There is a widespread perception that mental ill health is on the rise in the West, in tandem with a prolonged decline in collective well-being. The idea that there are social and economic causes behind this perceived decline is increasingly convincing, amid what has been termed the zombie economics and grinding austerity, which have followed the global financial crash.

In particular, there is growing concern that the conditions and effects of neoliberalism – the enervating whirl of relentless privatisation, spiralling inequality, withdrawal of basic state support and benefits, ever-increasing and pointless work demands, fake news, unemployment and precarious work – is partly to blame. Perhaps most wearying are the invasive yet distant commands from media, state institutions, advertisements, friends or employers to self-maximise, persevere, grab your slice of the diminishing pie, “because you are worth it” – although you must constantly prove it, every day.

In our work and leisure we are urged to feign permanent enthusiasm amid radically lowered expectations. Neoliberal newspeak hollows out the terminology of achievement, mandating boasts about personal “excellence” and “dedication” as actual possibilities for achievement diminish and work becomes stripped of meaning. At my institution, the cleaners’ uniforms are emblazoned with inscriptions announcing that they deliver their work with “passion, professionalism and pride” – as if it were reasonable to demand “passion” from a cleaner on minimum wage whose workload has doubled since 2012.

Here’s what we know: learned helplessness can indeed be a severe form of torture. The inability to control one’s environment has repeatedly been shown to create not only anger and frustration but, eventually, deep and often insurmountable depression. In a sense, inducing learned helplessness makes a person give up. We shouldn’t forget the high price at which the learned-helplessness findings came: many of the animals used in the studies died or became severely ill shortly thereafter. So is learned helplessness an effective way of causing incredible pain? No doubt.

But here’s the more relevant question: Does the condition, in turn, make someone more likely to tell the truth and give up important information that had previously remained hidden? Here we have no direct data—after all, there have never been controlled torture trials that we know of—but we do have some theoretical basis in the study of severe depression to suggest that it will do no such thing. People who’ve given up lack all incentive. Once they are in that state of hopelessness, there is no longer a way to motivate them. Absent any possible inducement or motivation, most people just want to quit. The threat of pain or even death no longer makes much of a difference: Nothing I do or say matters, so why bother? A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.

“I think learned helplessness would make someone less defiant and more likely to compliantly tell the interrogator what he wants to hear,” Seligman said. “It would also likely undermine the belief that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” In other words, it would do the opposite of what its users in this particular context intended.

Seligman says that he isn’t the father of learned helplessness. He’s the father of positive psychology: the study of how to go about identifying and nurturing positive emotion, and using it to withstand the negative. Learned helplessness, at the end, isn’t about helplessness at all—it’s about empowerment and control.