Results: Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human or other organism suffers repeated painful events beyond their control that are factually inescapable, causing them to fail to escape further painful events later in life, even when they have the means to do so. They will also frequently exhibit symptoms of depression and other mental illnesses. Prior to this survey, have you ever heard of 'learned helplessness'?

An interesting aspect of learned helplessness is that it seems to be largely influenced by the individual's "attribution style" - or how they explain the world around them. Those with pessimistic outlooks and explanations - that the world is inherently bad and full of bad people and will never change through human actions due to the inherent 'badness' or 'evilness' of humanity - are far more vulnerable to learned helplessness than those with more positive attribution. Do you know anyone with a 'negative attribution' explanatory model of life?

What I found to be both interesting and incredibly disturbing is that because of one of the ways humans learn - by observing others - they can also learn learned helplessness even if they themselves did not experience the painful events. As it turns out, learned helplessness can be what my husband rather dramatically called a "psychological contagion" with the best prevention being drastically limiting or eliminating exposure to those already suffering learned helplessness. Were you aware that simply witnessing the suffering of others could have such a dramatic impact on individual mental health?

While clearly not everyone suffering the same painful experiences will develop learned helplessness due to its dependence on individual world views, my husband and I both felt that its contagious nature could help at least partially explain a wide variety of social ills ranging from failure of refugees and asylum seekers to fully assimilate into their new home culture to inter-generational homelessness, failure to educate younger generations or seek education on one's own and even some abuse. Do you feel there should be a stronger focus on attribution or world outlook in prevention and aid programs going forward to try and break the cycle of learned helplessness and the dependency it creates?

If you have any ideas to help deal with the problem of learned helplessness, will you share them in the comments?