Your reality

Interestingly, when you’re depressed your image of reality is actually closer to the truth than when you are – what they call – normal. It used to be believed that people that are sane have the most objective view of reality and that it was the abnormal who’s vision of reality was further away from what was really out there. In the case of depression this has been shown not to be the case.

There are a whole lot of reasons for this. The most important one being that if we didn’t have an incredibly rosy picture of ourselves, our friends, our past and our future in our minds, none of us would ever get out of bed. (Though that then begs the question, who exactly would be building those beds?) In order to maintain our sanity we actually can’t be – as we traditionally described it – completely sane.

For example, we believe we are move clever than we are (almost everybody thinks they are above average in intelligence, which obviously is impossible), have more control than we do (everybody seems to believe that they have a below average chance of getting into an accident, getting sick, or getting in trouble), are friendlier than we are (if everybody was as friendly as they thought they were, there wouldn’t be any more wars, I’m sure!) and have a brighter future than we do (everybody that’s young is certain they’ll be rich and famous when they’re older!)

The question researchers asked, when they saw all this data, was, why – exactly – do we have such a rosy picture of ourselves, our future and our surroundings? Isn’t it true that having an incorrect view of reality means that we’re all the more likely to get ourselves into trouble? (by way of comparison, if we thought a car was approaching differently from how it was, we’d be far more likely to step in front of it.) And no doubt it is.

The thing is, we’re not just observers, we’re also actors. We don’t just see ourselves as being better than we are, we also then proceed to act that way and that is the crux of the matter. We act like we are going to succeed at tasks we really only have a very slim chance of succeeding at and as a result sometimes succeed at them! This is commonly referred to as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. If you believe you can do something, chances are better that you’ll actually manage to do it then if you don’t believe you can do it.

And then there are always two final protective mechanisms to guard us when we do fail. The first is that we attribute success to our own skill and failure to circumstance. While the second is that we forget when we fail and remember when we succeed (thereby also establish a more rosy picture of our past, as well as the present and the future).

Depressed people disengage most of these defensive mechanisms and end up with an unfiltered view of the world around them. They see the brutality of the world around them and their insignificance within it. Their depression functions a great deal like the Ultimate Perspective Machine dreamed up by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We need to be convinced of our own importance. Otherwise, why bother? Therefore, we witness reality through numerous filters and interpretation devices – just to avoid being termed insane.