students (Dua & Plumer, 1993) and McDermott-Nelson ( 1993) found a negative linear relationship between self-care agency, a construct enabling self-care, and learned helplessness. Certain populations, then, such as those living with chronic illnesses, may experience learned helplessness and helplessness may further complicate disease trajectories, both through direct detrimental health outcomes and also, indirectly by way of cognitive and motivational deficits.In studies of specific disease populations learned helplessness has been positively correlated with disease duration, age, disability and disease activity, and negatively correlated with education (Engle et al., 1990;Smith et al., 1990). The relationship between learned helplessness and education has not been elucidated. It may be that higher education obviates the cognitive deficits engendered by learned helplessness, or, perhaps, helplessness is antecedent to educational achievement. It seems likely, however, that individuals who have experienced a long disease trajectory with much resultant disability are more inclined to be helpless.The learned helplessness theory, then, implies that individuals with MS may be susceptible to learned helplessness and that this helplessness may further complicate the disease trajectory both directly by detrimental health outcomes and also indirectly by way of cognitive, affective, and motivational deficits. However, learned helplessness has not been studied in the MS population, therefore, in this study the relationships between learned helplessness and disease status, functional and social disability, and disease activity in the MS population were described.