"Countless studies have shown that people who suffer from depression have more accurate worldviews than non-depressed people. Depressed people do not nurture the cheering illusion that they can control the course of their lives. They rarely possess the conviction, so common in the rest of us, that they are above average in virtually every respect. And they understand, all too acutely, the basic conditions of existence: that their lifespan is just a brief blip in the cold sweep of history, that suffering is real and ongoing, that they and all the people they love are going to die. That outlook is known as depressive realism.
Depressed people might be unhappy, but—when it comes to these big-picture, existential matters—they are generally more right than the rest of us. It scarcely requires saying that this kind of rightness is not fun. “To see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying,” wrote the philosopher Ernest Becker. “…It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.” As that indicates, the correlation between accuracy and depression runs both ways: people who are depressed tend to perceive the harsher realities of life more clearly, and people who clearly perceive those harsh realities tend to be (or to get) depressed. In an odd reversal of the usual state of affairs, when it comes to these existential issues, the bigger and more important the belief, the less it pays to be right."
-Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Depressed people might be unhappy, but—when it comes to these big-picture, existential matters—they are generally more right than the rest of us. It scarcely requires saying that this kind of rightness is not fun. “To see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying,” wrote the philosopher Ernest Becker. “…It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.” As that indicates, the correlation between accuracy and depression runs both ways: people who are depressed tend to perceive the harsher realities of life more clearly, and people who clearly perceive those harsh realities tend to be (or to get) depressed. In an odd reversal of the usual state of affairs, when it comes to these existential issues, the bigger and more important the belief, the less it pays to be right."
-Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
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