When we are depressed or not feeling good, we often tend to feel hopelessness and helplessness that we often tend to experience. Now, what are all these things? And why are they important to be addressed when it comes to mental health or therapy?
Hopelessness, in simple terms, can be termed as feeling or thinking that your future will not improve, bad things will continue to happen, there’s no point in trying because nothing will change. According to cognitive theory often associated with Aaron Beck and later elaborated in the hopelessness theory of depression people who tend to feel hopeless tend to think negatively about themselves, the world, and also expect a negative future. This seeds the vicious cycle of depression and often makes it difficult for the person to get out of it. It is the way how the person interprets the events and not the events itself. A person who believes bad events are permanent and it cannot change are more likely to develop hopelessness.
What is helplessness? In simple terms, we can say helplessness is a person’s feeling that they don’t have control; unlike hopelessness, which is mainly about the future, helplessness is more about sense of control. For example, a student who had failed several exams eventually may stop studying because they believe no matter how hard they try they fail. This is helplessness. Martin Seligman’s theory of learned helplessness explains this i.e., after repeated failures and uncontrolled stressful events, a person may stop trying even when they could succeed. Now the question is why does helplessness happen? The answer to this is that we often tend to develop this feeling of unable to control what happens after repeated experiences of failure, illness, traumatic experience. And over time, a person believes this continues to persist even when circumstances improve.
In anxiety and depression a person tends to feel hopelessness and helplessness. In depression, a person may feel nothing will ever get better; however, in anxiety, a person may feel “I cannot control what is happening.” It is important that in sessions, these two things are equally addressed. Cognitively restructuring one of the CBT techniques can be useful in addressing both of these issues along with behavioral activation, in which small physical actions are encouraged routinely; mindfulness can also help in breaking this heavy loop of thought.
