Seligman´s Theory of Learned Helplessness is when a person learns to be helpless. A person who learns to be helpless is a person that always tries to do things and never succeed so that person is more likely to learn to be helpless. Learned helplessness means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. The Environmental Theory of Depression is concerned with factors that are outside of us. They are not directly related to brain function, inherited traits from parent’s medical illnesses, or anything else that may take place within us. Instead, environmental events are those things that happen in the course of our everyday lives. These may include situations such as prolonged stress at home or work, coping with the loss of a loved one, or traumatic events. Sometimes researchers refer to these as sociological or psychosocial factors since they bring together events that happen out in society with the inner workings of a person's mind.
It has long been understood that experiences we have in our lives can affect our state of mind.
The Environmental Theory of Depression could relate to the Theory of Learned Helplessness because both of the theory relates to depression. Both of these theories also have to do with what surrounds the people. In learned helplessness people think they are helpless because of one or many specific situations that happened to them in their society that caused them to feel depressed. For example in the environmental theory of depression is when you are depressed because something in your surrounding changed drastically, or you did not succeed in something. This is linked to the theory of learned helplessness because it also involves your surrounding and what you do in your society and how can learn to be helpless when you fail in something you do.