LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND COCAINE DEPENDENCE - AN INVESTIGATION

Low personal control and a sense of meaninglessness of life. attribute s associated with a pattern of human learned helplessness, have also b een described as contributing to the onset of adolescent drug use, as well as the maintenance of chronic substance abuse. However, despite i ts intuitive appeal as an etiologic factor, the absence of psychometri cally sound and easily administered measures of learned helplessness h as limited the ability of researchers to empirically test its role in the addiction process. Accordingly, the publication by Quinless and Ne lson (1988) of a relatively brief Learned Helplessness Scale (LHS) led us to administer it to a sample of 30 consecutive cocaine dependent i ndividuals seeking treatment for the first time at our facility. Our r esults indicated that the LHS was internally consistent when administe red to this clinical sample and that theoretically meaningful and stat istically significant relationships with other measures of psychologic al functioning were observed. Moreover, scores on the LHS were related to treatment retention/outcome.