Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in
depression and
anxiety in the United States (Terlizzi and Zablotsky, 2024). According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in five American adults experiences mental illness each year (NAMI, 2025), and a Harvard Medical School international study projected that half of the world’s population will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime (2023).
To deal with this mental health challenge, we need hope, something that psychologist C. R. Snyder (1994) described as a process of goals, pathways, and agency—a positive goal we can believe in, pathways or steps to the goal, and a sense of agency, the
motivation and belief that we can get there from here.
One person who responded with hope to this mental health challenge is Chris Magleby. On the surface, he had a successful
career and family life. However, he had been experiencing chronic anxiety for years, and in 2017, he experienced a
psychotic break.
“It was very terrifying at the time. I didn’t know what was happening,” he says. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, but it was also a very beautiful thing, because it ushered in a lot of healing.” Magleby began a two-part healing process he calls “healing the wound” and “building
resilience.” First, he went to
therapy to heal the
trauma, to help him recognize and process emotions that had been lurking beneath the surface. Then he began building resilience by developing his
spirituality through
meditation and reading books on recovery and spirituality. He learned from psychologist Lisa Miller’s book
The Awakened Brain (2021) how spirituality can have “a preventive quality against depression.” He found inspiration reading Viktor Frankl’s book
Man’s Search for Meaning, discovering how he survived in a Nazi
concentration camp by finding love and purpose.
Finding Hope: Turning From Pain to Purpose
Inspired by Frankl’s example, Magleby found hope. As Frankl realized, no matter what darkness we face, we have “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way” (1984/1946). He chose “to alchemize my suffering into purpose and help for others. I wanted other people to learn from what I had been through.” Research has now shown that having a sense of purpose when dealing with challenges can bring us a greater sense of hope (Lachman and Schloski, 2024; Ostafin and Proulx, 2023).
Another person who transformed pain into purpose is Kathryn Goetzke. When she was 18, her father died. He had been her hero, her role model. But one February morning during her first year of college, she called home, only to learn that her father had died by
suicide. Devastated, she spiraled into hopelessness, attempting suicide herself.
Then she found a goal. Seeking to understand suicide and its causes, she began doing extensive research, learning that the major predictor of suicide is hopelessness. She discovered a way to build hope; these are her five
Shine strategies:
stress skills, happiness habits, inspired actions, nourishing networks, and eliminating hope challenges. Goetzke shares these skills with elementary school students, teens, parents, and college students, and she worked with the United Nations to establish an annual International Day of Hope on July 12 (Goetzke, 2022).
Building Hope in Community
When we’re in psychological pain, we often feel isolated and alone. And in recent years, the United States has been experiencing an increase in
loneliness and isolation that former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (2023) says undermines our emotional and physical health.
An important part of building hope is reconnecting with community, one of Goetzke’s five keys to hope (2022). Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson (2013) found that reaching out to our loved ones and the people around us benefits both the giver and receiver, dramatically raising our mood, relieving stress, and reducing inflammation to promote greater physical and emotional well-being. Fredrickson’s research shows that, over time, even small acts of connection can spread through whole communities in a positive ripple effect.
Magleby also sees community as a vital part of hope and healing, describing how trees communicate with each other through mycelial networks connecting their roots together. Some trees, he says, actually send nutrients to each other through these networks beneath the surface. He sees “human energy and human connection that way. Sometimes when a tree is distressed, the other trees around it can send it nutrients and help it.” He recalls that when he was struggling, a lot of people close to him shared their connection—he felt their love and their energy and their presence. “It seemed like nutrients were flowing to me beneath the surface when I couldn’t provide my own.”
Beneath the surface, beyond all the negativity on the news, all the challenges we face as individuals in these turbulent times, there’s our ability to choose our response, connect, and embrace the promise of hope.
