Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
Seligman inferred that the canines that went on to escape shocks had realized something important—not all shocks are equal, and it doesn’t hurt to keep trying to get away. Those that didn’t likely went through a different reasoning process: Nothing I do here helps, so why even bother trying?
.. Humans, the group posited, differed from other animals in one significant respect: when they find themselves helpless, they explicitly ask why that is the case. The answer, in turn, can differ along three different lines: whether the electric shock, so to speak, is seen as permanent or transient, pervasive or limited, and personal or incidental. Seligman called these differences our explanatory style. Some people were naturally inclined to believe that bad things will keep happening to us and that they are our fault. Some were naturally inclined toward the opposite—bad things are happening now, but they’ll stop and they’re not our fault. The former were those who were prone to depression; the latter were those who tended to bounce back. Seligman believed that humans, like dogs, could be taught to become more resilient, a phenomenon he called learned optimism.
.. And, importantly, training people to change their explanatory habits—to more narrow, external, and transient—seemed to help them overcome existing depression and, in some cases, prevent its onset even when other risk factors were high.
.. This work, according to Seligman, who, in 1998, became president of the American Psychological Association, is his legacy. “I have spent my life trying to cure learned helplessness,” he told me.
But then came the torture report. And when he heard what his research had been used to justify, he was both shocked and mystified. He told me that he was “grieved that good science, which has helped many people overcome depression, may have been used for such a bad purpose as torture.” Not only that, but its very use, he felt, was contrary to the core of his findings. He is no scholar of interrogation, he says, but as he understands it, “the point of interrogation is to get at the truth and to have the person believe that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” Does learned helplessness actually achieve that end?
.. A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.