Hopelessness and Despair: What Influences Them and How to Deal with Them
Hopelessness and despair always make me feel like nothing can or ever will change. In that moment, it’s like I will be stuck in a never-ending pattern of turmoil and regret for the rest of my life without any improvements in my world.
One theory about hopelessness says that it comes from a combination of experiencing negative life events and how we interpret them, and that it leads to depression and suicide (ideation and attempts). Furthermore, childhood trauma, particularly emotional abuse because the it forces the child to internalize negative thought patterns1,2, influences how we interpret these negative life events1,3. In other words, someone with a history of abuse is more likely to interpret a negative life event as a personal attack. The negative life event plus the viewpoint of it as a personal attack lead this person to feel hopeless, which then leads to depression and suicide.
Despite the feelings, there are ways to change this pattern:
1. Change how you view the situation: People who view negative life events as something personal, stable, and influential (i.e., “This happened because I’m a bad person; I can’t change, and everyone will hate me.”) are more likely to feel hopeless and depressed than people who view it differently (“This happened because I’m tired. I’ve had a bad day, and tomorrow will be better.”)1,4. Allowing your thought pattern to be more fluid and self-accepting will improve the depression, viewpoint, and the negative life event1. Friends can help, as well: they can give feedback and correct any maladaptive viewpoints5.
2. Memory Specificity Training: This type of training will help you improve hopelessness and your ability to problem solve6. The point of this training is to change your memories from vague recollections to specific, autobiographical memories7.
3. Therapy: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy8, Psychotherapy9, Cognitive-behavioral-based Psychotherapy10, and Brief Problem-Solving Therapy11 all help improve hopelessness. One tactic includes life review, which is similar to memory specificity training but focuses on integrating specific life details into our stories7. Brief Problem-Solving Therapy will teach you problem-solving skills, and is shown to help with depression, hopelessness, improving problems, and self-harm11.
4. Find Meaning in Life: Doing interventions to find meaning in life will help improve quality of life, spiritual well-being, self-efficacy, hopelessness, anxiety, depression, and the wish to hasten death12. Being nostalgic is one way to find meaning in life because it helps improve self-continuity and social connectedness13. Also, the more religious14 and spiritual15 you are, the more likely you are to have more meaning in your life.
Hopelessness does lead to self-injury16,17 and suicide18,19, particularly for men20. It’s important to note here that the wish to hasten death may not be a true desire to die. These statements might hide a desire to stop suffering, a desire to hasten death because of suffering, a loss of self, fear (of the dying process and fear of inevitable death), a cry for help (wanting to live but in a different way), and a way to maintain control (choosing to die on their terms in their way)21. Hopelessness may increase these desires, but all is not lost when you are feeling hopeless.
1.Lui, Kleiman, Nestor, & Cheek (2015); 2. Rose and Abramson (1992); 3. Abramson et al. (1978); 4. Abramson et al. (1989); 5. Panzarella et al. (2006); 6. Barry, Sze, & Raes (2019); 7. Raes et al. (2009); 8. (Hernandez & Overholser, 2020); 9. Cuijpere et al., (2013), 10. Hawton et al. (2016); 11. Townsend et al. (2001); 12. Guerrero-Torrelles et al. (2017); 13. van Tilburg et al. (2019); 14. Cranney (2013); 15. George and Park (2017); 16. Fox et al. (2019); 17. Witt et al. (2019); 18. McMillan et al. (2007); 19. Ribeiro et al. (2018); 20. Miranda-Mendisabal et al. (2019); 21. Monforte-Royo et al. (2012)
