How did Martin Seligman link learned helplessness to depression?

Seligman said a young professor, Jim Geer, looked at the helpless dogs and called it depression. When the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual defined unipolar depression in 1975 with nine symptoms, Seligman found eight of them in the learned helplessness literature, all except thoughts of death. He proposed helplessness as a model of depression, and drugs that broke helplessness in lab animals became leading antidepressants.

• The nine symptoms included passivity, cognitive difficulty, sadness, anxiety, poor sleep, numbness and loss of mirth.
• Seligman says the model went on to become the leading model of depression.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Hidden Brain (2026-09-21). Read the whole episode summary →

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