Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

So the second gold standard of treatment for mood disorders and depression is CBT, right?

So this is the cognitive behavioral model.

A lot of people have heard of cognitive behavioral therapy.

It holds that a major psychological mechanism behind clinical depression is the tendency of patients to distort reality through inaccurate cognitive mindsets.

OK, so basically the idea behind CBT is that your brain or your mind's ability to see reality is distorted by cognitive bias.

Things are not actually as bad as you thought they were.

And if we can correct those cognitive distortions, then your depression will go away.

And CBT works well for many people.

But there are more and more patients who I've worked with.

A lot of these people end up in my office because they're looking for a different sort of approach because CBT doesn't work for them.

Their cognitive distortions, they don't have a whole lot of cognitive distortions.

In fact, what is going on is actually way scarier, which is something called the depressive realism model.

Many clinicians are unaware of the presence of a completely opposite of model, a model of depression called depressive realism.

What depressive realism basically shows is that those who had some depressive symptoms based on self-report rating scales were more accurate than those without depressive symptoms and correctly attributing errors to themselves as opposed to random errors beyond their control.

Conversely, the normal non-depressed subjects had a sense of greater control than they actually possessed.

Okay, so what does this mean?

So if you look at studies, and we have a great whole video about logic and depression.

If you look at studies on people who are depressed, it turns out that on the one hand, there are some people who have cognitive distortions.

But on the other hand, people who are depressed are actually more accurate judges of reality than non-depressed people.

The default state of existence, if you're a human, is to be cognitively biased in your own favor.