Final answer:
The therapist's suggestion aligns with the cognitive approach to depression, which implicates learned helplessness and negative attribution styles as factors leading to depressive symptoms.
Step-by-step explanation:
The therapist suggesting that Maggie is depressed because she attributes her failures to her own incompetence and feels a sense of powerlessness or learned helplessness is describing the cognitive approach to depression. According to this perspective, depression is influenced by negative thinking patterns, where a person makes internal, stable, and global attributions for bad outcomes, as described by Seligman's reformulated learned helplessness model. Seligman and colleagues proposed that these cognitive styles can make a person more prone to depression when faced with negative life experiences. Changing these attribution styles through cognitive behavioral techniques can lead to reduced vulnerability to depression.