Toxic Positivity and Epistemic Injustice

 

Toxic positivity (TP) is “the phenomenon of people being positive and optimistic to a degree that is unreasonable in a given situation, and as such makes others feel as if their own (less than positive) feelings are invalid or in some way wrong, thus having the potential to cause harm to the victim” (de Rijk 2025). For example, if one loses a loved one and tries to garner support from a friend who then tells you that you should not be sad because your loved one is in a better place, you may have fallen victim to TP. 

Features of  Toxic Positivity

TP has four features: 

1) appropriate emotion in the victim as a starting point

2) unreasonable optimism on the part of the perpetrator

3) dismissal of the victim 

4) potential harm to the victim 

Toxic Positivity and Epistemic Injustice

I have argued (de Rijk 2025) that TP is an epistemic injustice because it has the potential to undermine knowledge to which the victim ought to have a claim so wronging the victim as a knower (Fricker 2007). Further, this is a particularly sneaky kind of epistemic injustice because it often masquerades as something good, because optimism is seldom considered problematic. Knowledge might be undermined through TP in at least three ways, all of which have their root in the doubt-instigation that is caused through dismissal. 

First, TP can make a victim doubt their belief and genuinely doubting a belief means that it can no longer count as knowledge. Second, TP could make a victim lose their belief because they might think the best course of action in response to genuinely doubting their belief. Thirdly, a victim may lose self-trust, which is a precondition for acquiring and maintaining knowledge (e.g., Zagzebski 2012; Dormandy 2024), although this would only happen in the most serious cases. 

Toxic Positivity and Getting Proper Medical Help

I now argue that TP that undermines knowledge formed through negative emotional experiences related to health can prevent one from timeously seeking proper healthcare. Imagine you are suffering a serious bout of depression but remain highly functional. You confide in a friend that you think you are depressed and need help. But your friend responds by pointing out that you do not seem depressed, you are going about your life as normal and even cracking jokes with your friends and colleagues, he suggests that maybe you are just feeling stressed about an upcoming deadline and when it has passed you will feel better. 

This makes some sense to you, and you begin to seriously doubt that you really are depressed even though you continue to feel all the symptoms of depression. Nonetheless, the doubt sown by TP acts as a defeater to your belief that you are depressed. 

So, you do not seek proper treatment for your depression (because why should you seek treatment if you are not really depressed?) and eventually suffer a complete nervous breakdown. In this case, TP has prevented you from seeking timeous medical help and as a result you ended up in a far worse position than you might otherwise have been.

This is just one way that TP undermining knowledge in connection with our health can prevent one seeking healthcare. But it is sufficient to show that undermining knowledge formed through negative emotions related to health can be detrimental to taking the right steps to ensure that one receives proper medical help before one’s condition worsens. 

Shené de Rijk is a PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She is affiliated with the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS). Her dissertation is centred on investigating the phenomenon of toxic positivity in the field of social epistemology. Other than toxic positivity and social epistemology (and epistemic injustice in particular), her research interests include applied ethics, especially bioethics on which she has also written.