LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND DEPRESSION

Learned helplessness is a state where a person feels helpless to avoid a negative or unpleasant situation. This tendency is generally formed over several repeated encounters with an aversive stimuli/situation, which leads him to believe that he has no control over them. Sometimes the situation/aversive stimuli are escapable, but the person does not make any effort to get out of the situation. This happens because subsequently the person learns; all his effort will go in vain.

American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered this phenomenon of learned helplessness in an unexpected fashion. He and his colleagues were testing a particular learning theory on dogs, which involved giving electric shocks to dogs such that they couldn't avoid them. Later in the experiment, the dogs were put in open boxes from which they could escape, when given a shock. But, to the researcher’s surprise, the dogs made no attempt to escape i.e. when an animal is repeatedly exposed to an aversive stimulus which it cannot escape, it eventually stops trying to avoid the stimulus and behaves as if it is helpless to change the situation even when opportunities to escape become available.

Similarly in reactive depression a person faces series of negative uncontrollable events/stress (loss of relative/lover, failures, being dismissed from job etc). He/she feels they have no control over things that were happening to them. So, they give up trying. They learn that they are helpless and subsequently apply that piece of learning to any new situation too, even when they aren't helpless.

According to Seligman, people who suffer a series of such setbacks in life begin to believe that they have no control over any of the events in their lives’ and no matter what they do, things will turn out badly in the end. Therefore they give up trying, see themselves as failures and lose all motivation and interest in life.

The theory of learned helplessness also has been applied to many conditions and behaviours, including clinical depression, aging, violence, poverty, discrimination, parenting, academic achievement, drug abuse, and alcoholism , where a person shows a general inability or unwillingness to act, including low self-esteem, chronic failure, sadness, and physical illness.

In treating reactive depression cognitive behavioural therapy plays a vital role. The basic principle that underlies behavioural therapy is that if a thing can be learned it can be unlearned too. In case of such reactive depressions learned helplessness clearly explains why individuals may accept and remain passive in negative situations despite their clear ability to change them. Therapists here aim to break the conditioned conviction that “nothing will ever work”, by giving them simple tasks at which he/she can succeed, develop confidence and then move to harder ones.

Seligman says that the only way to help people who suffer from ‘learned helplessness’ depression is showing them that they can operate and deal effectively with their environment and are not mere victims of their fate. REMEMBER IT’S JUST A BAD DAY NOT A BAD LIFE!!!!!