in the 1960s, martin seligman came up with a model to decribe the thoughts of people who are prone to depression; it is called learned helplessness, and you may have heard of it (from frankl, perhaps, who is more widely read). seligman argues that a person's reactions to a bad situation he has no control over varies along three scales. internal-external (does the cause of my failure within or without?), stable-unstable (is my suffering temporary or permanent?) and global-specific (is my failure situational, or will i succeed in other things?). predictably, depressed individuals tend to think of root causes of suffering as internal, stable, and global, whether or not this is true. thus, they expect that bad things will happen to them, and sometimes even will their failures into being by assuming that they have no control over matters.

i had a point when i started writing this entry, but now i have forgotten it.