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21
Sep 23

Unveiling the Prevalence of Helplessness: Is It More Common Than We Thought?

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

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23
Sep 21

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Have you been in a situation where you experienced an unpleasant event that left you traumatized for the rest of your life? Well, that is considered post-traumatic stress disorder in which an unpleasant event or incident happened that might cause life threatening injuries to a person. Although some are not life-long, many might be for a while and cause a person to fear his life. Symptoms, like nightmares, irritation, anxiety, depression and many more, should be shown before giving a person this diagnosis. An example of PTSD is riding a roller coaster in which I give an example explaining it more in depth below. Some treatments that would help with PTSD are cognitive processing theory and medications. PTSD is a psychological disorder that relates to other mental health disorders that we discussed in class like anxiety and depression.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychological disorder in which an incident or event happened that caused a person to constantly stay afraid or traumatized afterwards. Some reasons that a person might experience post-traumatic stress disorder is either experiencing an unpleasant event or going through something. For example, if someone has a fear of roller coasters and rides it one time or even sees on the news that a roller coaster stops midair for hours this would cause a person’s anxiety levels to increase causing a person to develop PTSD. It would also cause a person to fear riding a rollercoaster ever again. Not only does it cause a person to stress about it, but it might cause a person to have other symptoms. Other symptoms are like not being able to sleep, causing mental health problems, hyper vigilance, depression, nightmares and many more.

This might even cause a person to stress about it while only thinking and talking about remembering the bad experience. Some might experience it for a long time while others might only experience it for a short period of time. There are treatments that a person can go through which would help them with solving the problem. An example is cognitive processing theory in which the process changes the way that a person might think by changing their attitude resulting in a change in their feelings. Another treatment is medications in which stress relievers are given to a person to help calm down their nerves. As well as exposure therapy is a beneficial treatment because it helps with “Repeated confrontation of traumatic memories, often through detailed recounting of the traumatic experience” (3 Jonathan). These are only a few treatments for PTSD. Connecting it to the example of a roller coaster, PTSD is considered as a rollercoaster because of the ups and downs that it causes a person to go through. Consider yourself a psychologist or even a student pursuing psychology, how would you approach a person with PTSD? 

Post-traumatic stress disorder connects to the textbook reading in which it connects to different psychological disorders like anxiety and depression. PTSD is a form of anxiety in which as the levels of PTSD increases, more anxiety is caused. PTSD is considered a psychological disorder and to find treatments for these disorders, “social psychologists who work in this area study factors that might bias the process of identifying the nature of a client’s difficulty. They also study the impact on the client’s welfare of giving a diagnostic label to a client” (Gruman 99). Many disorders can be treated after researchers’ work with patients and finding the reason behind the diagnosis. An issue that is present in most physiological disorders is the labeling effect in which a person’s identity might be influenced by words that describe a person. There are other issues in psychological disorders which are present in the textbook like stereotypes, anchoring, and the confirmation bias (Gruman 124). Even though there are issues related to PTSD, it can be treated through different formats. 

Experiencing a traumatic incident or event that might cause a person to injure themselves is considered as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are many symptoms in which a person goes through to consider themselves having PTSD like constant fear, anxiety, lack of sleep, mental health problems, and many more. After diagnosing someone with PTSD, there are some treatments in which a person can go through to help with their mental disorder like cognitive processing, medications, and exposure therapy. Post-traumatic stress disorder connects to other psychological disorders discussed in the textbook like anxiety and depression. Even though there are treatments for PTSD, I think there should be more treatments and solutions to post-traumatic stress disorder. One question to keep you thinking is, how would you approach a person with PTSD?

Here is a link to another example of PTSD if you are interested.

https://youtu.be/YMC2jt_QVEE 

References:

Bisson, J. (2007, April 12). Post-traumatic stress disorder. Retrieved September 23, 2021, from https://www.bmj.com/content/334/7597/789

Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE.

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