Hope Is Harmful in Depression

Thank you for writing this. I often tell people my tombstone won’t have my name or dates on it. It’ll just say “Finally Something Good Happened”

I came across your article as I was searching why the hope I am is triggering to past experiences and the feelings of depression I am currently experiencing. Thank you being brave and writing this. You made me feel less alone and that I can breathe a little easier.

This is a great article and it has helped me feel less ashamed. So often I've heard how hope is essential to mental illness recovery. But when hope is hard to find, not being hopeful becomes yet another failure.
Like you, I've found hope troubling because there's usually a huge letdown when it falters. Letting go of hope has helped me accept myself better. I still get challenged on this as a harmful attitude, so I don't talk about it much.

This article is a refreshing glimmer of truth for those of us living with Bipolar who understand. Hope, as in the feeling that something good or pleasant will happen, is downright counterintuitive when in depression. Hope, NOT faith, holds empty promises. Faith in holding on to facts about the Disorder is helpful to me. This (insert symptom or mood) will end. I don't know when or how, but it will. I can't hope my way out of this. That's my truth about "hope" and the harm it can do.

Alone for many years, totally alone.
When I find a little bit of hope and it is dashed as quickly as it came, it can take weeks of being so low.
I found myself never believing in hope.
Then I realised I was truly hopeless. But I felt that I was better off without it?
I was completely miserable.
A human without hope is nothing I thought.
Now I have a direction. Some support. It's very slow, and hard to allow hope but I find if I do not project too far ahead, a little bit of direction goes a very long way.
It would be remiss of me to not mention Natasha and her insights remind me that I'm not alone, and that I once functioned very well regardless of bipolar.
I do have a little hope that I will find a better routine and lifestyle, and I'm working on it.
Thanks Natasha for helping to open the conversation so that more will understand the complexities of this illness.

Therapists making promises they can’t keep relieve their own anxieties. But they set their clients up for a betrayal of trust. I am glad my docs never promised my treatments would work. Because they didn’t. But we were able to maintain a partnership in seeking for what might help at least a bit.
I think you are on track, Natasha. The genuine hope you offer is that your readers discover there is somebody willing to tell us the truth. And that we are not alone.

I thought about this last night, as I tossed abs turned. So many times I placed hope on the wrong thing, wrong people, unsubstantiated dreams. Like casting a fishing rod into sand.

Preach, Natasha!
With bipolar disorder, my experience is that feeling good is inevitably followed by some level of depression. I can’t ever just have a good day and not pay for it later. That’s the nature of bipolar disorder. I’m doing everything I can to keep those swings from happening, but so far it’s what I live with.
The perspective of “hey, it always gets better” comes from a place of privilege, and from those who don’t understand. MLK said, “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
People with bipolar disorder don’t always have bootstraps. It doesn’t always get better. I do the best I can with what I have, and I don’t give up.

Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I have chronic depression and chronic pain conditions and I too struggle so much with hope and even making long term goals or plans. It completely overwhelms me. But it is so hard to explain to friends and family and even doctors. So, I plan to share this article with them to help them understand how I'm feeling a little more. Thanks again, and keep up the great work!

It’s really important to read all the way through this article and to read/listen with open ears. This article makes perfect sense to me and courageously dares to discuss feelings and thoughts that a lot of “helpful” people don’t want to hear. The author also says not to abandon hope or healthy habits. This is about dealing unblinkingly with life when you’re never going to “get better” or “be normal.” Also, it is really codependent to suggest that a person or an article would be responsible for someone’s suicide. It’s very likely that many despondent people may read this article and hear a strain of truth that they have never before heard for all the platitudes and facile aphorisms which are constantly thrown at people who are suffering.

Are you crazy? This is going all over the internet. There are people who are hanging on by the thread of hope and because you want a few minutes of fame you make unsubstantiated claims as if you have a PHD in psychology.
I work with suicidal Veterans and cancer patients. Giving them the slightest reason to give up hope could be enough reason for them to pull the trigger. You need to retract your article before someone dies or I begin a campaign to expose you as dangerous author who needs to be banned from publication.