HOPE

Why do I think hope is important for mental health. Why do I suggest it trumps fears? If I consider its opposite, hopelessness, it’s apparent that this is a debilitating feeling associated with depression. If we feel hopeless, we tend to think that there is no way through to change our experience for the better. Hopelessness, is closely aligned to helplessness, both underpinning and maintaining depression. In both states an individual seems to have lost all sense of their personal capacity to change or improve anything, either within or outside of themselves. It’s as if all sense of personal agency has been lost as well as any belief that there is anyone or anything external that can help.

Hope, by contrast, signifies a world of possibilities, in which the person themselves, someone else or some external change, could occur, that would relieve the current state of suffering. It suggests that the current bleakness could give way to something better. Hope implies a possibility of growth, of renewal, there’s no certainty of that, the importance of hope is in the possibility of something better in the person’s experience of their life. As Abraham Maslow, one of the fathers of the humanistic movement in psychology said, “ One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” Hope is an essential ingredient in the choice of growth and the overcoming of fears. Being hopeful we can imagine the possibility of a better future, this will trump and overcome our fears which are always based on some notion of a negative future outcome. If we can admit that in reality we can’t be certain of what will happen in the future, we can let go of our predictions of negative outcomes and embrace at least the possibility of something more benign ahead. In so doing the states of hopelessness and helplessness dissipate. Being hopeful we can initiate actions which can lead us to our desired outcomes. Hope is an abstract concept, but being hopeful is a mental and emotional state that points towards actions (which includes thoughts) and the experience of some degree of personal agency, to change experience for the better.

Diogenes who was something of a comic and challenger of Plato in the 5th century B.C. in Greece, argued that philosophy was something to be lived and he espoused virtue over wealth. He lived in a storage jar in the middle of Athens and carried a lamp which he said was to aid him in his vain search for an authentic human being. He was a revolutionary and dreamed of a political equality which was way ahead of his time and ours! When he was asked what the most precious thing in life was, he replied, hope. It’s been argued by philosophers that hope has elements of desire and belief, so to hope for something is to wish for it and to see it as possible if not inevitable, you don’t hope for something you don’t desire and you don’t hope for something if you think it is unattainable or conversely, bound to happen. Nor do you hope for something if you think it is attainable purely by your own actions, so we hope when we want something that we don’t think is wholly under our control. Kierkegaard defined hope as a passion for what is possible. it doesn’t matter if the possibility is very small but it’s about the aliveness of the passion for it that is sustaining. For example, I think it’s very unlikely that the world will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees however much I may hope for that, but with a hopeful attitude I can be passionate in my hope that it will be limited to 2 degrees and this points towards being active in some way in working toward that outcome. So whereas hope may be merely wishful thinking when it is clearly unrealistic, it’s best seen as the activity of being hopeful in an appraisal of realistic possibilities no matter how small.