Decades of psychological wisdom have equated mental health with contact with reality and mental illness with deficits in commonsense renderings of reality. Counter to this perspective, recent research indicates that being normal involves a good deal of illusory thinking. These studies suggest that depressed individuals are more likely to process information in a relatively realistic fashion, whereas normal people appear to “view the world through rose-colored glasses.” Yet these studies continue to rely on the assumption that there is one reality that is apprehended by some (depressed persons) and distorted by the rest.

This assumption ignores centuries of philosophical discussion of the relationship between reality and a person’s subjective awareness of objects in the world. It also overlooks insights from sociologists and anthropologists who posit that common sense is cultural in character, fashioned historically and interactionally. Common sense is neither universal nor objective.

Lisa Capps and Elinor Ochs, Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia