Helplessness

Following on from Martin Seligmans work. He has been looking at treating individuals for depression brought on by learned helplessness.

But maybe we should be looking at why society since around 1920s or so has had this well documented huge increase in depression. Is it in fact due to the structure of society, rather than changes in individuals? Certainly in a big population, its easy for everyone to get the feeling of helplessness.  When your leader is elected by multitudes of voters who have no contact with the leader at all, how do you ever get a feeling of being able to affect anything your leaders/government/society does.

This also could be much improved by having small groups elect a leader they all know personally, and can talk to and influence.
And in turn that leader can then make a sensible decision about whether an idea or suggestion should be shunted upstairs to the next level.  At all levels, the idea ( or whatever ) is passed from a small group of known individuals to another group of known individuals, with the leader providing the link between the levels.  So at all levels, the 'helplessness' effect never shows up.