Learned Helplessness

They use learned helplessness to stop elephants from creating chaos at the circus. So it applies to animals as well as humans. Intresting.

I feel like my childhood and teenage years were plagued by learned helplessness. What could have been done?  How could they have taught me that certain pressure points on my life might have an impact on anything I do, even when they arn't connected?

Learned helplessness has a great deal of parallels with depression and is cured pretty much the same way, and that's through empowerment. Volunteering, therapy, and doing things you are good at and things that give you a lift are all things that can overcome learned helplessness. A person that has learned helplessness usually doesn't see it that way, and so I doubt that in the midst of your childhood you would have found it easy to seek help and ask these questions.

A theory like this video in medical scenario's - may prevent patients from appropriate medical tests.

Look at ME, a disease considered by some as 'Learned Helplessness' but is infact a disease of the central nervous system - World Health Organisation. (ICD-10 G93.3).

There is an implicit danger here. One needs to be extremely careful. DSM-IV personality disorders may not be what they appear, if one is foolish and fails to robustly research, prior to labelling. A Phd is not an MD.

poor niggers

Well...with the whole "ONE time then it's over," they are wrong. Everyone has varying amounts of willpower. Some people will try the same thing over and over no matter how they fail. I'm not refuting the theory of learned helplessness, but more often than not, it takes more than ONE time to get broken into a pattern or feeling.

wow, I have brand new term for lack of confidence!
now go and buy my book!

Its a term agreed upon by many psychologists and there are many books about it.

buy them all, become superman!

Ive read the books Learned Helplessness and Learned Optimism. The whole idea is to discover areas in your life where you have developed this conditioning and change it, resulting in learned optimism.

The book goes into depth about its theories and explains how certain genetic traits were passed on through human evolution, but I am sure you know al about the theory and have read the work on it before making your comment, right?