Hello and good morning, or evening. It’s not crazy to say that adversity is inevitable in our lives. Whether it be small as spilling soda on your shirt, to dropping the expensive cake to your daughter’s wedding on the floor, eventually something you dislike or that will stress you out WILL happen. But what if your beliefs on the adversity you might face were perpetual and actively preventing your sense of agency from making decisions and coping? You just might be experiencing something called “Helplessness”, something that affects more people more often than we assumed.
Helplessness (or Learned Helplessness) is the mental state where one believes that nothing they say or do will change their unfortunate circumstances that might occur to them (Gruman et al., 2017, pg.108). Meaning instead of just being pessimistic about a single or few topics for a sec, everything to them becomes inevitable or something they can’t avoid. The cause for someone to develop learned helplessness is the experience of constant trauma or negative circumstances over an extended period (Maier, 2016). This constant adversity gives people the perception that anything they do is a waste of energy, so, they just accept the trauma without making any plan to stop it. It is honestly scary to think about, but what terrifies me more is the connection between helplessness and other disorders/mental health.
While it is possible to see someone have learned helplessness alone, it’s way more common to see it coupled with another condition. This coupling of conditions is called a comorbidity, and learned helplessness is commonly coupled with depression and PTSD (Leonard & Sharon, 2022). Often one of the mental health conditions leads to the other. For instance, when someone has seasonal depression (the constant feeling of sadness and loss of interest as fall/winter comes around) they might try to start a project. But as they start to work, they may feel as though they’re sluggish, unmotivated, and tired, which results in them putting it off. If this chain of actions/adversity happens often enough, it could develop into learned helplessness as they may give up entirely on accomplishing what they wanted, as well as never deal with what they may believe is just the “Winter Blues.”
Another point I want to push is how helplessness may not be coupled with just conditions but a lack of information on a certain topic. Trauma, which according to the American Psychological Association is an emotional response (usually negative) to a horrible event/disaster that may cause unstable emotions, flashbacks, and even physical systems like being nauseous or a headache (2008). This word is used a lot by the public but fails to see how deep it goes. For example, PTSD (or post-traumatic stress disorder), the intense anxiety/ stress one feels when perceive a trigger like their past trauma. Most people believe that only those who served in the army get this, but trauma can be gained as simply as being neglected by someone or constant run-ins with your local wasp nest. I mention this because we all may have trauma that we have gone through, or still are, that if we simply gave up on handling it could bring us to developing helplessness without knowing it.
I feel like the topic of helplessness and trauma should be brought up more often. As it is important to know what may trigger us and how we should learn to cope in a healthy matter. Helplessness is a scary perspective to have, often coupled with other mental health conditions, which strips away our ability to cope and treat our problems. Along with our lack of conversation on common trauma, it becomes a issue invisible to us and ultimately unchecked.
References
American Psychological Association. (2008). Trauma. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma/
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017b). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems (3rd ed.). SAGE.
Leonard, J. (2022, September 2). Learned helplessness: Examples, symptoms, and treatment. Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325355
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033
Tags: learned helplessness, Post traumatic stress disorder, Trauma
Hello! Learned helplessness is a much more common mental health issue than people believe. When we think of mental health problems, we usually think of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, etc. Helplessness is actually a theory of depression. The helplessness theory of depression “suggests that depressive symptoms are most likely to occur when two factors are present at the same time: (a) a vulnerable person, and (b) negative environmental circumstances” (Gruman et al., 2017). So not everyone who experiences negative environmental circumstances will develop this helplessness, they have to be vulnerable. Patients with prior mental health issues will be more likely to develop this hopelessness. A vulnerable person is “someone who has a characteristically negative style of interpreting the causes of aversive life events” (Gruman et al., 2017). Luckily, there are many treatments for this issue.
References:
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., Coutts, L.M. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. (3rd ed.). Sage Publications, Inc, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071800591
Hi! I can appreciate this topic of helplessness because I have had some friends who thought like that. I feel like I have always been able to look on the bright side, find the silver lining, and just put a positive spin on things even when the going gets tough. I think it is normal to have bouts of helplessness or moments of feelings like that, but to live like that would be really hard. To have been through so many traumatic events and have that still affect you would be hard to navigate and get away from. Our book suggests that two things must be present for the hopelessness theory of depression to happen, first they must be vulnerable, and two, they must be experiencing a negative environmental circumstance. (Gruman, et al., 2017) When I first read the term “vulnerable person” I was thinking someone going through a life event that made them vulnerable at the time, like a bad breakup or death in the family. However, it is actually someone who has a negative style of viewing the cause of aversive events. (Gruman, et al., 2017) When your outlook is always grim, it would always feel like life is just trying to get you down and you can never win. That would be a really hard way to go through life, because I feel like we all have little things on most days, in between the big things, that go wrong. To let every little thing affect you like a big thing would be exhausting, and of course, lead to more stress and possible depression.
Gruman, J., Schneider, F., & Coutts, L. (Eds.) (2017). Applied social psychology. SAGE Publications, Inc, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071800591