Hopelessness: 5 Unique Questions Answered

✅ Today's Wednesday • 📖 8 mins read

“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.” — Haruki Murakami

Hope is a critically important part of life, though hopelessness is often a necessary evil.

Feeling hopeless is a natural reaction to many life experiences, but it can have a serious influence on one’s thoughts, feelings, and view of self and others, even pushing people to their ends.

Around the globe, hopelessness is a prominent cause and result of ideas and acts of self-injury.

What is hopelessness?

Hopelessness is a feeling characterized by the absence or insufficiency of hope (Donncha, Ross, 2011). Hopelessness is often accompanied by self-hatred, aimlessness, pessimism, and self-injury ideations and tendencies. It is frequently a result of a cause of other mental illnesses.

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines hopelessness as the feeling that one will not experience positive emotions or an improvement in one’s condition.

Hopelessness has been defined as negative expectations toward oneself and the future. — Kazdin, Rodgers, & Colbus, 1986

How do you measure hopelessness?

Hopelessness is commonly measured by the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), devised by Beck, Lester, & Trexler in 1974.

The BHS is a 20-item survey that measures three aspects of hopelessness: future feelings, motivation loss, and expectations. It assesses how pessimistic the person is about their future. It could be used to predict the risk of self-injury in depressed people.

• Hope: 7 Unique Questions (Answered For You).

What is a hopeless personality?

A hopeless personality is characterized by an absence of optimism, hope, and passion. Such people have very little expectation for positive things to happen in the future.

Aaron Beck introduced hopelessness as a personality feature characterized by negative emotions, an unrealistic negative attitude toward the future, and loss of pleasure in life.

Men have a higher incidence of hopelessness than women. This was more pronounced in less educated, divorced, rural, and relatively poor men.

When people feel hopeless, they become indifferent to both their internal and external environment. They find it hard to concretize their plans, realize alternate solutions to problems, and imagine that someone could help them find solutions to their issues.

The “Hopelessness Theory of Depression” (Metalsky & Alloy, 1989) suggests that hopeless people develop a negative view of themselves, often seeing themselves as worthless.

This negative self-perception grows stronger with time and starts to encompass negative expectations for the future. In time, this gives in to self-injurious behaviors.

Interestingly, the hopelessness theory was developed as a response to limitations in Seligman’s (1972) “Learned Helplessness” (Seligman’s fascinating experiment on dogs) theory of depression.

What is the effect of hopelessness?

Hopelessness can lead to persistent low mood, anhedonia (when nothing feels pleasurable anymore), anxiety, posttraumatic stress, bipolar disorder, depression, eating disorders, substance dependency, and self-injury.

This study found that patients with breast cancer and benign breast disease are at risk of hopelessness.

Hopelessness has links to self-injurious ideas and repeated instances of self-injury. A strong association was found between hopelessness and self-injury ideation in 50+-year-old depressed individuals (Britton & Duberstein, 2008).

It can impair a person’s capacity to perceive themselves (self-perception, the image we hold of ourselves and our qualities), their surroundings, and other people. (Ali & Soomar, 2019).

Hopelessness has also been suggested as a predictor of loneliness, especially in older adults (Juan, Iraida, 2022).

People feeling hopeless often make statements like:

• I’m out of options.
• Nobody can help me.
• I feel like giving up.
• I don’t have a future.
• It is already too late.
• I will never again be happy.
• My situation will never improve.
• What’s the use of doing anything?
• What are the types of hopelessness?

“Hopelessness … comes on like a thick blanket, covering your thoughts, your confidence, creeping into your mind, and filling the corners. I lie in the dark. I sleep, then wake, then sleep. The sleep is filled with monstrous dreams that hurt, cry out, and vanish, leaving me once more awake and staring into the darkness. ‘Help me!’ my mind is screaming, but there is no one to hear.” — Joan Lowery Nixon

What are the types of hopelessness?

According to Scioli and Biller, there are nine types of hopelessness, and they all seem to originate from the inability to meet certain vital needs in your life:

1. Alienation (attachment hopes): feeling that others have forgotten about you.
2. Forsakenness (attachment and survival hopes): feeling that others have abandoned you when you needed them the most.
3. Lack of inspiration (attachment and mastery hopes): feeling that you are devoid of all creativity and motivation to do anything useful.
4. Powerlessness (mastery hopes): feeling that your life and actions have no influence on the world.
5. Oppression (attachment and mastery hopes): feeling that you are treated unfairly and unequally, and are victimized by racism and sexism.
6. Limitedness (mastery and survival hopes): feeling that you don’t have enough resources, money, or skills to fulfill your goals.
7. Doom (survival hopes): feeling that you are unlucky in life, condemned to suffer negative outcomes, and perhaps die.
8. Captivity (survival and attachment hopes): feeling that you are trapped at some point in your life (like in a toxic relationship) and cannot free yourself or do as you wish.
9. Helplessness (survival and mastery hopes): feeling that you are helpless by yourself to do anything.

What causes a sense of hopelessness?

• The most common causes of hopelessness are long-term illnesses and physical disorders that limit one’s activities and movement.
• Depression can cause and exacerbate hopelessness and is nearly a defining feature of severe major depression.
• Some social factors that can cause hopelessness include loss of so-called dignity, stigmatization, unemployment, family disputes and issues, and financial constraints.

Though hopelessness is seen in various depressive illnesses, its implication in self-injury attempts and completed incidents is severe. Hopelessness may be more closely associated with self-injury than depression.

How do you control hopelessness?

Overcoming hopelessness is possible. Here are some helpful tips to overcome hopelessness:

1. Seek expert help. If you have been feeling hopeless or thinking that your life has no meaning or purpose, urgently seek the help of a mental health professional. A therapist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you open up about your issues and negative thought patterns, and teach you how to challenge them and apply the modified insights in your daily life. A trauma-informed care practitioner can help resolve your past traumas.
2. Challenge and change your distorted patterns of thinking. Force yourself to dispute thoughts like nobody cares about you or everybody who meets you wants to get some favor or money out of you. Actively seek out supportive relationships, especially friendships, notwithstanding your fears.
3. Try “somatic therapy” to help process the physical effects of your trauma. It involves practicing body-focused exercises and revisiting the trauma without recalling specific events and emotions. It helps you develop a mind-body connection and regulate your emotions via body movements, like dancing or stretching.
4. Learn to handle criticism. Stop believing everything that everyone says about you. Let go of your toxic relationships. Get away from people who blame you for your condition and do not help you grow out of your hopelessness.
5. Focus on the present moment. Practice mindfulness meditation. A simple exercise like letting the water run over your hands while noticing its temperature and flow can help you moor in the present moment. Try box breathing.

Box Breathing

Box breathing is a mindfulness breathing exercise used to calm the nervous system, increase focus, and bring attention to the present moment. This is how to do it:

• Sit upright and relaxed.
• Inhale slowly through the nose for 4 seconds (count to 4).
• Hold your breath for 4 seconds.
• Exhale slowly through the mouth for 4 seconds.
• Hold your breath out for 4 seconds.
• Repeat for 4–6 cycles or until calm.

Final Words

The ills of hopelessness are many, especially those caused by unresolved trauma.

Nearly 1 billion people live with a mental disorder and in low-income countries, more than 75% of people with the disorder do not receive treatment. Every 40 seconds, a person dies by self-injury. About 50% of mental health disorders start by the age of 14.

— Rialda Kovacevic, MD MPH, World Bank, 2021

According to the American College of Physicians (ACP), hopelessness and depression are major predictors of self-injury. Bringing hope into the lives of those suffering from depression can save many of them.

“Hope is the bedrock of getting out of self-injurious states.” — Jon G. Allen, The Menninger Clinic, 2013

When the future is uncertain for a long time, people abandon hope, engage in high-risk behavior like substance use, and react violently to minor triggers.

We must address hopelessness in a bigger way than is currently being done. There should be public awareness programs to bring “hopelessness” to the forefront and save many precious lives.

HopefulMinds says, “Hope is the most critical skill we can teach everyone.”

Hope is teachable and learnable. Together, we can create a conversational space to raise hope among the hopeless.

Further reading:

• The relation between bullying, victimization, and adolescents’ level of hopelessness (Siyahhan & Aricak, 2012).
• Hope and Hopelessness: The Role of Hope in Buffering the Impact of Hopelessness (Huen, Ip, & Ho, 2015).

Hope is an expectation that is both desired and possible.

√ Also Read: How to find hope in hard times and make it work?

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» You deserve happiness! Choosing therapy could be your best decision.

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