I think a more accurate verbal expression of EHP would be "everything happens for a meaning." It is a belief that although we may not control events in our lives we can control what meaning we attach to them and over time this actually does give us more control over the events themselves. For example, a woman may be attacked while walking home alone at night. The event itself is random, the meaning attached can be deterministic. Someone who gives little thought to the attack and how it could have been prevented may be just as likely to be randomly attacked again in the future, whereas a person who finds meaning in the frightening event ( ex, "I need to avoid walking alone after dark, and this was my wake up call.") actually does reduce thier chances of getting attacked agian in the future due to meaning- based behavioral changes. To assume the attack was meant to happen so that a worse attack could be avoided is taking it a step further, but to retroactively place control over the attack by deriving meaning ( a false control), may actually give a person more real control over the future.

Dear Dr. Krueger--Your interesting essay rightly notes that "The problem of determinism is a deep one." No one has all the answers, of course, to these vexing problems. However, many of us in the mental health field who are also interested in Stoic philosophy and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza believe that "free will" (qualified in certain ways) and determinism are not incompatible. On the contrary, as my friend Tom Clark has pointed out--and as the philosopher Moritz Schlick argued--we would not have personal freedom of any real kind unless determinism were operating in and through us. Spinoza well-expressed this seeming paradox in another way by saying (to paraphrase), "The free person is the one who embraces necessity." (In Karl Jaspers' book on Spinoza, we read, "Freedom is knowing participation in necessity."). I have outlined some of these issues in two essays, available at:
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/54281 and at
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/55086.

With best wishes, Ronald Pies MD

Professor of Psychiatry and Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Prof. of Psychiatry Tufts USM.