These words refer to a defeated, pessimistic attitude. Despair is the most general and informal of these. It implies the loss or abandonment of hope and may suggest a permanent state of mind or a momentary one bought about by some calamity: lives doomed to want and uncreative despair ; their silent despair at having lost the election. It may also refer specifically to pessimism about the future, whether momentary or permanent: a growing despair of ever getting a salary rise. Hopelessness relates exclusively to this last possibility of despair , implying a pessimism more deep-seated and long lasting: the utter hopelessness with which she regarded her narrow range of choices. The word may also suggest that someone’s present position is extremely imperilled with or without his realizing it: they were not yet aware of the hopelessness of their situation, given the lack of fresh water on the lifeboat.

Discouragement and dejection are much milder words than the others of this group. They restrict themselves to one possibility of despair in that they pertain almost exclusively to a let-down feeling at some misfortune or rebuff: the understandable discouragement with which he took the dismissal of his application; in constant dejection ever since his girl went away. Dejection is a state of existence, while discouragement most often suggests a response to the thwarting of frustration of an on-going process of effort; it can be momentary (as above), gradual or total: growing discouragement with his life that he couldn’t even explain or analyse. Despondency and depression also pertain to a thwarted or frustrated feeling, but are more intense than discouragement or dejection in suggesting more strictly a sense of total defeat that is expressed in lethargy, introversion and apathy: days of despondency in which he hardly bothered to get out of bed; a long period of depression before the first suicide attempt. These words relate tangentially to hopelessness in that such thoroughgoing defeat as the words suggest usually implies, as well, a feeling that the future will not improve one’s situation. Of the two, depression is the more intense, probably because it is the medical and psychological term for such a state.

Desperation is unique among these words in suggesting such an intensity of despair that one may easily be goaded into wild, blind or reckless action as a last resort. Thus the word contrasts drastically with despondency and its implications of lethargy: fighting back at his tormentors with the desperation of a cornered rat; willing to risk anything in his seizure of desperation .