Depressive Realism

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/nov/25/healthandwellbeing.features1

Here’s a depressing thought: what if being depressed, at least a little bit, is actually a good thing? And if it is – if being generally pessimistic is a useful personality trait to have – then isn’t that a cause for optimism? In which case, is it really a depressing thought after all? Shouldn’t it make you happy about being depressed, in fact, and therefore not depressed? Recently, I have been attempting to resolve this paradox, but my brain just locks up, rendering all further thought or action impossible, like whenever I try to use those self-service checkouts at Sainsbury’s.

The cause of all this trauma was discovering “depressive realism” – the theory that people suffering from depression might have a less distorted picture of the world than the non-depressed. This has been controversial ever since it was first proposed in the 1970s, when two psychologists, Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy, recruited groups of non-depressed and mildly depressed people and sat them in front of a light bulb and a button. The subject pressed the button, and the bulb either came on or it didn’t. In fact, the button didn’t control the bulb at all, but the non-depressed people were much more likely to believe they were in charge of events. The non-depressed people, it seemed, were too caught up in protecting their self-esteem to make accurate judgments.

Recent research has thrown doubt on some aspects of this downbeat conclusion, but not on the general point that happiness may be largely a matter of delusion. We’re rubbish, for example, at predicting what will make us happy in the future, as Daniel Gilbert points out in Stumbling On Happiness, which became a bestseller this year, presumably because people thought reading it would make them happy. (Presumably it didn’t.) We treat our future selves like beloved children, Gilbert writes, dedicating our lives to making them happy – and they respond like rebellious teenagers, throwing it back in our faces.

“Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year – or at least later this afternoon?” Gilbert asks. “Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives – to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slipcovers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come? So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing or useless?”

And guess what? Depressed people turn out to be less prone to these errors of thinking. One of Gilbert’s conclusions is that if we experienced the world as it truly is, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. And, of course, some seriously depressed people can’t. So maybe they’re the best people to be running the world, managing our national finances, assessing the threat from climate change, determining foreign policy – as opposed to upbeat politicians, who pride themselves on their optimistic (and therefore delusional) visions of a bright new future. But they can’t. Because they’re in bed. It’s a pretty hopeless situation, really.

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What Is Depressive Realism?

https://www.healthguidance.org/entry/15809/1/what-is-depressive-realism.html

Depressive realism is a depressing thought… it dictates that perhaps while none of us want to be depressed – it’s possible that those who suffer from depression may in fact be right. The central conceit here then is that they are depressed not due to a warped view of reality, but due to the fact that they have a more accurate perception of reality and that they don’t possess many of the cognitive biases that the rest of us do which help us to cope with the harshness of reality.

Generally this term is used to describe those with borderline or moderate depression – whereas there is still a level of depression above that which is considered to then be the result of cognitive biases going the other way.

So the question is simple – do we in fact view the world through rose tinted glasses? Do the depressed among us have a valid point? Or do we have more to be happy about than we do to be depressed about? While there is no easy answer to this question we can nevertheless look at the studies and theories that currently exist and use these to make our own mind up. Here we will do just that.

The Cognitive Biases

Our brain works in a specific way. A way that is designed to help us to perceive events in a certain way that is conducive to survival – not necessarily that is accurate. A very simple example of this ‘practicality over reality’ is our perception of ‘edges’. In actual fact edges do not really exist the way we perceive them, and nor do solids. Take a solid rock and the amount of matter compared to the amount of empty space when perceived at an atomic scale is vastly greater. In other words even the most solid objects are in fact mostly empty space. Conversely the empty space that we perceive around us is not as ’empty’ as our brain would have us believe either and is in fact filled with tiny particles – particles of oxygen, particles of dust and even bacteria. Thus the contrast between a solid object and the air around us is very slight. At the same time ‘edges’ don’t really exist at all as they are full of holes as well.

The way our eyes have evolved to work though is such that we perceive edges and we perceive a great contrast between solid objects and the space between them and what we are actually seeing is the difference between what we can pass through and what we cannot. Our visual ‘resolution’ is set at this level not through accident, nor because it can’t be any higher, but in fact because this is the most efficient way for us to view the world so we know what we can move through and what we cannot intuitively.

Such cognitive biases exist in our conscious thoughts though too and we are designed to make certain assumptions and interpretations regarding events that are not necessarily true principally because they help us to survive. There are many cognitive biases then that can help us to see a more positive view of reality. Some of those are described here…

Positive Illusions: Positive illusions are those that unrealistically favor attitudes that people would prefer to be the case. These include inflated beliefs in one’s own abilities as well as unrealistic optimism about the future. The exact extent to which people regularly exhibit positive illusions is something that is highly controversial, however it is fair to say that most of us tend to expect the best for ourselves in a range of scenarios. For instance if someone were to imagine their future grandchildren or children then they would likely imagine them to be above averagely attractive, academically gifted and well mannered. Likewise it is normal to imagine yourself doing well in your career and rarely do we anticipate the likelihood of illness or death befalling us or anyone close to us.

Illusory Superiority: We also tend to overestimate our own abilities and qualities in relation to others. This extends to many areas of life, and the majority of people who do not suffer from some form of depression believe themselves to be superior or at least better than they in fact are when it comes to skills and abilities. Even more common is to believe yourself to be superior in your honesty, compassion and conscientiousness.

Illusion of Control: In the illusion of control individuals believe themselves to be in control of events over which they in fact have no influence on them. It is normal and healthy to have an ‘internal locus of control’ which dictates that you are more in control of your life than you are not. It is obvious to see the evolutionary value of trying to alter events even when there is no obvious way that you would be able to affect them rather than just giving up entirely.

Defense Mechanisms

Another way in which depressive realism could operate is via ‘defense mechanisms’. These defense mechanisms were proposed by Sigmund Freud as part of his psychodynamic theory of psychology. His belief was that you could separate the ‘psyche’ into three distinct parts – the ego, the superego and the ID. The role of the super-ego is to protect the ego – which is essentially our conscious mind. The superego thus would use the defense mechanisms such as repression and reaction formation in order to disguise the truth from us and make us hold more positive beliefs.

Repression for instance occurs when something is so damaging to our psyche that it is ‘forgotten’ and rendered inaccessible to the conscious mind. This then essentially edits out the worst parts of life almost like a cut version of a movie. Likewise reaction formation protects you from your own thoughts and feelings that you find repulsive. For instance if you were to be unsure of your sexuality you might act homophobic as a way to ‘prove’ to yourself that you were not gay. Similarly projection involves attributing your own characteristics onto someone else – so if you were very short tempered you might accuse those around you of being bad tempered. Fantasy simply refers retreating into fantasy and creating fallacious events to help you to avoid the reality.

Remove all of these defense mechanisms then and you would have a far more depressing view of your own personality and of your reality.

Media

It’s also true that the media and many other sources are constantly giving us positive versions of the world around us. Films and television programs always have happy endings and they always involve attractive people and straight forward problems. Likewise we are constantly being told by advertizing, by our teachers, by our parents and more that we can ‘achieve anything’, that the ‘world is wonderful’ and that we are all neighbors. Of course all this is objective, but when so much of the stimulus around us is overwhelming positive and optimistic it becomes the social norm to be optimistic as well.

Studies

There are many studies that have been done on these cognitive biases in order to discern whether depressive realism has anything going for it. Some of these studies seem to suggest that our view of reality may indeed be seen through ‘rose colored glasses’.

Studies have found for instance that people tend to overestimate their own abilities more often than they underestimate them and that they tend to overestimate their performance in exams and tests when compared to other people. Other studies have shown that we tend to have more positive expectations for our life than reality subsequently shows to be the case.

That said, the majority of more recent studies seem to show that the opposite is true – that psychologically unhealthy individuals are more likely to hold illusory beliefs than are healthy individuals.

For instance in one study by Colvin et al. 1995, found that self-enhancement biases tended to correlate with poor social skills and other psychological maladjustment rather than with any depression. Likewise in another study men and women were videotaped having normal conversations (unaware of being filmed) and the tapes were then assessed by independent observers to identify those with positive biases – and these were revealed to be those with various psychological issues. Compton 1992 also managed to demonstrate how it was completely possible to have high levels of self-esteem without exhibiting any psychological issues or illusory beliefs. Other studies showed that even those with depression still often held strong positive illusions.

Overall however, a meta-analysis that compared the results of 118 studies found that the just over half of the studies did support depressive realism as correct.

Conclusion

Although the studies lean slightly towards depressive realism, there are problems with the methodology of these studies in many cases, and the evidence is not really strong enough to draw any concrete conclusions.

Part of the problem with analyzing such a concept is that many of the terms are hard to define or even arbitrary. For instance Knee and Zuckerman have challenged the definition of mental health that some studies have used. Likewise it’s impossible for a test to definitively prove or disprove views that you hold about yourself.

In general it’s also hard to say what perception of reality would warrant depression. Often it’s less about how you perceive something and more about what aspects of that perception you choose to focus on. Our views of our own performance, of what matters in life, and of whether something should be celebrated or lamented are subjective and in many cases completely arbitrary.

If you can take anything from the studies and theories regarding depressive realism then it should be that life is what you make of it… but then again that right there is undoubtedly an example of a positive illusion…

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Depressive Realism, : https://wallowinmaya.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/depression-reveals-truth/

Depression Reveals the Truth: We Live in the Abyss

[Epistemic status: Just poetry, written in a nihilistic mood. Don’t take it so seriously.]

When you are in the midst of a deep depression it’s impossible to do anything other than lie in bed and wish to die. Speaking is difficult, writing impossible. So any piece of writing about depression will always be false. False, because written prose about depression originates always as an afterthought, thus distorted, allayed, softened. The written word can’t fully capture the despair, the futility and the horror of being depressed. Paralyzation of will renders it impossible. But I try my best.

First of all, there is always the feeling of pain. Pain in your bones, your limbs, your lungs, head and heart. Then exhaustion and extreme tiredness. You are too exhausted, too tired to move. But you can’t sleep. And you are too fatigued to escape. To distract yourself. You also don’t see the point in distracting yourself. Truthfully, you don’t see the point in anything. The problem is that depression makes all of it very believable. You think you can see the truth. And maybe you do. There is this saying: „Depression lies“. I’m not so sure. Maybe happiness lies. Maybe life itself lies. Just imagine if you could apprehend, to the full extent, all the evils of this world: dying children in Africa, pigs slaughtered in factory farms, women in mental ayslums crying over their dead daughters, lonely students, heart-broken and addicted to benzos and opioids because their cries for love were never answered. Then imagine if you saw, clearly, in your minds eye, all your failures, your weaknesses, your shortcomings, your inability to understand the theory of general relativity, your insomnia, your aging and ever less appealing body, your slowly decaying immune system, your lack of money, your lack of influence, your lack of willpower, your laughable productivity. Your selfishness. Imagine if you could contemplate, at all times, the right deeds you didn’t do, all the good things you could have done, all the experiences you could have had or would have had or could have in the future if you were just another person. A person more intelligent than you. A person more energetic than you. A person more admirable than you. Or a person, just less miserable. Less tormented. Less pathetic. Less you.

If you perceived clearly all this you couldn’t function. Not in this world. Not in any world. Evolution, the alien God, Lord of all reductionistic worlds, would have thrown you into nothingness. Depressed people lose the game of natural selection. The Alien God made creatures not able and not willing to see the flaws of the world and of themselves. He created optimists and gave them their rose-colored glasses for free. I won’t give you an academic sermon about the phenomenon of „depressive realism“. That’s none of my business. That’s what Wikipedia is made for.

So here is my thesis: Depression doesn’t lie. It pierces through the veil of ignorant bliss. It reveals. And the revelations are frightening, soul-crushing and true. Depression lets you see the grim, naked truth. It lets you see into the Abyss. At the heart of all being is suffering, and the wish for things to be different. Combined with the knowledge that this wish is unfulfilled. Unfulfillable. You are alone. People may say they love you. But they only love a mask. A shell. Depression lets you see that there are people out there who have more positive impact on the world at least by orders of magnitude and there is nothing you can do about it. Sure, you wish more people would admire you. That you would be a better writer. A better scientist. A better being. Or more intelligent, preferably at math. Maybe more funny, more talented at computer science. More useful. More productive. You wish you were unique. Special. At least a bit. But you are not. You are just a random sample from the eternal and vast urn of genes, environment and happenstance. The laws of probability are stern and unforgiving. You are average. You are mediocre. This is the axiom of existence.

Consider the self-sampling assumption. You should reason as if you were a random sample out of the set of all the observers in your reference class. Anthropics is the enemy of perfection. And even if you were one of the lucky few. One of the chosen ones. A genius, talented, witty, productive, energetic, admired. You would still die. You would still have enemies. You could still lose all of your loved ones. Just through a freak accident. And you will. And all of this, and I mean all of it, call it life, the cosmos, the multiverse or the ultimate ensemble. It doesn’t make any sense. Whatsoever. It just is. There is no purpose. Nothing justifies the existence of this world. Or of you. But you exist. You have to exist and nobody asked you for your consent. You were thrown into this world, cruel and uncaring. Oh sure, there is happiness. I’m not saying that there isn’t. Opioid receptors are a solid fact. But suffering prevails. It is stronger. Let’s say you got really lucky. I mean, really, really lucky. You are a genius, productive, admired and have a loving partner. What will happen? Hint: Death. Oh, sure, maybe someone will build a friendly AI, summon the singularity, transcendence, whatever you wanna call it. Entropy still reigns. Eventually, everything will be nothing.

Whatever. I’m in a good mood, really generous here: Let’s imagine the second law of thermodynamics was somehow false. But don’t celebrate to fast! How would this help? Ok, death is dead. But boredom is still alive and well. The question you have to ask yourself is: What would you do for the rest of eternity? Do math? Physics? Write books? Make love? Dance? Take drugs? I guess this would get boring long before the last stars have burnt out. But admittedly, the ability to indulge in superficial hedonism is strong in us. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Even so: You *know* that there exists suffering. Maybe, which is highly, extremely doubtful, considering the all-encompassing baseness of our species, we would be able to eliminate all suffering in our light cone. There would still exist suffering. In the past (google timeless universe of block universe). And in other, causally inaccessible parts of the universe. And you know that your happiness depends on the existence of this suffering. A bit of a bummer, you don’t think so?

Let’s be even more generous, delve straight into the realm of panglossian fantasy and assume that suffering was abolished. Everywhere. Through some weird shit. I don’t know. Maybe quantum stuff or time travel or acausal magic of some sort. Whatever. But then this still leaves one fucking thing left: There is no fucking purpose whatsoever. To all of this shit. The multiverse is mute and cold and doesn’t care. It’s absurd to the core. A sick, twisted farce with no redemption or meaning.

Some of you will say that we, as humans, have the ability to give our lives our own meaning. Just like that. Through some weird, existential, Munchhausen bootstrapping shit. So yay! Let’s celebrate and create lots of meaning. If you happen to be around, can you give me some meaning? I guess I need it.

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Depressive realism

Sometimes it seems like happy people live in a bubble, unwilling or unable to grapple with the grand humane and existential challenges of life.

The popular notion of “depressive realism” offers a kind of perverse satisfaction in being miserable: the idea that depressed people see the world more clearly, or that happy people are buffered from harsh realities by self-serving delusions of competence and optimism.

If you find it difficult to be happy, you can console yourself with the idea that happiness is just for dumb, superficial, or morally unserious people.

But is this kind of depressive realism any better than a sour grapes attitude toward happiness?

Ironically, this consolation is itself the fostering of a self-serving delusion aimed at making us feel better, as we pride ourselves on being both willing and able to face the harsh realities of life.

When life hands you lemons, sure, you could make lemonade…but a real man will just eat that lemon and grit his teeth against the sourness, because lemons are supposed to be sour!

Intentional optimism

In the past few months I’ve made a conscious effort to change the way I think about life, in order to improve my mood.

In the process it’s become clear to me that despite all the suffering implicit in decades of anxiety and depression, despite being desperately unhappy, I couldn’t honestly say that I wanted things to be different.

We all want to be happy, but our desire for happiness is typically framed and delineated by very strict conditions.

We want to be happy in certain ways, under specific criteria; we want happiness on our own terms, even if those terms are largely unconscious in daily life.

When I first considered changing my thoughts in order to improve my mood, I immediately worried about becoming “delusional”, like one of those dumb, superficial, happy people who lives in blissful ignorance of life’s deeper meaning and struggles…

It was very important to me that I maintain a sense of my own realism, honesty, and clarity about the nature of life; so important that I was more comfortable being deeply unhappy than risking a change to my self-image.

I put limitations on my pursuit of happiness, limitations that turned out to be based on little more than crude stereotypes.

Crude stereotypes of happiness

If I was truly honest with myself, wouldn’t I have to acknowledge that those supposed “dumb, superficial, blissfully ignorant people” were just a fantasy?

In all those years of looking for answers, I hadn’t once gone out of my way to examine people who were actually happy, preferring to think that I understood what superficial, derogatory happiness looked like.

In fact, my own experience belies the notion that happy people are ignorant or deluded. I don’t know anyone who matches the caricature that exists in my own mind.

People who are genuinely happier than me tend not to go around thinking and talking about their depressing problems, but to cast that as a moral failing is misguided.

I’ve met others similar to me: deeply depressed, yet repulsed by the thought of having to “delude” themselves in order to feel better.

Such people would never have the audacity to claim that they are free from “delusion”. They might say that they try not to delude themselves, but it’s more a statement of values and ideals than an objective assessment of their overall knowledge and beliefs.

It’s as if we’ve tried and failed at just “getting along” in life, and instead of admitting the failure, tried to redefine the parameters of life itself until those who get along well are the ones who’ve failed the test of moral seriousness.

Temperament defines happiness

The problem is that we aren’t all the same in what excites us and makes us happy, and therefore we can’t and shouldn’t try to “get along” in the same ways.

Those of us who struggle most with anxiety and depression seem to have an (un)healthy dose of what ancient proto-psychologists called melancholic temperament.

Melancholics are excited by meaning and ideals, and not much else. Yet we inhabit a society full of people who find happiness and fulfilment more easily accessible – in the pursuit of power and prestige, the enjoyment of sensual pleasures, or in simply being left alone to do their own thing.

Meaning and ideals are hard to reconcile with a world ordered to more tangible and readily accessible pursuits. That alone is enough to explain a depressed and anxious outlook.

But if we can at least recognise that meaning and ideals are what motivate and fulfil us, and that we are not all motivated by the same things, then we can dispense with attempts to universalise happiness and justify our own preoccupations.

In other words, it is not superficiality that makes others happy; they are happier (in general) because they have greater ease in identifying and accomplishing the things that make them happy.

Likewise, we are not less happy because of our bold embrace of harsh truths and discomforting realities; we are less happy (in general) because we have not succeeded in identifying and accomplishing the things that make us happy, and have in fact gone to the other extreme of denying our need for meaning and ideals.

Putting meaning and ideals first

I think the most important thing is to recognise what it is that makes us happy as individuals – whether that be meaning and ideals or something else – and seek to enlarge that aspect of our life.

For melancholics the initial challenge is working out that it is meaning and ideals that excites us, and the subsequent challenge is learning how to approach meaningful things for the sake of the meaning they provide.

I used to study philosophy, but I couldn’t really articulate that it was the search for meaning that drove me to it. So I tended to go along with other people’s perspectives of what philosophy is and why it is meaningful or important.

There came a time when I ceased to find philosophy meaningful. And it turned out that I didn’t really care all that much about the other aspects of philosophy that people find valuable. I didn’t really care very much about critical thinking or rationality or asking big questions or seeking answers generally.

Ironically this makes a melancholic surprisingly pragmatic in a way that can even resemble a choleric. A melancholic is like a choleric whose ambition is finding meaning, and everything else is subordinate to that goal.

I think that’s what drives my interest in mysticism, philosophy, and religious practice and thought. I’m looking for a pure meaning that can encompass and imbue all of life.

https://zacalstin.com/tag/depressive-realism/

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