a good illusion (delusion?)

may be the best defense against unpleasant reality.

Some delusions seem to be more culturally acceptable than others - various forms of 'religion', for example, seem to have enjoyed long-standing popularity as the delusions of choice for millenia.

From a blog called Damn Interesting, a quote from an article titled The Total Perspective Vortex (bolds, 'scare quotes' and italics mine):

Most people think of the “mentally disordered” as a delusional lot, holding bizarre and irrational ideas about themselves and the world around them. Isn’t a mental disorder, after all, an impairment or a distortion in thought or perception? This is what we tend to think, and for most of modern psychology’s history, the experts have agreed; realistic perceptions have been considered essential to good mental health. More recently, however, research has arisen that challenges this common-sense notion.

In 1988, psychologists Shelly Taylor and Jonathon Brown published an article making the somewhat disturbing claim that

positive self-deception is a normal and beneficial part of most people’s everyday outlook.

They suggested that average people hold cognitive biases in three key areas:

a) viewing themselves in unrealistically positive terms;
b) believing they have more control over their environment than they actually do; and
c) holding views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify.

The typical person, it seems, depends on these happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day.

It’s when the fantasies start to unravel that problems arise.

This (from the same article) is even more depressing:

Consider 'eating disorders', for instance. It’s generally been believed that an unrealistically negative body image is an important factor in the self-abuse that characterizes anorexia and bulimia. A 2006 study at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, however, came to a very different conclusion. Here, groups of normal and eating disordered women were asked to rate the attractiveness of their own bodies. They were then photographed from the neck down, and panels of volunteers were brought in to view the photos and rate the women’s appearances objectively.

The [non-body-dysmorphic] women, as it turned out, evaluated themselves much more positively than the panels did, while the self-ratings of the [body dysmorphic] women were in close agreement with the objective ratings.

The eating disordered subjects, in other words, had a more realistic body image than the normal women.

No SHIT, Sherlock!

However, it is important to note that the study was based upon the broad concept of “attractiveness” rather than body weight specifically—while the eating disordered women may have rated themselves poorly because they felt “fat,” their weight was a controlled variable and not the basis of the volunteers’ assessments.

And, best of all?

Studies into clinical depression have yielded similar findings, leading to the development of an intriguing, but still controversial, concept known as depressive realism.

This theory puts forward the notion that depressed individuals actually have more realistic perceptions of their own image, importance, and abilities than the average person.

While it’s still generally accepted that depressed people can be negatively biased in their interpretation of events and information,

depressive realism suggests that they are often merely responding rationally to realities that the average person cheerfully denies.

Bingo! Dingdingdingding - we have a WINNAH!!!!!!! (crowd goes wild :-)

I love this next bit, in a twisted, perverse kind of way, mainly because it vindicates damn near everything I've ever believed:

As one might imagine, these issues present some problems when it comes to treatment.

How does one convince a depressed person that “everything is all right” when her life really does suck?

How does one convince an obsessive-compulsive patient to stop religiously washing his hands when the truth of what gets left behind after “normal” washing should be enough to make any sane person cringe? These problems put therapists in the curious position of

teaching patients to develop irrational patterns of thinking—patterns that help them view the world as a rosier place than it really is.

Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s justified because what defines a mental disorder is not unreasonable or illogical thought, but

'abnormal' behaviour that causes significant distress and impairs normal functioning in society.

Treatment is about restoring a person to that level of normal functioning and satisfaction, even if it means building cognitions that aren’t precisely “rational” or “realistic.”

It’s a disconcerting concept. It’s certainly easier to think of the 'mentally disordered' as lunatics running about with bizarre, inexplicable beliefs than to

imagine them coping with a piece of reality that a “normal” person can’t handle.

Hah! Take *that*, you so-called 'normals'!

The notion that we routinely hide from the truth about ourselves and our world is not an appealing one, though it may help to explain the human tendency to ostracize the abnormal.

Perhaps the reason we are so eager to reject any departure from this fiction we call “normality” is because we have

grown dependent on our comfortable delusions; without them, there is nothing to insulate us from the harsh cold of reality.

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-total-perspective-vortex

Two more interesting links:

In Defense of Delusions of Grandeur
http://littlebirdcommunication.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/in-defense-of-delusions-of-grandeur/

and

Are We All Delusional
http://starseeds.net/forum/topics/are-we-all-delusional