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How does the poem lead to catharsis when it is so overhelmingly packed with the disillusionment of the post war generation?

In fact, it seems that the writer is so unbearably deep down in his confusion and pessimism that the Waste Land cannot allow for any possibilty to be turned into pure, promising, life giving ,love seeking times.

You need to see the movie Tom and Viv. It's about T.S. Eliot's marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Throughout their marriage, Vivienne suffered mood swings and erratic behavior. She got so mad at him one day that she went to his office and poured molten chocolate all over his papers. Eliot and the rest of her family thought she was insane and had her committed. Now, biographers think she had a hormonal imbalance that could have been treated if she had been thoroughly diagnosed.

My point is that Eliot wrote The Wasteland in the midst of this relationship. I'm sure that the sense of despair and depression you feel was what the poet was experiencing. Is there a catharsis? I'm not sure. For Eliot, it probably came with disposing of Vivienne.

I think that the Waste Land shows a deep depression in the side of Eliot. It is said that he wrote more lines than those we see in the poem and it was edited by his friend Ezra Pound. This shows that Eliot wrote this poem where it was a flow of ideas and thoughts motivated by despair caused by two things contextualised the time of writing the poem: The aftermath of WWI and the troubled marriage of Eliot with Vivien. It might remains under questioning whether it is a catharisis or not. But concerning hope and life giving aspects of the poem I think the rain mentioned at the end and the replacment of the malcontents of the modern times (in West) by Oriental rituals(the reference to Hinduism); an idea Eliot could be offering, give a slight glimpse of hope.