Journal

The vulnerability of the human psyche is a phenomenon that has intrigued psychologists and human beings in general for thousands of years. The causes for disturbances in people’s emotional and behavioral state have also been explored by many different people throughout history. One of the most common abnormal mental states is depression in which a person finds itself trapped in negative situations that lead to the loss of hope in life. This loss of hope can be defined by learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a condition of a human being or animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is presented for it to restore itself. This condition basically describes how the depressed person feels. The different causes for being in this condition have been outlined by psychologists. One of them, known as the cognitive theory of depression states that people become depressed because of a negative view they possess of themselves. Depression is learned by people and it is reinforced because there is no positive aspects that will decrease those thoughts. Cognitive factors that cause depression are mostly having a low self-esteem and being constantly pessimistic about everyday situations. Psychologists have concluded that depressed people whose causes are closely linked to cognitive factors have deficient social skills.
This cognitive theory of depression can be linked to the idea previously presented of learned helplessness. When a person perceives information through his senses and later processes them in their mind, cognition is coming into play. When the perception of oneself is negative and degraded, this person reaches a point where they think that they have a myriad of faults and defects that they cannot change. For example, a person who gets a bad grade in a test may think that he is dumb and he will never be able to get a good grade. Therefore, he stops trying and no longer studies for other tests because he thinks his efforts are useless. This incursion into a learned helplessness state presents great probabilities that the person will eventually become depressed. Another example is when a guy is trying to flirt with a girl and get attention from the opposite sex. Constant rejection may lead him to think that he is ugly and he is not cool enough for girls to pay attention to him. He will eventually stop talking to women and will renounce to not having a girlfriend or a date. This lowers his self-esteem and this even reflected in other activities he does, following the pattern of learned helplessness. This degrading of his view of himself may also eventually lead to depression.