Introduction
Despair is a very serious mental health condition that can take a toll on an individual's quality of life. This is why it's important to seek professional help if you suspect you are suffering from despair or a related disorder such as depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic pain.
Recognizing the Signs
Feeling hopeless is natural for some people and can happen to anyone at any time, however if you are feeling this way on a regular basis or for long periods of time it's important to talk to your doctor. This can help to identify underlying conditions and treat them, or to change the way you think about certain situations that may be triggering your feelings of hopelessness.
Symptoms of Despair
Symptoms of despair can include a loss of interest in activities, sleeping less or more often, and feeling worthless. These symptoms can also be accompanied by mood changes, such as sadness or irritability.
Impact on Older Adults
A new study has found that despair isn't just fueling suicides among people with fewer educations — it's also sucker-punching many older adults into a world of physical pain. It's an emerging trend among disadvantaged people in the United States, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The Despair Scale
In their research, Case and Deaton used a new despair scale to gauge the levels of seven indicators of despair – things like loneliness, self-destructive thoughts or behavior and feeling overwhelmed by social problems. Compared to young adults who qualified for a depressive disorder in psychiatry's diagnostic manual, those with high despair scores were more likely to think about or attempt suicide and to abuse illicit drugs such as opioids.
Study Methodology
The research was conducted over three months, and participants were questioned about their despair levels every two weeks. They were asked to list at least one of the seven items on the despair scale and to indicate how often they had experienced it in the past three months.They were then given a rating that ranged from one to five for each item on the despair scale, with the higher the score, the more intense the despair. Most participants rated themselves as having no despair, but some did.
Prevalence of Despair
In this study, despair was most common in a group of 25- to 30-year-olds who didn't get a college degree and in African Americans as a whole. And a large number of these individuals also had elevated despair scores that traced back to childhood, Copeland and her colleagues report in the journal Science.
