Depressed People See the World More Realistically (2017)

so they gave a depressing scenario to people and the depressives were quicker to identify that it was, in fact, a depressing situation.

however, put depressives into a fun party where people are open and accepting and the depressives will often instead focus on a negative, antisocial view that is manufactured by their mood disorder and takes them out of this very welcoming and positive situation.

As a lifelong depressive I've struggled to see reality for what it is and not as what my depression is constantly misrepresenting. I of course also have the experience where I can see an actually depressing situation for what it is more readily than others, but I think the premise of the article is still generally absurd. The world seems like a very hostile and dangerous place to me, and while you can of course find limitless examples of this being completely true, it nonetheless it prevents me from doing things that other people do quite safely and successfully all the time and for which this dark perspective is completely exaggerative and distorting.

Usually when I do express these thoughts they're in the form of semi-dark humor ("You don't like the boss? Don't worry, you'll only have to deal with him for a couple more years (because you won't quit) and then the company will go under and you'll have to work somewhere else with a similar boss"). The humor is to mostly try to diffuse how harsh these statements can seem to others, and because I find them legitimately morosely funny, but for some reason I tend not to get laughter when I say them... So I try to keep this "depressive realism" to myself most of the time.

I promise I have social skills. That's probably my biggest consistent faux pas. But sometimes I wonder why I can lose friends so fast by just saying things that are true or are very likely to be true. I guess a lot of people don't like to see that clearly? I don't know.

It seems likely some people suffering from depression have real mental illness, and a much much smaller number of people are ultra realists and get depressed over real negative events and facts.

I know there have been times in my life where I have suffered from depression because of my realism. On occasion bad things have happened to me and I've found people will try to comfort me by saying things like, "everything happens for a reason", "it will all work out in the end", etc, but being a realist, I know there often isn't a reason and it won't work out. At best I can only hope that I find it in me to continue through the rest of my life with the regret or loss that I'm experiencing. And even then, even if I make it to the end of my life, what's the point? Our lives and suffering is all pointless in the grand scheme of things.

My cat died this morning. Sorry.

>it's most likely to occur in mildly depressed people—those suffering from major depression, by contrast, are more likely to suffer from larger distortions in their thinking.

I wonder if we have overly-pathologized the regular melancholy that comes with every day life? If mildly depressed people actually see the world realistically, maybe nothing is actually wrong with them? Should we call them depressed or should we just call them human?

I think we need to recognize the constant striving for happiness, and the inevitable disappointment when we don't reach it, as the unhealthy behavior that it is. It's okay, normal, even necessary to feel sad and pissed off at the world sometimes. It doesn't automatically mean something is wrong with you.

Of course, it would be absolutely unacceptable for the makers of Prozac to lose half of their customers, so it is a major thoughtcrime in many circles to even suggest the possibility.

If people have "mild depression", maybe sometimes it's okay to tell them to toughen up, put their head down and keep grinding because that's what life consists of. If you are not mildly depressed then you are an idiot - it shouldn't be called mild depression, it should just be called "existing as a human being". You grind and suffer and struggle through life, because you were born into a broken world and have no other choice. Sometimes all the struggle gets you good things to be proud of and appreciate. And sometimes all the suffering doesn't amount to anything of worth at all. That's life, not a pathology. It's amazingly beautiful if you can learn to come at it from the right angle, but that doesn't mean it will ever hurt any less.

But there's a lot more to depression than seeing the world realistically. There's a tendency to feel inadequate, hopeless and disempowered. And there's more to that than seeing oneself and ones capabilities realistically.

One aspect is failing to break out huge problems into manageable pieces.

Friend: "I'm such a failure and my future is definitely going to be horrible!"

Me: "So, who's judging you as a failure, why does such judgments even matter, and how exactly do you have no options or influence over your future?"

I've had this dialog plenty, and it has little to do with realism.

I cringe every time I see Vice on the front page. To be "depressively realistic", I think they care less about scientific accuracy, and more about making their introverted, male, mildly-depressed audience feel smart.

For the HN crowd, consider startup founders. The vast majority of startups fail, yet virtually all founders go into it overestimating their chances of success. After all, if they were realistic about their chances, they'd find the whole business too crazy to begin with.

I hope this helped you to feel more depressed.

Consider the following scale:

Being drunk is to be intoxicated by alcohol to such an extent as to be unable to perceive the world clearly through the senses.

Being sober is to be able to perceive the world clearly through the senses, yet humans are quite capable of giving themselves illusions and little stories to make life more bearable.

Being knurd is to be (un)intoxicated with Klatchian Coffee to such an extent that all such comfort stories are stripped away from the mind.

This makes you see the world in a way 'nobody ever should', in all its harsh reality.

People generally find being knurd excruciating, as their comfortable illusions are stripped away and all of life's terrors are exposed.

The world is really going down right now and just following news what's going on is reason enough to cry like a baby or lose it completely.

That's one of the main reasons why many people take drugs - it helps to forget what's happening around us and it makes us numb enough to stop feeling the constant pain when we think about the things happening to our brothers and sisters who aren't lucky enough to be born in the right place, to have the right parents or live in the "right" place etc.

Too much information on how the people are screwed every minute may be reason enough to be depressed if you don't shut those thoughts out in the long run.

Do we see reality as it is? (Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

The intellectual bomb in the video is this:

Organisms that perceive only "fitness" drive to extinction all organisms that perceive reality as it is. (in model systems simulating environments and creatures navigating them)

My take: at every level, it would seem, perceiving true reality is not favoured. Nevermind cognitive biases, that's just one level. Literally the fabric of the universe: spacetime, matter, language, etc. It means nothing that it might feel comfortable or intuitive -- we should question it all.

"When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens."

This is a rational explanation for why anyone ought not succumb to pessimism.

I think about this every day, I thought it was an established fact for some reason. Perhaps I thought it was established since I know the saying "ignorance is bliss"

  Illusion in the spirit is as nothing,
  behold a world that runs on illusions!

  Their war and peace are made upon illusion,
  their glory and their shame are from illusion.

[1] https://bit.ly/31jwRUb

My father was a therapist and a big advocate of the idea that people can be happy regardless of their circumstances and that emotion comes primarily from what someone thinks. There's a lot of truth in that, and it seems clear that Cognitive Therapy is an important treatment for depression.

However, he sometimes seemed to de-emphasize the importance of circumstances. For example, he was opposed to the idea that moving to a different part of the country could make someone happier. However, doesn't that ignore that fact that different places have different rates of depression and suicide?

I'm always discussing what it means to be depressed, only in an effort to find what is the will to live. I find it interesting.

"When driving on the interstate, each driver has the power, with the flick of a wrist, to end it all. But they don't. Why not? What prevents people from flicking? What's worth living for?"

My wife wants me to stop talking like that, because she fears I will be vacaracted.

I feel like you can always get a better perspective on things by swimming in the deep end. It's always good to stir your inner stew.

Example: If you are depressed you are more likely to focus on input data that is 'negative' and overlook the 'positive' data. For instance if your depressed, instead of focusing on the different ways people are trying to improve the conditions of existence, you could focus on "the shitty conditions in india/africa/china/etc.) You could say this is more "realistic".

Example: If you are optimistic on the other hand, you could say to yourself, I have no control over those variables that make the world 'shitty', let me try and focus on the variables that make the world 'positive' and see if I can affect them, so that the world as a whole can be more "positive". Some could say this is "unrealistic".

Which is more "desirable" I would argue the latter, but I hope the argument has shown that these are value judgements subjective to the individual.

For what it's worth, Terror Management Theory has pretty much failed to replicate: https://psyarxiv.com/dkg53/ ("Failed pre-registered replication of mortality salience effects in traditional and novel measures")

Just one study, whole theory doesn't depend on one replication attempt, etc. -- but the baseline rate for a set of social psych findings being legit should probably be <50% at the outset.

>we tend to operate under happy delusions that lift away when we're depressed

Well this brings unhappy delusions in the same way. Just that it matches more with therapists world view and called "more real"?

Biases in attention and interpretation in adolescents with varying levels of anxiety and depression https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2017.1...

A depressed mindset says, "There's no good food in the house", and focuses on this as a negative fact.

An imaginative mindset says, "No good food. Time to go grocery shopping".

The first is simply "realistic". The later is realistic, and imagines a solution to the realistic problem.

It's lower effort to turn a pessimistic outlook into reality than it is to turn an optimistic outlook into reality.

I've been ready the Wayside School books to my daughter for bedtime recently, the character Kathy demonstrates this pretty well.

From https://wayside-school.fandom.com/wiki/Kathy_(book_chapter) :

"The chapter opens by mentioning that Kathy doesn't like you, and that you are the stupidest person she doesn't know. She also thinks you are the ugliest person she doesn't know, and she doesn't know a lot of people. Even the people she does know she doesn't like. She thinks D.J. smiles too much and hates John because he can't stand on his head.

After the introduction, the chapter talks about a time Kathy had a pet cat named Skunks. She was afraid he would run away, but Mrs. Jewls told her that he would stay as long as Kathy took good care of him, and remembered to give him plenty of food and water. However, Kathy thought Mrs. Jewls was wrong, and to keep Skunks around, locked him in a closet, sometimes even forgetting to take care of him. One day when Kathy was looking for her other shoe, Skunks ran out and never came back. Kathy bragged to Mrs. Jewls, claiming that she was right all along, and tells her that next time she gets a cat, she'll kill him so he never runs away.

Afterwards it talks about a time Dameon was trying to teach Kathy how to play catch. Kathy complains that she'll just get hurt, but Dameon states that as long as she keeps her eyes on the ball, everything will be okay. However, worrying that she'll be hurt in advance, she closes her eyes and the ball lands in her face. She claims that Dameon was wrong and she was right as she runs away sobbing.

Allison thinks that if she is nice to Kathy, Kathy might be nice to her in return, so she bakes her a cookie. Kathy however, thinks it will taste terrible because Allison made it, so she keeps the cookie in her desk. Three weeks later, she decides to eat the cookie, which is now stale and dusty, and as expected, hates it. Kathy says that she was right about Allison's cookie, then the chapter cuts back to narration, explaining that Kathy thought she had very good reasons for hating everyone in Mrs. Jewls's class, alongside a very good reason for hating you. She knows that if you met her, you would hate her too, and already knows she's right. The chapter ends by saying it's weird how someone can always be right and still be wrong."

I think it can be valuable to see things realistically, and then rejecting what you see.

> If you set up a circumstance where there's no relationship between the button and the light, depressed patients might be able to better pick that out, because that set of circumstances happens to conform to their somewhat biased view of the universe, that bad things happen for no reason," Moore explains. "That doesn't necessarily mean that they're more accurate broadly, but under that very narrow set of stimulus conditions, they come out looking more accurate.

But yes, in my experience rose-tinted glasses generally also come with a narrower field-of-view.

In my experience though, The worst is being powerless and not knowing why. If you can gain understanding of the world, even though your situation might not change right away, it still helps.

But, you are in a state of fear where you are over-exagerrating the things you could lose.

In a happy state or happy manic state, you don't overvalue these things. You accept the fleeting nature of moments moving on, and this frees you up to make bolder choices.

It's all a spectrum of how bold you want to be in your life and day to day.

> It seems like the button is doing something, but actually it's not attached to anything

> Ask people if they felt like they had any effect on the world

> Depressed people say "nothing I do matters", non-depressed people say "Well, I'm not sure, but there might be some effect, yeah"

"DEPRESSED PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD MORE REALISTICALLY"

This world we have created tends to encourage people to eventually become sick: whether it be diet, emotional, spiritual, physical, etc.

When we look around, we to have a positive outlook.

It's easy to see that a plant is not doing very well. We aren't very good at seeing this in humans.

You feel good, get too optimistic, things don't work out because you underestimated everything aaand you're back to being depressed.

So it's dangerous to suggest that their lack of optimism and self-worth is "realistic" in any way, because it never is.

"A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist".

Reality is for people with poor imaginations :)

Maybe there is some truth to the idea. I wouldn't be surprised, although we probably can't make that general of a statement.

Either way, don't let something like this article stop you from improving your life. One thing is for sure, we can't accurately predict all of the possibilities for ourselves. Might as well aim for a few improvements, eh?

For what it's worth, I'm currently dealing with mild / moderate depression and anxiety. In my opinion, it's a shit way to be and I aspire to experience less of it in the future.