Learned Helplessness and Depression
To understand the proposed connection between learned helplessness and depression, we need to understand the two types of learned helplessness, as outlined by Seligman and colleagues.
Universal helplessness is a sense of helplessness in which the subject believes nothing can be done about the situation she is in. She believes no one can alleviate the pain or discomfort.
On the other hand,
personal helplessness is a much more localized sense of helplessness. The subject may believe others could find a solution or avoid the pain or discomfort, but he believes that he, personally, is incapable of finding a solution (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978).
Both types of helplessness can lead to a state of depression, but the quality of that depression may differ. Those who feel universally helpless will tend to find external reasons for both their problems and their inability to solve them, while those who feel personally helpless will tend to find internal reasons.
In addition, those who feel personally helpless are more likely to suffer from low
self-esteem since they believe others could probably solve the problems they feel incapable of solving.
Although the cognitive and motivational deficits are the same for people suffering from both personal and universal helplessness, people experiencing personal helplessness tend to have a greater and more impactful emotional deficit.
In addition to this differentiation between types of helplessness, learned helplessness can on two other factors: generality (global vs. specific) and stability (chronic vs. transient).
When a person suffers from
global helplessness, they experience negative impacts in several areas of life, not just the most relevant area. They are also more likely to experience severe depression than those who experience
specific helplessness.
Further, those suffering from
chronic helplessness (those who have felt helpless over a long period of time) are more likely to feel the effects of
depressive symptoms than those who experience
transient helplessness (a short-lived and nonrecurrent sense of helplessness).
This model of learned helplessness has important implications for depression. It posits that when highly desired outcomes are believed to be improbable and/or highly aversive outcomes are believed probable, and the individual has no expectation that anything she does will change the outcome, depression results.
However, the depression will vary based on the type of helplessness. The range of depressive symptoms will depend on the generality and stability of the helplessness, and any
impact on self-esteem is dependent on how the individual explains or attributes their experience (internally vs. externally).
This proposed framework identifies the cause of at least one type of depression—that which stems from helplessness—and provides the path to a cure for it. The researchers outlined four strategies for treating helplessness-related depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978):
- Change the likelihood of the outcome. Alter the environment by increasing the likelihood of desired events and decreasing the likelihood of negative events;
- Reduce the desire for preferred outcomes. This can be done by either reducing the negativity of events that are outside the individual’s control or by reducing the desirability of events that are extremely unlikely to happen;
- Change the individual’s expectation from uncontrollability to controllability when the desired outcomes are attainable. In other words, help the depressed person realize when outcomes they desire are actually within their control;
- Change unrealistic explanations for failure toward those that are external (not due to some inherent flaw in the depressed person himself), transient (not chronic), and specific (due to one specific problem rather than a larger pattern of problems). Likewise, change unrealistic explanations for success to those that are internal (due to some inherent strength in the depressed person), stable (chronic), and global (due to an overall competence rather than a specific area of competence).
