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.
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