What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
—Eugene Gendlin
Wikipedia now has an article on depressive realism.
It seems to me - and I'm a depressive - that even if depressed people really do have more accurate self-assessment, your third option is still the most likely.
One recurrent theme on this site is that humans are prone to indulge cognitive biases which _make them happy_. We try to avoid the immediate hedonic penalty of admitting errors, forseeing mistakes, and so on. We judge by the availability heuristic, not by probability, when we imagine a happy result like winning the lottery.
When I'm in a depressed state, I literally _can't_ imagine a ... (read more)