."

Straight away I'm thinking holy crap there's actually a disorder where people are too possitive?!

Now I can understand that there some instances whereby people need to understand the severity of certain situations in order to act appropriately and not cover things with roses... but a disorder?

I guess it makes some sense when I think about it. I mean there's got to be extremities on both ends of the scale.

There's Melencholy, which is defined by dictionary.com as "the condition of having too much black bile, considered in ancient and medieval medicine to cause gloominess and depression."

This word and understanding of it has been around since, or even before Elizabethan times as shown in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. So this is not new to us/me.

After a quick search I've found an interesting word: Agathism.

This is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "The doctrine that all things tend towards ultimate good, as distinguished from optimism, which holds that all things are now for the best."

Thinking about it closely I'd say that positivity and optimism are pretty much brother and sister in terms of their relativity to one another going by that defination.

So somehow, amoungst all that life has to throw us in terms of lows and highs we've got to keep a positive outlook so as not to develope negative thoughts which could culminate in accumulating too much black bile, but also have to be wary of being too optimistic as we could lose sight of the reality of the situation we find ourselves in be in negative or positive.

Of course, It's always better to be optimistic/positive than the other way!

Interesting...