Cognitive Theory of Depression and Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is something that has been increasing throughout the years. It is a term related to the human psychology as well as to animal psychology, meaning that is a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when it has the opportunity to successfully help itself by avoiding a harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Because of these actions, animals or humans are forced to be in a complicated stage at their lives, which includes depression.

Depression is a sickness that is due mostly to mental problems of each individual. Several theories such as the environmental theory, which relates to the problems caused on someone's mental ability that come from outside sources, the biological theory, which is the one that has to do with the changes of chemistry in the brain like hormones, and the cognitive theory, which is the one that relates to each individuals feelings and what they believe and think. All of the three of them are important factors to the cause of depression. Personally, I think that the most important of them all is the cognitive theory.

This theory has much to do with the one on learned helplessness, mainly because the fact of being helpless is influences by factors such as people’s own ideas. Because there people think that they are not good enough, and even though they try and try and try, thing do not come the way they have expected, so they get to a point that they have to give up, and this causes a lot of mental problems. They think that they are not good enough and because of this they are not good enough for society. This are all ideas that come across these people’s minds, and are the ones in charge of causing such depression in the individual.