Despair

Desperation
Spirit sickness
Despairing people
Loss of hope

Nature

Despair is characterized by lack of hope and by a sense of waiting for hope to return. In present day Western society, despair is commonly suppressed or at least a (usually successful) attempt is made to hide its existence from others. This is said to leading to a partial numbing of the psyche so that the emotional and sensory life are diminished. Anxiety provoking data is effectively filtered out and the numbing effect intensified unless the despair is worked through. In this respect it is not dissimilar from grief.

Incidence

In industrialized countries despair is typically associated with alienation from society. There is growing desperation among the poor in both the industrialized and developing countries.

Claim

In the long-run the security and well-being of the industrialized world depend on improving the economic prospects of the world's poor. Rich countries cannot hope to wall themselves off from billions of desperate people who see the gap between themselves and others widening.

Lucid despair menaces the living more than the frantic or irrational kind. The message of the suicide from beyond the grave is that, having peeled life back to the core, nothing was to be found.

Without going into an analysis of figures and statistics, it is sufficient to face squarely the reality of an innumerable multitude of people (children, adults and the elderly) in other words, real and unique human persons, who are suffering under the intolerable burden of poverty. There are many millions who are deprived of hope due to the fact that, in many parts of the world, their situation has noticeably worsened. (Papal Encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 30 December 1987).