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The authors concluded that the animals had learned they had no control over the situation and named the phenomenon “learned helplessness.”

During an election cycle, news outlets like to report that the American public is living in a state of learned helplessness, which anyone who feels like they are being barraged with a flood of unpredictable stressors can certainly relate to.

While the two are not mutually exclusive, learned helplessness is also thought to play a role in depression.

In experiments that put animals into a state of learned helplessness, those animals also tend to eat less and show a general lack of motivation and pleasure.

“What happens in depressed people is, you end up having a sensation of anhedonia, where it’s not worth it to move towards the reward, or you develop learned helplessness, where you need to move but you cannot.”