Maybe this is helpful in the USA, but I hardly see how knowing anything about this counts as "personal growth"? There are plenty of things you can know that actively make you a worse person by making you depressed and thus less engaged with things you can actively act upon.
Poor models of reality are a Hallmark of depression.
I think that for many, learning more about gun violence could be a relief because their uninformed baseline is so bad
Is that a fact? I recall from studies with pessimists and optimists, where they should self report some progress on learning something - and the reports of the pessimists were way more realistic, than those of the optimists. (But the latter probably enjoyed the whole thing)
Pessimism is more of an understanding that things will go wrong (which is often just factual correctness; any vague understanding of risk makes most people sound like pessimists). Depression is more of an "it is hopeless" take which is not logically sound - even if life is meaningless the sensible thing to do is leave a peaceful & cheerful existence as best can be managed.
There'd be a bit of an overlap in some cases (depression would make someone an extreme pessimist), but the pessimism that comes from being realistic doesn't lead to depression.
It is usually more concrete in the sense of "it is hopeless, that I get into a state of happiness again". Which might or might not be correct. So calling depression not logical .. is a potential tough thing to say.
But nevertheless, as someone who is acutely aware that unspeakable horrors surround us, an accurate prediction of never feeling happiness again doesn't logically lead to feeling a sense of hopeless, so it doesn't follow that depressed people are more likely to be working from an accurate world model.
The logical thing to do is to either look for ways to feel happiness or ignore it and salvage some meaning from whatever is left besides happiness. Easier said than done I know, particularly for someone who is depressed. But logic is what it is.
Indeed. It is a abstract tool that is helpful, if the abstractions of reality are meaningful in the given context.
As others posted, pessimism and depression different topics.