Giving Hope back to our Young People: Creating a New Spiritual Mythology for Western Culture

Abstract

There is extensive psychological literature which has linked hopelessness with depression and suicide risk for decades. Although there is a strong research and clinical base for targeting depression, there is a gap in the psychological literature when it comes to targeting hopelessness, specifically. In the absence of such a body of psychological literature, this paper draws on the research from the Futures Studies field which also records a rise in hopelessness, negativity and fear of the future among young people in the West. These phenomena (hopelessness, depression and suicide) will be analysed using Causal Layered Analysis, a methodology from the Futures Studies field, pointing to the long-term psycho-social impact on youth of the materialistic worldview that underpins Western culture. The paper will also explore the question: 'how can hope for the future be promoted?' by looking beyond the dominance of materialism to spiritually inspired worldviews and the new metaphors and stories that arise from them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.