Feeling Hopeless and Tired: Suicidal Thoughts

I used to feel like this constantly. If I could go back, I'd tell my younger self not to give up hope because it will get better. For me, the key was finding the right combination of medication (which took YEARS, and a lot of advocating for myself). At least in my experience, coping skills only work if you're well enough. When you're in such a deep depression, they're useless tbh. One thing I think everyone should do is keep a detailed list of every medication you've been tried on, with dose, time you were on it, how it affected your mood, etc. Also do a lot of research and go to your doctors appointments ready to have a 2-sided conversation instead of just letting the dr make all decisions themselves. For example, I realized after researching that the medications that made me much worse were SSRIs. And for some reason, doctors always want to try every single SSRI before they jump to something else. A big step that helped me was I absolutely will not take SSRIs and tell the doctor that. It still took time after that, but once we eliminated the 10 or so meds that made me feel worse, we started making forward progress. It's also important to really look at symptoms and see if you're bipolar or depressed. Treating bipolar with an antidepressant and no mood stabilizer can actually make you more depressed and more unstable.