Revisiting “Depressive Realism”
I made reference a couple of days ago to the literature on “depressive realism,” which I characterized as the hypothesis that “people suffering from depression have more accurate perceptions about many things.”
As perhaps I should have predicted, the situation turns out to be somewhat more complicated than that. There were a wave of “depressive realism” studies starting in 1979 as a counter to 1960s-era “cognitive” theories of depression which held that depressed people were making some kind of mistake. It turns out that at least on some metrics, the reverse is happening. But the depressed and non-depressed populations are both heterogeneous and there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive biases that people suffer from, so it’s not at all clear that you’d want to say that depression leads to more accurate perceptions in general. A well-informed reader suggests this meta-analysis as a good survey of the subject.
5 Responses to “Revisiting “Depressive Realism””
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“The Dark Ages are my favorite period in history. The serfs were worked to death, and the Church was telling them that when they died – they were going straight to Hell. So, there were no false hopes.”
Celine
November 5th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
From the abstract:
“. Overall, however, both dysphoric/depressed individuals and nondysphoric/nondepressed individuals evidenced a substantial positive bias, with this bias being larger in nondysphoric/nondepressed individuals. ”
So, even the depressives had a positive bias? The depressives weren’t depressed enough to correspond with reality? Am I reading this right?
November 5th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Scientific American published an article about depression a month or so ago wherein the authors hypothesized that depression is an evolutionary adaptation to allow humans to solve complex problems in the most logical way. So depressed people avoid as many interfering stimuli (like other people and fun in general) as possible.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
@Jim T
That theory (as is much of evolutionary psychology) is BS. You don’t do much logical reasoning when you’re in a fetal position in your cave, praying for a rock to fall on you.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:08 am
Depressed, non-depressed, manic, bi-polar, EFFORT, who knows what leads “accurate perception,” or even if there is such a thing. I do know we all feel blue from time to time -we are all aware at some level the pointlessness of our existence. Right?
Creating illusions or just being plain delusional allows us to get out bed in the morning. Take me. I’m still thinking I got a shot at being a scratch golfer. This fancy of mine pushes against the thin borders of insanity. I know it, and despite the danger I allow it, because it keeps the engine humming.
Whatever. That’s base existence. But the integrity of the mind to me is the point. You have let it go, allow it to search as deep as it can in all directions. It’s not scary or depressing, once you get used to it. It’s intriguing, and on occasion, you actually can extract a few drops of joy out of the process.
And believe it or not, people think I’m weird because I’m so goddamn happy all the time. Old negative madman Maxi424. Go figure.