Depressive Realism - A More Accurate Worldview But Not Necessarily a Healthy One

While common supposition is that depression is a result of (or results in) people have an inaccurately negative viewpoint of themselves and/or life in general, Depressive Realism is the proposition that people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality, specifically that they are less affected by positive illusions of illusory superiority, the illusion of control and optimism bias.

Studies by psychologists Alloy and Abramson (1979) suggested that depressed people appear to have a more realistic perception of their importance, reputation, locus of control, and abilities than those who are not depressed. Especially noted was their "light-bulb" experiment, a part of their studies that consisted of depressed and non-depressed people being presented with a light-bulb and a button to press. Unknown to either group, the light bulb would go on and off independently of any pushes of the button - yet the depressed group far more accurately were able to discern this while a significant proportion of the non-depressed group felt they were exerting varying levels of control of the light bulb via the button they were pressing.

Dobson and Franche (1989) and later researchers have further supported this viewpoint with studies and similar experiments.

However...

"In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe
...
The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed." (Quoted from Depressions Upside - New York Times)

Daniel Gilbert, the bestselling author of Stumbling On Happiness, sees things this way:

"What gets us through life, evidently, is just the right amount of delusion — enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves (...we all believe ourselves to be above average; 90 percent of drivers certainly do), but not so much as to exceed our own credulity. "If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning," Gilbert writes. "But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers."
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Interestingly, the clinically depressed seem less susceptible to these basic cognitive errors. For instance, healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is. All in all, it's yet more evidence that unhappy people have the more accurate view of reality — and that learning how to kid ourselves may be a key to mental health." (Quoted from Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert - NY Times Book Review)

Bruce Weinberg's publishing on the subject:

"psychologists have found that moderate overconfidence is both pervasive and advantageous and that people maintain such beliefs by underweighting new information about their ability." (Quoted from A Model of Overconfidence by Bruce A. Weinberg - Abstract)

And a (semi-lengthy) article that sums up these concepts (although with a somewhat pessimistic slant):

"Most people think of the “mentally disordered” as a delusional lot, holding bizarre and irrational ideas about themselves and the world around them. Isn’t a mental disorder, after all, an impairment or a distortion in thought or perception? This is what we tend to think, and for most of modern psychology’s history, the experts have agreed; realistic perceptions have been considered essential to good mental health. More recently, however, research has arisen that challenges this common-sense notion.

In 1988, psychologists Shelly Taylor and Jonathon Brown published an article making the somewhat disturbing claim that positive self-deception is a normal and beneficial part of most people’s everyday outlook. They suggested that average people hold cognitive biases in three key areas: a) viewing themselves in unrealistically positive terms; b) believing they have more control over their environment than they actually do; and c) holding views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify. The typical person, it seems, depends on these happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day. It’s when the fantasies start to unravel that problems arise.

Studies into clinical depression have yielded similar findings, leading to the development of an intriguing, but still controversial, concept known as depressive realism. This theory puts forward the notion that depressed individuals actually have more realistic perceptions of their own image, importance, and abilities than the average person. While it’s still generally accepted that depressed people can be negatively biased in their interpretation of events and information, depressive realism suggests that they are often merely responding rationally to realities that the average person cheerfully denies.

Lear's Fool speaks of wisdom disguised as madness. Those with paranoid disorders can sometimes possess a certain unusual insight as well. It has often been asserted that within every delusional system, there exists a core of truth—and in their pursuit of imagined conspiracies against them, these individuals often show an exceptionally keen eye for the real thing. People who interact with them may be taken aback as they find themselves accused of harboring some negative opinion of the person which, secretly, they actually do hold. Complicating the issue, of course, is the fact that if the supposed aversion didn’t exist before, it likely does after such an unpleasant encounter.

As one might imagine, these issues present some problems when it comes to treatment. How does one convince a depressed person that “everything is all right” when her life really does suck? How does one convince an obsessive-compulsive patient to stop religiously washing his hands when the truth of what gets left behind after “normal” washing should be enough to make any sane person cringe? These problems put therapists in the curious position of teaching patients to develop irrational patterns of thinking—patterns that help them view the world as a rosier place than it really is. Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s justified because what defines a mental disorder is not unreasonable or illogical thought, but abnormal behaviour that causes significant distress and impairs normal functioning in society. Treatment is about restoring a person to that level of normal functioning and satisfaction, even if it means building cognitions that aren’t precisely “rational” or “realistic.”

It’s a disconcerting concept. It’s certainly easier to think of the mentally disordered as lunatics running about with bizarre, inexplicable beliefs than to imagine them coping with a piece of reality that a “normal” person can’t handle. The notion that we routinely hide from the truth about ourselves and our world is not an appealing one, though it may help to explain the human tendency to ostracize the abnormal. Perhaps the reason we are so eager to reject any departure from this fiction we call “normality” is because we have grown dependent on our comfortable delusions; without them, there is nothing to insulate us from the harsh cold of reality." (Quoted from The Total Perspective Vortex)

While that last paragraph may hit a little too close towards the Albert Camus' existentialistic view of "the absurd" for my personal beliefs, I find myself thinking there may be some merit to much of the above. The irony seems to be that most modern psychologists agree that awareness of this may in fact be counterproductive in terms of treating depression.


How about dealing with depression in others?  See this post for my take on that and a little more about my personal experiences in dealing with depression myself.