Learned helplessness

If you seperate a predatory fish from some prey fish with some clear perspex the fish will initially keep knocking into the perspex to try to get to the food, after a while it will give up trying and just swim around and ignore them. The interesting part is that if you remove the perspex the predatory fish will continue to ignore the prey and will not make further attempts to catch them, this effect is so extreme that the predatory fish will actually die of starvation before it tries again to catch the prey again- hence the fish has learned helplessness.

Life in the Transkei can sometimes feel like the life of the predatory fish. For example I've developed learned helplessness towards accessing various tests for my patients. I have tried hard to access CT scans through the government hospital but have had virtually no success and had essentially given up.

What I've learned is that just as in the fish story it is a dangerous mindset to slip into because you just never know when the perspex has been lifted. It often takes the fresh approach of a new member of staff to spur you into action and in my experience you can get some great results when this happens. For example, I've recently learned by chance of a new approach to the CT scan problem that may well work and it has spurred me on to revisit some other obstacles that I had previously abandoned.