If you can’t be a good example – be a warning

No one put things more starkly and more bleakly that the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, often referred to as the “philosopher of pessimism”.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said, “It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow— and so on till the worst of all.”

If you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of nonexistence. And in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a lifetime, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little. This feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even consider it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently assumed, and form the groundwork of all they have to talk about.

He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.

- From Studies in Pessimism (1913)

Learned Helplessness and Depression

One cognitive account of depression is the Learned Helplessness Theory (Seligman, 1975). It argues, that depression occurs when people expect that bad events will occur and that there is nothing they can do to prevent them, or cope with them.

Learned Helplessness Theory emerged through Martin Seligman's work with laboratory dogs. He designed an experiment which consisted of three individual dogs, all restrained by harnesses. Dog group (a) was the control group, receiving no electric shock. Dog groups (b) were paired up. One dog in a pair was administered with a mild electric shock and at any time the dog could cease the electric shock by stepping their paw upon a lever. Dog group (c) were too paired up, however one of the dogs was a wired up to a dog in group b and the shocks they received were in congruence with that of group (b). The idea of this was that the group (c) dog would receive a shock that was erratic in timing, unavoidable and inescapable. The tests resulted in groups (a) and (b) recovering quite promptly from the experience. As predicted however, group (c) dogs were left meek and subdued; portraying symptoms similar to those of clinical depression and thus conforming to Seligman’s predictions: that helplessness can be learned. 

Learned helplessness results from being trained to be locked into a system. It can involve a state of apathy or passive behaviour induced by negative conditioning. People may believe that their personal 'defects' will render them helpless to avoid negative events in the future, and their sense of hopelessness places them at significantly greater risk for depression.

Although Seligman theorized that learned helplessness and depression had similar origins, the theory was widely criticized and he has since revised his ideas in his 'Explanatory Style'. This proposes that depression is linked to how we attribute causalities of certain events in our life or traits of our existence (i.e. whether we attribute events to internal, stable or global aspects) (Yen, 1998). Therefore, it is interesting to ask whether learned helplessness is in fact a cause of depression or a correlated side effect of becoming depressed.

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"Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better" ~ Martin Seligman