Hopelessness Test: Screen Your Outlook on the Future Across Three Areas and Get a Clear Next Step

The test has 16 statements. Fifteen of them are split evenly across the three areas that hopelessness research keeps describing: five on feelings about the future, five on loss of motivation and five on what you expect to happen. Each statement is rated from 0 (not at all true) to 4 (very true), and six of the fifteen are worded toward hope rather than despair and scored in reverse, so simply agreeing with everything does not inflate your total. The sixteenth statement asks directly about thoughts of not wanting to be here. It is scored into the total like the others, but it is also treated as a critical item: if you endorse it at all, your result is raised to at least the high range and a direct note about support is added, whatever the rest of your answers add up to.

The total runs from 0 to 64 and falls into three bands: 0 to 21 low, 22 to 42 moderate and 43 to 64 high. These are educational thirds, chosen to give you a clear read, not clinical cutoffs taken from a validated instrument. The breakdown underneath your result shows your score in each of the three areas, which matters because people arrive at the same total in different ways. Someone whose motivation has collapsed but who still half-expects things to improve is in a different place from someone who expects nothing and has stopped reaching, and the next step differs too.

Hopelessness is a specific set of negative expectations about the future, paired with the belief that nothing you do will change them. Aaron Beck and colleagues described it in 1974 as a measurable aspect of pessimism, and the three-part shape used on this page, feelings about the future, loss of motivation and future expectations, comes from that line of research. It is not the same as sadness, and it is not the same as being realistic about a hard situation. Plenty of people face genuinely difficult circumstances without concluding that effort is pointless; hopelessness is the conclusion, not the circumstance.

Two things are worth holding onto. First, hopelessness is a state, and states lift. People who feel it describe it as permanent, because that is what the belief itself says, yet the research on recovery from depression shows the sense of a closed future opening again as treatment works. Second, hopelessness is closely tied to depression and, in the research, to suicidal thinking, which is why this page asks about safety plainly rather than talking around it. Hopelessness depression, described by Abramson, Metalsky and Alloy in 1989, is a recognized pattern in which the expectation that bad outcomes are certain and uncontrollable drives the low mood itself. If that sounds familiar, our Depression Test at Depression Test is a natural next step.

In a ten-year study of patients admitted to hospital with suicidal thinking, Beck and colleagues found that hopelessness, more than depression severity alone, predicted eventual suicide. Later and larger work tempered that finding without erasing it: a 2018 meta-analysis of longitudinal studies by Ribeiro and colleagues found that both depression and hopelessness raise the odds of suicidal thinking and attempts, but that neither is a strong predictor on its own, and that clinicians cannot rely on any single scale to tell who is at risk. The honest summary is that hopelessness matters, it is not destiny, and it is a reason to talk to someone rather than a verdict.

This is why a high score on this page is routed toward support rather than toward a report. The useful question is not whether you are "a hopeless person" but what has taken the future away from you, how long it has felt this way and what might give some of it back. Therapy for hopelessness tends to work directly on expectations: cognitive behavioral approaches test the belief that nothing will change, behavioral activation rebuilds the experience of effort paying off, and problem-solving therapy breaks an immovable situation into pieces that can actually move. If you are not sure whether therapy fits, the Do I Need Therapy? quiz at Do I Need Therapy? Quiz helps you think it through.

Look at the breakdown before the total. If feelings about the future carried most of your score, you are describing how things feel, and feelings are more movable than they seem from inside them; if motivation carried it, the most useful early step is small, concrete and scheduled rather than inspiring; if expectations carried it, a therapist can help you test the belief that what is hard now is fixed. Our Hope Test at Hope Test (Adult Hope Scale) measures the other side of this picture, the sense of having routes toward goals and the will to use them, and the Optimism Test at Optimism Test looks at your general expectations about outcomes. Taking either after this one gives a fuller view than this screener alone.

If your score was high, or if you endorsed the safety statement at all, please treat that as the priority. Tell one person today, book a session with a therapist, and if you are thinking about hurting yourself or not being here, call or text 988 in the US any time, or your local emergency number. Hopelessness tells you that reaching out will not help. That belief is the symptom, not the truth.