A theme in the previous section on some troubled nonhuman primates is that there is a discrepancy between the sorts of stressors they are exposed to and the coping responses they come up with. Learned helplessness, which we saw to be an underpinning of depression, appears to be another example of such discrepancy. A challenge occurs, and what is the response of a depressive individual? “I can’t, it’s too much, why bother doing anything, it isn’t going to work anyway, nothing I do ever works….” The discrepancy here is that in the face of stressful challenges, depressives don’t even attempt to
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