system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What if persons, seen as mentally ill, are in fact perceiving the "real reality"?

Because mental health is determined by how the majority of people "is". But what if the mentally ill minority, are those experiencing reality?
gpt
Partly the answer will depend on what "mentally ill" specifically means-- after all, we now recognize many mental disorders, of some considerable variety. To take just two major ones, schizophrenia (itself found in many forms) and major depression are quite different, and involve experiencing self and world differently.

Our evaluation of the proposal, accordingly, will vary. For instance, there is a view called "depressive realism" which posits that depressed people make more accurate inference about certain things (such as one's own abilities and competence). Or, more broadly, we could suggest that depressed people are accurately seeing that the world is a hopeless and ultimately tragic place.

On the other hand, if we're talking about, e.g., paranoid schizophrenia, the idea that the patient sees more accurately would presumably involve his picking up on real conspiracies that other people don't catch. Or perhaps the suggestion could be that what *we take* to be mental disorder is simply perceiving some disturbing fact-- perhaps there really are alien intelligences speaking to some people telepathically, and we say they're just "hearing voices" and label them as mentally ill.

So a lot depends on the details, and we'd have to consider in each case just what our reason is for thinking any of these scenarios are plausible.