Psalm 42 · Subject · Hope
Hope and Despair in the Mind
Four studies tested how hope and its loss bear on the mind, from hospital patients to fifty years of animal research.
A prophet who had seen fire fall from heaven on Carmel later sat under a broom tree and asked God to take his life.
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why the unease within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him for the salvation of His presence.
- Books
- Psalms, 1 Kings
- Hold in memory
- Psalm 42:5
Summary
Scripture names despair in the lives of God's own people, from the singer of Psalm 42 to Elijah under the broom tree. Psychologists have built scales to measure hope and have followed hopelessness and depression as warning signs of suicide. Their numbers show how much the loss of hope weighs, and their limits show what a measure of a group cannot say of one person.
- Psalms 42 and 43 answer the same question three times: the downcast soul is told to put its hope in God.
- In Aaron Beck's study of 1985, only the Hopelessness Scale and one pessimism item among the measures taken at admission predicted later suicide.
- A review of studies from 1971 to 2014 found depression and hopelessness to predict later suicidal thoughts and acts more weakly than expected.
- Steven Maier and Martin Seligman, the authors of learned helplessness, wrote that passivity under prolonged harm is the default response and that control is what is learned.
What Scripture Says of the Downcast Soul
Psalms 42 and 88, Proverbs and the story of Elijah speak of despair in God's own people.
The question is what despair is and what the research on hope can add to what Scripture says of it. Despair is the loss of hope, and Scripture gives it to the faithful as well as to the wicked. A psalmist and a prophet each reach the end of what they can bear. Psychologists have since measured hope and hopelessness in studies of patients and of animals. The four studies come from psychiatry, psychology and the neuroscience of animals. The sections set the studies side by side, show how hope is measured, read the Hebrew of the psalm's refrain and name the limits of the research.
The singer of Psalm 42 longs for God as a deer pants for water. His tears have been his food day and night, while others ask him, "Where is your God?" (Psalm 42:3). He remembers leading the procession to the house of God and then turns on himself.
Elijah ran for his life into the wilderness after Jezebel threatened him, and he asked the LORD to take his life (1 Kings 19:2 to 4). An angel woke him twice with bread and water, and in the strength of that food he walked forty days to Horeb.
A second time the angel of the LORD returned and touched him, saying, “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.”The angel's second visit gives the reason for the food.
Proverbs names the weight of a broken spirit: "The spirit of a man can endure his sickness, but who can survive a broken spirit?" (Proverbs 18:14). Psalm 88 ends without a turn at all: "darkness is my closest companion" (Psalm 88:18).
Four Studies Side by Side
Two of the four studies concern suicide, and two concern how hope is measured and lost.
The four studies measured four different things in four different groups, so their findings cannot be added together.
| Study | Who or what was studied | What was found |
|---|---|---|
| Beck, Steer, Kovacs and Garrison, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1985 | 207 patients admitted to hospital with suicidal thoughts, followed for five to ten years | 14 later took their lives; only the Hopelessness Scale and the pessimism item predicted them, and a score of 10 or more "correctly identified 91% of the eventual suicides" |
| Snyder and others, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991 | The building and testing of a self-report scale of hope | Hope measured as agency, "goal-directed determination", and pathways, "planning of ways to meet goals", with "acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability" |
| Maier and Seligman, Psychological Review, 2016 | Fifty years of research on learned helplessness, most of it in animals | "Passivity in response to shock is not learned"; it is the default response to prolonged harm, and it "can be overcome by learning control" |
| Ribeiro, Huang, Fox and Franklin, British Journal of Psychiatry, 2018 | A meta-analysis of published long-term studies from 1971 to 2014 | Depression and hopelessness together: prediction "weaker than anticipated", with weighted odds ratios of 1.96 for suicidal thoughts, 1.63 for attempts and 1.33 for death, lower again after adjusting for publication bias |
How Hope Is Measured
C. R. Snyder's Hope Scale measures how a person sees his own goals.
Scripture uses the word hope for a confident waiting on God for what He has promised, which no scale of personal goals measures.
Hopelessness as a Warning Sign
A study of hospital patients and a review of many studies reach different strengths of finding.
Beck's patients were all in hospital for suicidal thoughts, so the study shows what predicted the worst outcome inside a group already at risk. Its authors read the result as showing the importance of the degree of hopelessness as an indicator of long-term risk.
In the 2018 review the link held regardless of how severe, how old or how long followed the samples were, while its size stayed modest.
Helplessness Revisited
The account of learned helplessness changed between 1967 and 2016.
In 1967 Martin Seligman and Steven Maier proposed that animals exposed to shocks they could not escape learned that nothing they did mattered, and so stopped trying. Fifty years later the same two researchers wrote that "the original theory got it backward" (Psychological Review).
They offered the bearing of this on depression as speculation, and the work behind it was done chiefly in animals.
The Hebrew of the Refrain
The refrain's verb is the Hebrew word for waiting, and another psalm names hope with the word for a cord.
Where the Berean Standard Bible reads "Put your hope in God" in Psalm 42:5, the Hebrew verb is yachal (Strong's H3176). The lexicon glosses it "to wait; by implication, to be patient, hope" and counts 41 uses. The poet of Lamentations uses the same verb in Lamentations 3:24, where he says that he will hope in the LORD.
Psalm 62:5 uses the noun tiqvah (H8615), the word that also names a cord. In both psalms the soul is spoken to, and in both the hope is placed outside it, in God.
Rest in God alone, O my soul, for my hope comes from Him.The psalm's first verse sets the theme that this verse repeats as a command.
The Limits of the Research
The studies measure risk across groups and leave two popular claims unsupported.
None of the four studies shows that hope cures depression or that a hopeful outlook prevents suicide. They measure how often an outcome follows a score across a group, and a group's risk cannot be read off as one person's fate.
A person who has lost hope needs the help of others now. Scripture tells believers, "Carry one another's burdens" (Galatians 6:2). Anyone in danger of harming themselves should speak at once to someone who can help, a doctor or an emergency service among them.
The Refrain's Last Word
The refrain turns the downcast soul from itself to God.
The command in the refrain rests on who God is, whatever the measure of a person's hope on a given day.
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why the unease within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.The third form of the refrain closes the pair of psalms.
Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail.This is the turn in the book of Lamentations from complaint to hope.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible word index (TAHOT), Tyndale House, CC BY 4.0, the Hebrew words of Psalm 42:5, Psalm 62:5 and Lamentations 3:24 with Strong's numbers.
- STEP Bible, Translators lexicon of Extended Strongs for Hebrew (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- Aaron T. Beck, Robert A. Steer, Maria Kovacs and Betsy Garrison, Hopelessness and eventual suicide: a 10-year prospective study of patients hospitalized with suicidal ideation, American Journal of Psychiatry 142, no. 5 (1985): 559 to 563.
- C. R. Snyder and others, The will and the ways: development and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 4 (1991): 570 to 585.
- Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned helplessness at fifty: insights from neuroscience, Psychological Review 123, no. 4 (2016): 349 to 367.
- Jessica D. Ribeiro, Xieyining Huang, Kathryn R. Fox and Joseph C. Franklin, Depression and hopelessness as risk factors for suicide ideation, attempts and death: meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, British Journal of Psychiatry 212, no. 5 (2018): 279 to 286.
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