Hope?

Now that the part about love is done, let's move on to Hope!

In the legend of Pandora's Box, hope was the very last evil to leave the box, only when directly prompted to do so by Pandora. And yes, hope was regarded as one of the great dangers of the world.
Yet, in that legend Hope is the element that allows humanity to cope with all the other evils, without which all the other ones humanity would feel only despair.

According to Nietzsche, the only point of Hope was to prolong the suffering of man by allowing her to sustain a vision of things getting better in order not to kill herself.

But enough reading from the Wikipedia-article on the matter.

What is depression? It's a pathological removal of hope.

According to famous comedian, actor, author and show host Stephen Fry, suffering from a severe case of manic depression himself, people who just have the "regular" form of depression are really getting the short end of the stick.
See, people who are directly affected by bipolar disorder, the fancier word for it, have huge ups and downs. A manic depressive person can have huge peaks in mood, where the world is open to them and they feel like they can do anything!
But then they can also have the enormous lows, where there is no meaning whatsoever to anything.

When you suffer from depression, on the other hand, you only get the lows. You have that fantastic(and yes, I'm using the word in a sarcastic manner) sinking feeling of lack of purpose, like all the pleasures and colours of everyday life are just momentary distractions from the gray and hopeless shit that spreads out like a vast ocean in front of them.

Some people tend to believe, quite wrongly, that a depressed person is someone who always walks in the rain with their head bent down low and mumbling quietly to themselves. While there are extreme cases like that, they are far from being the most common.
A depressed person can smile, he can make jokes, he can be glad.
He just doesn't have hope. No matter how good something feels, the depressed person will always have a feeling of it being momentary, temporary, something that doesn't belong in the regular flow of time. If things are bad, and they usually are to someone who is depressed, there is no hope of things improving, and there is no feeling that his own actions can somehow help to make things better.

Quite frankly, 'tis no wonder people kill themselves. Alot of people fail to comprehend how someone could go that far, and I myself didn't understand it about four years ago. Death is something that we are tought to avoid at all costs, he is shunned by the entire western world, he is the big enemy to us.

What was my point again?

Oh, right, hope!

Stop telling depressed people to just walk it off! Just stop doing that!
Anyone who does it deserves to have their eyeballs ripped out through their nose!

What does it take to instill hope in a depressed person? It takes a fucking big pile of drugs and just a little luck!

The one thing that does NOT help is your fucking "advice", platitudes and clichés! Telling a depressed ateist "I'll pray for you!" is also one of those things you should just stay away from, lest you'd lose a limb sooner or later.

Do I have hope?

Yes, I do. Thank the drugs for that!