You can’t give a depressed person hope though. And even if you could box hope up, how would you make it last? At the end of the day, depression is a chemical imbalance and hope isn’t going realistically fix that - maybe that depression is a result of brain injury, like a nasty bump on the head that has permanently damaged the way the brain works… Depression is a long way off being solved.
Depression is a state with causes. Remove the things that make it persist and it will go. If you’re talking about a chemical imbalance that itself is abnormal and could only truly respond to treatment like drugs (e.g. like schizophrenia and lithium) then I agree, but most depressed people have “normal” brains that are in a currently unhealthy state, so I’ll avoid arguing exceptional cases.
I’m also not suggesting that hope cures depression, I’m suggesting that hope prevents suicide. Basically, why kill yourself if there is hope? Depressed people aren’t being rational but then neither are optimistic people, each with their own distortions of reality. However, they’re not delusional, you might call it a state of hyper-realisticness that actually distorts through the destruction of possible branches in reasoning. An optimist thinks “it’ll be sunny tomorrow“, a depressed person thinks “it won’t be sunny again, ever”. Neither requires reasoning for their position snd can easily dismiss any given, but it can be done. Reason with an optimist and you will deflate them and they will react badly, usually we avoid this because it has little upside. Reason with a
depressed person and they will also react badly but the upside is that it may sow the seeds of their remission.
Regardless of all their defences, distortions and dismissals, if they can be convinced there’s hope it will keep depression from being suicidal.
In fact, I think it is a very harmful myth. When people become falsely convinced that their depression is due to a "chemical imbalance", it encourages them to see their current mental state as something fixed and unchangeable – and then that false perspective helps to sustain and worsen their depression
Even that suggests that living life is some kind of 'default' or 'obviously correct' state, that anything else has to supply sufficient reason to deviate from. Why should that be so, really? Just because we are born into it?
To be pithy: why must death justify itself, but not life?
Well put. I often see people who are not depressed who use optimism towards depressed people, because optimism will cancel out an ephemeral despondency as it doesn’t really require evidence or reasoning beyond “it’ll get better”. Depression is too well bunkered in for something like that.
Optimism provides a useful safeguard against depression in the first place. It's called the optimism bias. If people think too realistically (or, perhaps it's better to say glumly because it may still not be realistic even if more realistic) without regular doses of optimism that realism may turn into longer periods of despondency, and we know where that leads.
As I recall, around 80% of people have the optimism bias. The rest are prone to depression.
